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The city they love to hate

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published August 6, 2006

Last week the White House Press Briefing Room, a rat-infested but prestigious dump, was ceremoniously closed for renovations that are expected to take nine months. Meanwhile, reporters and camera crews will be taking up temporary quarters in a town house in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. The wonder is that city code enforcement didn't condemn the place years ago.

No doubt President Bush and Dick Cheney will savor having pesky reporters out of their place, even temporarily, and they may be tempted to drag out the renovations until they leave office. My question is, Why stop at relocating White House reporters and photographers? Maybe we should dismantle official Washington and scatter its pieces around the country.

After all, Washington rarely gets a kind word from presidential and congressional candidates who run against the city, the symbol of everything that's wrong with our politics and government, to hear them tell it. Washington is a beautiful city of marble, green space and broad avenues. But to its critics, Washington is about greed, hubris, sleaze, craven lawmakers, brazen lobbyists, balky bureaucrats and famous journalists who believe in free speech as long as they are not asked to make one.

Instead of bringing reporters back to a refurbished and modernized White House press room, why not relocate them to Hollywood, where they would feel at home in many ways? They are drawn to celebrities - just check the guest list to the White House correspondents' annual dinner - and some of them do their part to blur the line between news and entertainment.

Television reporters who are used to delivering their reports standing in front of the White House could just as easily broadcast from a Hollywood set. How hard would it be to construct a facade of the White House? When they were not listening to Tony Snow's briefing - piped in from an undisclosed location - reporters could be mingling with the swells of show business, stars like Barbra Streisand and Mel Gibson.

But it's not just the press that needs to get out of Washington. Big Government needs to pack up and disperse itself across the country. I wish I could take credit for this idea, but it originated with the late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, who grew weary of hearing Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia, constantly bashing the nation's capital for its faults. You would have thought Carter was in prison the way he went on about Washington.

McGrory understood Washington better than the presidents who came and went in her time. She once wrote of the city: "Its personality disorders - delusions of grandeur, acute status anxiety, aggravated turf consciousness, just to mention a few - are so intractable that within months after a change of administration it is back on its bar stool, back-biting, rumor-mongering, sniping, cavilling."

Given Carter's misery as the city's First Citizen, she suggested that he might want to relocate to a more "mainstream" community, renting office space in, say, Toledo, Ohio, or Hackensack, N.J. The White House would be closed for business until a president came along who actually wanted to live in Washington. The columnist thought the vice president should be in a separate city to eliminate the "morbid curiosity about how close he really is to the president."

Under the McGrory plan, Congress would be split up. The Senate would head to Newport, R.I., to settle into an oceanside mansion worthy of lords. And since House members were "compulsive commuters," they might as well stay in their districts on a permanent "district work period." Think of the savings in air fares alone. And in the Internet age, they could do everything but make floor speeches and dine with lobbyists from their district office.

She thought the Pentagon belonged with the high-rollers in Las Vegas, and the Supreme Court at the Columbia University School of Law in the Big Apple.

"The whole project would take a lot of planning, and more money, perhaps, even than the new energy program," McGrory wrote. "It would be worth it, though. Think of having an election with nobody campaigning against Washington."

She wasn't being serious, of course. But the more I think about it, she may have been on to something.

Philip Gailey's e-mail address is gailey@sptimes.com.

[Last modified August 6, 2006, 06:29:19]