There really is a total disconnect between the people in Washington and the rest of the country. I first got that impression when I volunteered on my first political campaign more than 20 years ago. That impression has been validated countless times over the years. Now it seems it’s not just a gap, it’s a question of the Washington folks living in an alternate Universe….
They forget everyone else isn’t sitting in a DC restaurant drinking $350 bottles of wine. Or they assume they aren’t doing so just because they are lazy.
These DC folks are totally out of touch with what is reality for most people….
Great article, below, from Charles M Blow in the New York Times:
Last week I spent a few days in the Deep South — a thousand miles from the moneyed canyons of Manhattan and the prattle of Washington politics — talking to everyday people, blue-collar workers, people not trying to win the future so much as survive the present.
They do hard jobs and odd jobs — any work they can find to keep the lights on and the children fed.
No one mentioned the asinine argument about the debt ceiling. No one. Life is pressing down on them so hard that they can barely breathe. They just want Washington to work, the way they do.
They are honest people who do honest work — crack-the-bones work; lift-it, chop-it, empty-it, glide-it-in-smooth work; feel-the-flames-up-close work; crawl-down-in-there work — things that no one wants to do but that someone must.
They are women whose skin glistens from steam and sweat, whose hands stay damp from being dipped in buckets and dried on aprons. They are men who work in boots with steel toes, the kind that don’t take shining, the kind that lean over and tell stories when you take them off.
They are people whose bodies melt every night in a hot bath, then stiffen by sunrise, so much so that it takes pills for them to get out of bed without pain.
They, too, sing America. But they’re the ones less talked about — either not glamorous enough or rancorous enough. They are the ones without champions, waiting for Democrats to gather the gumption to defend the working poor with the same ferocity with which Republicans protect the filthy rich, waiting for a tomorrow that never comes.
Lost in the 21st Century 