WASHINGTON — Washington has become a wartime capital, and its preoccupation with terrorism has widened the gap between its officials and hometown America.
That impression, born of my most recent grass-roots reporting experience for The Washington Post, has been powerfully reinforced by what happened — and what didn’t happen — when the nation’s governors gathered here earlier this week.
It was one thing to discover from interviews with a group of California voters that the recent passage of a landmark education reform bill crafted by President Bush and leading congressional Democrats had made almost no impression.
It was even more instructive that the governors, who have the responsibility for making it work in their states, spent almost no time talking about how to do that.
It is not that voters or governors are uninterested in what is happening in the schools. In a focus group of voters two Post colleagues and I organized in the Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas, the quality of their children’s education was one of the first things they wanted to discuss. But when polling director Richard Morin asked them about the school reform bill Bush had made a priority for more than a year and had signed into law with a cross-country flourish of congratulations for its bipartisan sponsors, their expressions were blank.
Surprised and intrigued, Morin polled a national sample last week and found that only 44 percent had even heard of it.
What that says to me is that even "big deal" achievements in Washington are seen as having only slight relevance to the things people really care about.
What was true of the education bill was even more true — for our California voters and the national sample in the poll — when it came to the marathon struggle over campaign finance legislation, the fight over the economic stimulus bill and the debate over the budget deficit.
What has happened, I think, is that the war on terrorism has so far overshadowed everything else in the news from Washington that other subjects virtually have disappeared.
Still, it was striking to sense the same thing at the governors’ annual winter meeting in Washington. To be sure, their agenda and resolutions dealt, not only with homeland defense, but with such domestic concerns as agriculture, transportation, health care and welfare.
But there was a desultory — almost ritualistic — quality to their discussions of these topics. They asked for more generous funding of highways and Medicaid, but with defense spending exploding and deficits on the rise, they seemed almost resigned to getting much less than they want.
Although they had their traditional meeting with the president, they recognized they were far from the center of his thoughts. Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, a Yale fraternity brother of Bush’s, was asked if Bush seemed different now. "He’s still got his sense of humor and he can poke fun at himself," Knowles said, "but he’s totally preoccupied by the war."
And the governors have their own preoccupations — budget crises at home that make the gyrations of Washington politics seem of secondary importance.
Iowa’s Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack is usually one of the more acute students and critics of the capital. But when asked what his constituents make of the continuing impasse in Congress over an economic stimulus bill, Vilsack said, "There’s so much focus on our state budget problems, the stimulus bill has gotten little attention."
Nationally, the recession has knocked an estimated $40-billion hole in state budgets, a gap that must be closed by spending cuts or higher taxes. Iowa accounts for only $120 million of it, but with corporate tax receipts down 23 percent from the previous year, Vilsack faces a move by Republican legislators to order unpaid furloughs — a half-day every other week — for 50,000 state workers.
Similar or more drastic remedies are roiling tempers in state after state. Arizona Gov. Jane Dee Hull postponed Employee Appreciation Day in Phoenix after more than 1,000 state workers rallied to protest economies she had ordered to close a $1 billion budget shortfall.
With situations like these so common this year, it is not surprising that Washington seems both remote and insulated. A governor like Indiana’s Frank O’Bannon, who has closed campgrounds and pools and cut three-quarters of a million dollars from the school for the blind, while seeking to boost cigarette and gambling taxes, can hardly identify with a city whose politicians cannot even agree on a bill to extend unemployment benefits an additional 13 weeks for workers who have lost their jobs in the recession.
Some might say Americans have tuned out on Washington, but to more and more people living outside its boundaries, it looks as if Washington has turned its back on America.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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