One of the best descriptions of Washington, D.C., and its permanent political class comes in the second chapter of Advise and Consent, the 1959 novel by Allen Drury: “It is a city of temporaries, a city of just-arriveds and only-visitings, built on the shifting sands of politics, filled with people passing through. They may stay fifty years, they may love, marry, settle down, build homes, raise families, and die beside the Potomac, but they usually feel, and frequently they will tell you, that they are just here for a little while.” Yet they’re lying to themselves and everyone else, because even when they leave they always “hurry back to their lodestone and their star.”
Two-thirds of the way through this long paragraph, Drury inserted a line that may have been about himself: “They come, they stay, they make their mark, writing big or little on their times.”
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