Capital cynics: Who do they think they're fooling?

• Author: Postrel, Virginia I.

Washingtonians are down in the dumps. It was bad enough when the rest of the country just didn't like them: At least the anger of 1994 produced the New Republican Congress and the resultant buzz. Washington was the place to be, a city of high drama whose denizens got zillion-dollar book advances and mingled with fashion models in the pages of George. Its think tanks became rich, its pundits famous.

No more. "There's not much elan of any kind, old or new, in Washington today," says New York Times correspondent R.W. Apple, borrowing a phrase from the recent French election. "We don't have a lot of ideas at the moment." People in the rest of the country have stopped paying attention. They care more about JonBenet Ramsey, Tiger Woods, and Bill Gates. Interviewing Apple, PBS's Charlie Rose frets that maybe Gates has "more influence than most senators or cabinet secretaries in this nation's capital."

"The year of the great disconnect" is what Wall Street Journal writer Gerald Seib calls it. Turnout in last year's elections was a mere 49 percent, the lowest since 1924. Polls show Americans don't know who Trent Lott is - why should they? - and politicos report record non-attendance at town meetings.

And while it's bad enough to be ignored by the riff-raff outside the Beltway, now Washington has been betrayed by one of its own. Susan Molinari, the perky Republican congresswoman from Staten Island, is quitting her job to become an anchor on a new CBS weekend show. A second-generation pol, she was mediagenic enough to become a "rising star" in the GOP - not a person of accomplishment or ideas but, in Apple's words, "someone who was well spoken of." She was great at reciting the GOP's spin of the day.

Her resignation stung. "Now, it seems, politics has become just another route to becoming sufficiently famous to land a high-paying TV job," gripes Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz.

And why shouldn't it? The Lethal Center that dominates Clinton's Washington is dedicated to little more than the manipulation of media images: The nation's capital has become the perfect happy-talk training ground for future anchorpeople.

With typical self-absorption, the gloomy Washingtonians are missing the story. Yes, the rest of the country is ignoring them. But it's more than that. A new attitude toward Washington is brewing. It isn't the get-out-of-my-face anger of 1994 or the Perotista throw-the-bums-out anger of 1992. It has less ideological content or...