Your congress-persons-elect are now starting to drift into town, regaling each other with war stories from the campaign. Much local color here, you understand, for campaigns are conducted back in the home district, which is characteristically a remote and oddly shaped piece of real estate to which the congressperson professes bedrock loyalty while discharging his duty to live elsewhere. His district is little more than a geopolitical abstraction to which the congressperson travels biennially to have his passport renewed. Home is here in Washington, where the French-like restaurants along K Street play to the people who have left Peoria.
Papers in order, they’re back now, trying to reorient themselves in the new ambiance of Washington. Somebody seems to have moved the rhetorical furniture. There is wonderful talk here of economy and budget-trimming and gap-closing. The trinket of the day is the Krugerrand—for the one you love most in the Me Decade—and the preprandial libation is a solitary white-wine-and-soda, which, if the congress-person is liberal enough and northern enough, he has the nerve to call a spritzer. The disco Hustle has given way to the Shift to the Right, and the really long, really black limousines are back where they belong, in the hands of the redundantly rich. As for the merely bureaucratic, they’re back in Dodge country.
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