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Eugene Robinson, TruthDig, January 4, 2008

WASHINGTON-I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: People in Washington really should get out more.

By “Washington,” I mean not just the city but the state of mind, and by “get out,” I mean spend time surrounded not just by a different geography but by a different demography as well. If we did, the high-blown debates we have here-and by “we,” I mean politicians, lobbyists, advocates, bureaucrats, scholars, journalists and all the rest trapped in the Washington echo chamber-might bear more relation to what people who live outside our bubble think of as reality.

Case in point: When former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last week, Washington tied itself in knots trying to figure out which presidential candidates on the Democratic and Republican sides would benefit in the Iowa caucuses. This was the kind of shocking event that could prove pivotal, said the conventional wisdom in Washington-with pro forma apologies, of course, for implying that Bhutto’s death would actually be “good,” in terms of political advantage, for one campaign or another.

But when I was in Iowa last weekend, I failed to find Iowans for whom the tragic events in Rawalpindi were a political issue. It’s not that Iowans don’t recognize why instability in Pakistan is important or why it might impact their lives. It’s just that they had put the shocking murder in what they considered its proper context.

Another example: In Washington, it is conventionally wise to think of government gridlock as basically a good thing, even something of which most Americans approve. To have a president from one party and a Congress controlled-or at least reined in-by the other, we tell ourselves, prevents too-abrupt shifts in policy. Gridlock is supposed to force bipartisan consensus, which is held as a kind of Holy Grail, the only way to tackle the nation’s biggest problems.

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