Tiny Town: Washington After a Fall [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Tiny Town: Washington After a Fall
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: June 15, 2008

Washington

“DID you hear about Tim Russert?” There are certain days when you can feel the air sucking out of Washington’s giant hot-air balloon, and Friday was one of them.

News of the “Meet the Press” host’s death moved entirely too fast, in that unnerving way that these things do in the viral media world, but especially here — the cycle of rumor to “did you hear?” to confirmation (“it’s online”) to disbelief lasted a matter of minutes. Riders on the D.C. Metro stared into their BlackBerrys, and every politician with access to e-mail was issuing statements, from the president on down.

These were the kind of days when Washington lives up to the cliché that it is really a small town — in the same way that Wall Street, Broadway and Hollywood are small towns, too, incubating outsize egos and ambitions, but also different. People remembered the big achievements of Mr. Russert’s career (“the pre-eminent political journalist of his generation,” John McCain said in a statement) and the little kindnesses, too (“When my mom died he sent two dozen roses,” wrote Ann Klenk, a producer at MSNBC’s “Hardball,” in an e-mail message. “I adored him.”)

In a sense, Mr. Russert seemed to have an intuitive grasp of all the petty concerns, Big Doings and peculiar rhythms of the place. He was a cut-throat killer when it came to booking guests on “Meet the Press,” and also a chummy neighbor who would watch the Washington Nationals play baseball with friend/rival Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS’s “Face the Nation.”...

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Another local cliché: Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. So in a town that’s in fact entirely over-populated with blow-dried preeners, it seemed entirely appropriate that the signature TV star be, if not ugly, aggressively “not pretty.” Indeed, Mr. Russert seemed to intentionally hold his face at crooked angles, like he was sidling up to a Rust Belt dive bar (as opposed to, say, his favorite lunch joint in Washington, the Palm).

Mr. Russert liked to seem sheepishly above-it-all, but was also as acutely status-conscious, befitting the local water....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/weekinreview/15leibovich.html#