Our Town

Politicians run against it. Tycoons sneer at it. But I'll stick up for Washington.

After 44 years in Washington, I am still impressed when I look out the window of a plane landing at Reagan National Airport. The monuments and government buildings arrayed around the Mall never fail to remind me of the beauty, majesty and purposefulness I see in the nation's capital.

So it annoys me when businessmen now wait for Washington to bail them out after long sneering at how government works here. And it particularly irks me when candidates for president rail against my adopted home town. Throughout this long campaign, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain have been trying to outdo each other in their colorful denunciations of "the mess" in Washington and their insistent vows to "change," "clean up," "fix," "reform" and "shake up" everything here. Their stump speeches and campaign ads willfully misrepresent Washington, along with each other's records and positions.

Never mind that the biggest mess in America today, the crisis in the financial markets, is largely the creation of the private sector, which has left it to Washington to clean up. Never mind that the two presidential candidates and many of their advisers are already part of the fabric of this town. And never mind that both senators have been striving for years to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Of course, the potshots are nothing new. Presidential candidates have been running against Washington since at least the time of Andrew Jackson, and it has often appeared to work. Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did it. So did Republicans Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. And then there was Richard Nixon, who filled his enemies list with people in Washington before being forced into exile in disgrace.

I know there are real problems in Washington. In my decades as an editor at this newspaper, I've put plenty of stories on the front page about waste, fraud and abuse of power, excessive partisanship and governmental gridlock, cronyism and bureaucratic incompetence, and influence-peddling and scandal. Yes, too much of all of that has gone on here, just as it has on Wall Street and Main Street, in Arizona and Illinois, and in Alaska and Delaware, not to mention my native state of Ohio.

But that is far from all that happens here. Large numbers of Washingtonians have dedicated much of their lives to real public service that does not involve the ego trips, trappings and hypocrisies of elective office.

Political appointees put their private lives on hold to cope with financial-market meltdowns, natural disasters and global crises. A senior Treasury Department official I know has been in his office from early morning until late at night every day for the past two months, along with colleagues across the government, working to contain the credit crisis. Several Middle East policy experts whom I know have devoted most of their lives -- in both Democratic and Republican administrations and even after their government service ended -- to attempt to bring peace to that region.

Some of those oft-derided Washington bureaucrats have risked their careers to do what they believed was right. We now know that top appointees in the Justice Department stood up to the Bush White House and were ready to resign en masse several years ago rather than certify that the administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program was legal. Intelligence sources who still can't be named helped this newspaper expose the CIA's "black site" interrogation centers overseas, where we now know terrorist suspects were tortured.

Federal workers throughout Washington put in long hours in virtual anonymity to combat terrorism, fight wars, enforce laws, seek cures for diseases, and administer billions and billions of dollars worth of federal programs that benefit nearly all Americans in one way or another. Among the most recent winners of Service to America Medals were civil servants who improved surgery performed on wounded soldiers, reduced infections in veterans' hospitals, uncovered fraud in defense contracting in Iraq and increased the use of renewable energy. We have published occasional stories in this newspaper about their good works, but we probably should have put them on the front page, where Washington scandals usually appear.

The dirty secret is that Washington usually works the way most Americans want it to work, even though they don't want to acknowledge it. Entitlements, farm subsidies, military spending, pork-barrel projects, research and development grants, regulations of all kinds, and even provisions of the complicated tax code all have constituencies across the country clamoring for help from Washington.

The nation's financial system is only the latest distressed sector to depend on the capital for emergency assistance. Banks, savings and loans, and homeowners have been rescued in the past. Farmers have been given decades of subsidies. Chrysler was bailed out. Amtrak was created to save passenger railroads, and the Transportation Security Administration took over airport security after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Now it is left to the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and Congress to try to save an economy in the worst crisis since the Great Depression, even as many Americans -- including McCain and Obama -- continue to blame Washington for how difficult it is to do. In fact, neither presidential candidate has provided much real leadership in working out a solution, while they have continued to jockey for political advantage during the final weeks of the campaign.