The first votes of the Republican primary season don’t come until next month, but we already know how it’s going to turn out: Washington, D.C., has won again. It may be Mitt Romney or it may be Newt Gingrich, but from the point of view of this town, it doesn’t matter: Neither poses a threat to our way of life. Our hometown industry — a commission-based economy in which the local citizenry helps the powerful get what they want from a too-big government — will survive.
Washington’s win was not always assured. Michele Bachmann would have taken a whack at big government, when she wasn’t converting all D.C. residents to heterosexuality. Rick Perry would have slashed large chunks of the federal government, once he remembered what they were. Pizza man Herman Cain, had he not been undone by his behavior issues, probably would have brought the whole place to a halt. But neither of the leading contenders represents a danger to Washington political culture. As is already well-known, Romney, trained at Harvard and financed lavishly by Wall Street and special interests, is a technocrat and a second-generation politician driven more by personal ambition than any of the various ideologies he has assumed over the years. Conservatives wound up with the consummate Washington insider.
“I did no lobbying of any kind — period,” Gingrich said recently, explaining why the $1.5 million-plus he earned from lending his influence to mortgage giant Freddie Mac wasn’t technically lobbying. “I’m going to be really direct, OK? I was charging $60,000 a speech. And the number of speeches was going up, not down. Normally, celebrities leave and they gradually sell fewer speeches every year. We were selling more.”
So he wasn’t lobbying — because he was instead trading on his name and influence in Washington to give speeches for $60,000 a pop. That’s well more, for an hour’s work, than the median household income in the United States, which last year was $49,445. Newton Leroy Gingrich, self-described celebrity, poses no threat to Washington’s pay-to-play economy.