Washington's nice problem.

• Author: Segal, David
• Position: Too many nice people in Washington DC politics

"This is a town that is full of evil people," says Alan Greenspan in Bob Woodward's The Agenda. "If you can't deal with every day having people try to destroy you, you shouldn't even think of coming down here."

Of course, Washington was thought to be a swamp of villains and miscreants even before Harry Truman famously declared that "If you want a friend in Washington, bring a dog," and that reputation endures today. Where else would a swell guy like former chief of staff Mack McLarty - nicknamed "the Nice" - get demoted and then have to read in The New Yorker that "some used his moniker in a denigrating way; to them his niceness proved his failure of assimilation." The implication was not only that McLarty needed to be a far tougher gatekeeper for the president, but that around these parts, nice people don't fit in. Phil Gramm, whom no one has ever accused of being too nice, is fond of saying that he is doing the "Lord's work in the Devil's city."

The Devil's city? Granted, presidents - especially the current president - tend to get roughed up in Washington, and occasionally a lawmaker will go after a colleague in the House or Senate. But in general there's surprisingly little nastiness here. Even Congress is tame compared to the acrimony in, say, Japan's Diet, where legislators often punch each other in the face. No, the city's power strata - legislators, journalists, administration officials - are all in fairly high spirits. The truth is, Washington is a nice town filled with nice people being nice to each other. This explains why so few leave. This also explains how they stay.

Most of Washington's players come to town for a specific job. Politicians get elected to work on behalf of certain constituents political appointees arrive because they have managed to land a position in the government, and countless aides come to assist these people. These jobs are not lifelong positions. Much of official Washington, therefore, is always facing the prospect of looking elsewhere for work - or going home.

But once you're here, it's not easy to go home. You settle in, the kids are in school, you buy a house. And why would you want to leave? The town affords folks the chance to work on important issues with important people; it's hard to go back to the farm after you've seen the Department of Agriculture. Of course, once you've been here a while, you have an expertise and a set of contacts that make you marketable, and the Washington market can be very lucrative. Those who parlay their public service expertise and contacts into private practice see their salaries soar. Consequently, those who are forced to leave - either because they lost an election or weren't reappointed - are usually plotting to come back. Everyone else is working hard to make sure they don't have to leave at all.

But how do you stay, given that most jobs in Washington last only a few years? There's just one answer, son. You've got to network for dear life - and fast. That means making contacts, fattening your Rolodex, and attracting allies. If you're a political appointee at say, the Department of Labor, you'll want to be friendly to anyone you meet professionally: union leaders, interest groups, lobbyists, and your fellow bureaucrats. These are the people who are most likely to help you find another job or offer you one outright. And you can be helpful to them as well, either through your work at Labor now, or as a contact in whatever you end up doing next. Together, you'll create a sort of mutual survival network.

Because everyone here needs a survival network, the place is suffused with a sense of "We're all in this together." Not that all relationships in Washington are fake. On the contrary, people tend to empathize with those who help them survive or raise their profile; sometimes the bonds of friendship here are very real. When Rep. Dan Rostenkowski was indicted on no less than 17 charges of defrauding the public, one sensed that Post columnist David Broder, Washington's grandfatherly voice of reason, meant it when he said he was sorry to see Rosty deposed.

Couldn't all this chumminess and respect just lend the nation's capital an air of pleasant, small-town warmth? Well, it could, but since it's the seat of the federal government, the sense of mutual enterprise here can have important implications for politics as well. If virtually everyone you come across is a would-be ally, then you will be averse to criticizing anyone too loudly, and you'll steer away from reforms that might rattle present or future friends. This creates an insularity and resistance to change that makes anything that rocks the boat - loud dissent, ideological passion - rare. The problem is that the boat is not always heading in the right direction, and often it is simply operating in a way that enriches those on board rather than makes sense for the rest of us.

To get a sense of how toxic Washington niceness can be, let's look at three different facets of the same problem. First, how survival networking can lead to bad policy; then, how it can lead to wasted millions in taxpayer dollars; and finally, how it can turn around even those politicians who come to town looking to buck the system.

A Toast to the Chairman

Watching Clinton juke and Dole jibe on TV, it may look as though wrangling and partisan disputes are all that ail the cause of health reform. But while politicians look for an answer for the issue's thorniest question - how to pay for universal coverage - Washington's niceness has helped to keep an obvious source of revenue off the table.

By any reasonable measure, taxes on booze are at a historic low, about 37 percent in real dollars of what they were after the last major tax increase, which, by the way, occurred in 1951. Back then, alcohol taxes were 5 percent of all federal revenues; today they are roughly one-half of 1 percent. Moreover, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, between 25 to 40 percent of bed space in hospitals is given over to alcohol-related disorders, at a price to the public and our health care system of something close to $100 billion dollars each year.

Add to all this polling results which show that Americans think taxing the alcohol industry is a great way to help pay for universal health coverage. Last February, a USA Today poll found that 85 percent favor higher taxes on alcohol to finance health reform, two percent more than said the same thing about tobacco. To...