Working-class blues

Campaign 2010 | In one industrial heartland, challengers are in and establishment is out | Edward Lee Pitts

Vergil Cabasco

WASHINGTON, Pa.—They call it the Beltway Blinders—a common disease that hits when so-called insiders to Washington politics lose sight of the priorities, challenges, and fears that matter in "real" America. Those inside the Capital Beltway, the roughly 60-mile interstate loop around the city, are vulnerable to the highly contagious disease, losing perspective on what the rest of America is saying even as they pretend to represent it. No respecter of party lines, the illness strikes politicians, their staffs, federal bureaucrats, and lobbyists on Capitol Hill. And it turns out that journalists are not immune, either.

So to inoculate myself from both the disease and the suffocating humidity that historically has caused many a lawmaker to flee the nation's capital in August, I launched a cross-country road trip—from Washington, D.C., to Washington state. Measuring the pulse of America heading into this November's elections, I learned that this summer it's hot everywhere: Voters are overheated about the nation's political climate.