and Johnson on the Democrat side and then Nixon and Ford on the Republican side. So I grew up in a very bipartisan Washington where the chairman of the Democratic Party, Bob Strauss and the chairman of the Republican Party, Howard Baker, were best friends and played poker illegally every Friday night. And deals got sorted out because they were all very, they had personal relationships. I think this is a critical component of understanding what's happened just as a, I'm going to start with a kind of detail that's really interesting. So why is nobody friends anymore? It's partly because Washington was the center of the money tap that got turned on, particularly after the financial crisis. But it has been really since the Second World War, an ever increasing flow of money, which meant inflation really got a foothold here. So property prices kept going up and up and up and up. And basically all these elected officials could no longer afford to have their families in Washington. So they (12/99)
You are viewing a single comment's thread from: