In late July, on a gauzy, impossibly hot Washington evening, I met a friend of mine in a quiet sushi restaurant a few blocks from the White House. My friend, a conservative aide to an even more conservative senator, is from the suburbs of Atlanta; his favorite word is "ignorant," by which he means some combination of insufficiently educated and totally deluded, and which he usually uses to describe Bill Clinton's foreign policy, or his ex-girlfriend, or a particularly memorable English professor. On this particular night, though, he was using it, liberally, to describe the Republican congressional approach to policy-making, on issue after issue.
I hadn't expected this line from him. My friend is the kind of tough-minded partisan who screens dates for political affiliation and who says that whenever he gets weeping calls from retired constituents about too-expensive prescription drugs, he thinks to himself, "You should have saved more then, shouldn't you?" A year ago, he was gearing up for a life on the Hill; now, he's taking the LSAT and planning for law school. He won't vote for Bush this year, either, a choice he says was "unthinkable" 12 months ago.
"What's infuriating," he told me, "is that it's hard to know what the party stands for beyond defending a bunch of interests. I mean, look at the leadership--who do you have? Frist? Hack. DeLay? Hack. Hastert? Total hack. I can't figure out if the administration are hacks or just don't care. John Kerry's running on budget deficits--that's supposed to be our fucking issue." He started slamming his hand against the table. "In 15 years, the whole federal budget blows up because of Medicare, this ridiculous prescription-drug benefit that no one even likes, our taxes go through the roof, and the economy breaks down. And this time, it's gonna be our fault."
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.wallace-wells.html
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