Walley@Witzend

By David Walley

I've been down here in DC for the past few weeks, working at the Library of Congress in the manuscript division -- it's like that line in Bull Durham about the playing in the big leagues, where all the balls are white, you don't have to carry your own bags, and all the women have brains. Only in this case, it's the librarians, and not only are they nice but they bring you your documents on a cart, no questions asked -- that's after you get by the metal detectors, the three guards with their Glock semi-automatics, after your laptop is registered and you get an official plastic ID (mine makes me look like Juan Mendoza, international narco trafficker, but my license photo isn't that much better). I know this doesn't jibe with the general way of things in your town, but in DC all the cops (library, congressional you name it) pack heat. I've been told that the Library of Congress, because it has "congress in the name," is on the watch list. Anyway, while I've been here I participated in an unscheduled drill where I had to leave the building in under five minutes -- but of course they didn't keep the reading room open the additional fifteen minutes I lost.

Don't ask me what DC is like because I haven't been seeing too much of it, save on Sunday, when even the Lord rested. Besides, I'm on a tight schedule, limited money and the Manuscript division is open six days a week, 8:30-5. And if -- if -- the libes was open eight days a week I'd have been there eight days a week, no excuses, no stopping. Though I don't have an advance, I have my own deadline and I used to have a life. As it is, because I'm under my own deadline, and I do have a life, it's a trip to be so juiced that in an average eight hour day I'm out of my seat maybe 10 minutes with no lunch. Great way to lose weight... Nevertheless, in the nation's capitol I have my column and the needs of my readers must be met.

And it's not just me who has to care. Americans all have to give a good one since we're down to the wire with the summer conventions in Philadelphia and LA. Back in the old days there used to be more... what shall I say... drama to it, it all wasn't so cheese-whizzed and homogenized. So it's little things that strike me, things maybe you wouldn't notice about the whole business. Have you noticed how "W" is trying to spin himself as the anti-establishment candidate? Oh, he might have been a Skull and Bones man from Yale, distressed at the knee-jerk politics of the neo-neo left, but he's still a product of Yale and Harvard Business School. But his spin meisters and he himself give out a different story, he might have been a party boy, but compared to those rad/libs at Yale and Harvard, he's a bedrock conservative, just not your father's (though it might be his).

Truth be known, both Bush and Gore were, in reality, born with silver spoons, but who said that the American president has to be a man of the people? Should it be a requirement that the next president come from State U? It would be amusing but still wouldn't answer the basic questions that I guess we're all interested in, like what are the issues. Which neither candidate seems to have focussed on, and probably won't until after the conventions, and then there are only two or three months until the final sprint to election time. In fact, I don't see too many Americans bothering too much right now, and maybe that's not accident, that's design.

Don't know how we got one party, but I know it happened while we were all watching, weren't we? Maybe it's not as simple as watching, maybe it's more a question of living our lives. Maybe politics isn't part of our daily lives. "All politics are local" is a truism, so what the candidates have to do is figure out how to make their politics ours -- a grim thought indeed. Of course one of the real problems with this monthly deadline is that you out there don't have the whole picture, we've got three out of four candidates up with no issues save the old reliable ones which the Conservative Republicans only seem to bring out once every four years, the so-called Right to Life movement. This is not the place to discuss that issue, being I'm not a woman. Sure as shooting, every four years, the Republicans throw out that lifeline to the conservative wing, why I don't know, because they should go off and form their own wing, with their own candidates, and their own funding. Would that it could.

But I just came back from dinner on this Sunday night, and I met a couple of engineers at the ESPN Zone and we got to jawing. WE didn't settle anything particularly, ie. they didn't give me the idea for this column because they were just as confused as I was about what we were to endure -- and then I thought about it, the one silver bullet issue which could make it as a campaign issue. Only I'm afraid that it wouldn't really make the cut. Still, I'll launch it and hope that someone, somewhere out there, will take the bait.

But is there something to be said for making the issue of Election 2000 competence and excellence in government? Like don't we all wish there was some? Competence and excellence. Which is the party of excellence? Better, which party believes in it enough to do something about it, something massive? As it is, excellence is almost a subversive concept in government (federal, state or local), in fact the people who take pride in their jobs are pushed out by those who do theirs indifferently. Remember the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade for the want of an up-to-date tourist map? Any other business, the guy who made the decision based on such information would have been fired even as the first bomb went off. Instead he was kicked upstairs and sideways. Bureaucracy rewards those who follow the laws of inertia blindly. "Excellence, competence" has a great ring to it, but which party could claim to have it? But with issues like these, who needs elections? Who needs candidates? Apparently all that is needed are spin doctors, statistics and flashy commercials.

That's what I was thinking as I was eating at the ESPN Zone on 11th and E right across from my hotel on a muggy Sunday afternoon. Maybe I'm just being a trouble-maker, don't understand the mood of the American public, but my take is as good as anyone else's these days. Excellence and competence. Isn't that something to conjure? Just think how revolutionary that would be if there were either in government.

Even if it's not an issue, those of you who happen to get close enough to the candidates to ask, ask them about it, see what they say and then decide. Better, encourage your local media to bring the issue up, and maybe like Alice's Restaurant Massacre it could become a national movement. Whether it will make a difference ultimately will be up to us all.