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Journalists examine D.C. power networks
Read an excerpt of John Harwood and Gerald F. Seib's book
CNBC's John Harwood and The Wall Street Journal's Gerald F. Seib's new book, "Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Backroom Power," offers a unique look at how today's Washington power game really works. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1, titled, "Gridlock on America's Main Street."
Pennsylvania Avenue, the most celebrated mile of pavement in America, stretches northwest from the U.S. Capitol to the White House, along a path cleared through the Washington swamp two hundred years ago. Every important chapter of American history has played out, in one fashion or another, on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Pennsylvania Avenue is the capital’s best address, the street of status, where the powerful work, and meet, and where the ambitious come to get things done. From the days when it was little more than a muddy path, the Avenue has been populated by smart people, men and women full of passion and drive and strong beliefs, many of them well meaning. Over the span of American history, the powerful have come together here to accomplish great things–to free the oppressed, to win great battles, to launch great public works, to comfort the downtrodden.
The people of Pennsylvania Avenue can be vain, greedy, downright nasty as well. Sometimes the Avenue is where they manage to stop things from getting done. Interspersed with the moments of great glory are those occasions when fear, mistrust, or simple disagreements run out of control to produce confrontation and gridlock on Pennsylvania Avenue.
In recent years, such occasions have become more and more numerous, to the point where, simply put, Pennsylvania Avenue doesn’t work very well these days. For a complex set of reasons, it has become an avenue divided–divided by party, ideology, money, technology–so that even the best of intentions these days often produce the worst of results.
To some extent, this complex of forces is well known to those who watch the nation’s political machinations through the pages of newspapers and magazines or the shouting heads that have come to dominate political talk shows. What’s less well known is the existence of a new kind of power broker on Pennsylvania Avenue, backroom power players who confront these forces and who strive to vault over them and, indeed, sometimes even succeed in doing so–in making Washington work.
Many of these people are new to the national scene, having moved into the power structure thanks to the political upheavals of the last two decades. Over that time, the old establishment in Washington has been pushed aside, starting with Ronald Reagan’s conservative sweep into Washington in 1980, followed by the Bill Clinton years, the Newt Gingrich revolution in the House in 1994, and the Democratic comeback of 2006. The capital’s old wiring has been ripped out, and replaced. It is the lot of today’s power players to have assumed positions of import at a time when, by all accounts, it has become harder and harder to get things done in the nation’s capital. Some of these backroom power brokers have mastered the new rules of the road on Pennsylvania Avenue, and perhaps profited from them; others have figured out how to get things done despite Washington gridlock, by breaking away from the traffic patterns that have produced that gridlock.
What all of these powerful people on Pennsylvania Avenue have figured out, amid great conflict along that 1.2-mile stretch of road, is a way to make their voices heard.
This is a book about some of those people on Pennsylvania Avenue, people who are rarely seen, often unknown. Through these profiles in backroom power, we mean to show how a new network operates in Washington today, and by a new set of rules.
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