I was scooping digitally through files from the three or four computers that lurk in various states of confusion in the cubbyholes under the desk in the great room of the farmhouse in the country. I don’t know about you, but this has been one of the more extraordinary public events I have seen in my life. I have tried to do the right thing. I watched as much of the Debate the other night as I could handle. This morning, I realized it was only ten days until this astonishing year delivers its electoral results. Sunlight gently pushed my senses as I stirred this morning in one of the last warm days of autumn with the realization that the election that has been looming for months is now only ten days away. A little more than a week to go, at least the way things used to be. I remember that strange man in Florida peering at tiny bits of cardboard pried haphazardly from what passed as ballots in the last one that was this crazy.

“Hanging chads” was the watchword of that day. I don’t know what they are going to call this one, but it has some great potential.

This is a particularly emotional contest. More than 50 million citizens have already cast their ballots in altogether new ways. I am one of them, and having slid the paper into the machine, thought back to the last time the civic festival was this intense and mutable. I thought back to the one that held the various mysteries of the hanging chads. I was still in the government then, and the change of administrations had a certain personal cost. Back then, twenty years ago, I thought of it this way:

The little girl in Poltergeist had it right when she looked into the television screen and the hobgoblins whirled around her: “They’re here!”

For us they also arrived this week, and while everyone is very nice, I can safely say that nobody had a very good week. I don’t know at what level the bad week stopped- somewhere north of the Custodial staff in the building, I would assume, since the level of white bond paper trash generated is one of the constants in this town.

The old political folks that are still hanging around from the Clinton Administration are disoriented, scared. Some of them desperately want to hang on to their Schedule “C” jobs- and are currying favor with the new guys, or trying to, by generating work for us tenured bureaucrats for whom there will be plenty of work, endless and secure, through the next several Administrations. It is a dramatic change from the lassitude that accompanied last summer, and the run up to the Elections, and the Elections that Wouldn’t End, and the Naming of the New Team. Colin and Condy and Don and Mitch and all the rest have made their brief pirouettes on the dais, right on the masking tape marks, behind the smiling President. So the Grown Ups have been named and confirmed through affirmation or acrimony. And life in our food chain moves on.

But there was a certain distance to all this before. But now the new team’s Grown Ups have now moved on to nominate their horse-holders, and the pandemonium is now with us in the trenches. As I have observed here before, Washington is a town that runs on connections. You know so-and-so, so-and-so used to be Chief of Staff to so-and-so and so and so. Lunches are planned, though perhaps not executed, calls made and mostly returned. Washington lives on returned phone calls. It is a token of respect, and the hubris displayed by those who do not return calls means they are either bullet-proof or cruising for a fall. Sunset Boulevard on the Potomac: be nice on the way up, because you will count on the residuals of those small acts on the way down again. The Private Sector richly rewards access to the Rolodex of a transitioning official. The job lasts until the phone calls are no longer returned. Some make it and some don’t. There is a bottom line, after all, which there isn’t in the Government. No emotion, sorry, just business.

By Wednesday of last week I found myself a creature known as a “Trusted Agent” by one of the Transition Teams. I had been tapped as Somebody-Who-Knew-Something by an old friend of so-and-so. Smelling the chance to roll a hand grenade into some of the more egregious outrages in the Department, I eagerly agreed to brief their Principal on the archania of how the process works. It was fun, but there was a factor that I failed to appreciate. The eagerness of this team to make real change was predicated on generating a meaningful product. That meant they were going to pump something out, and they were grabbing every one that already had a job in the Building to do it. With growing horror, I realized I had just got another job on top of the one which already squanders sixty hours of my week.

I was starting to lose perspective on what I was doing. We had Congressional Justification Books due at the printers; I had to write Testimony for the Senate Apropriators, due tonight to get through Department Review. I had some VIP visitors coming in Monday, also with a review period, though I had no particular idea of what I might say in the clinch. Just that their requirements were recognized, validated, but, regrettably, un-resourced. across the years because they fell below the cut-line.

It takes a pro to admit that I actually pretend to understand what I just wrote.

But what can you do? In prioritizing the importance of the Transition team couldn’t figure out whether they could provide a meaningful recommendation to anyone fast enough to make a difference. My suspicion was that everything that was going to happen had already been decided, probably before the last hanging chad had been discounted in Broward County. All the rest of this could very well be window dressing, just like the “Top-to-Bottom” review Secretary Rumsfeld had been chartered to conduct over at Defense.

You know you have been in this town too long when you realize that they are running out of directions to conduct studies. I remember when Secretary Aspin, life cut tragically short, had initiated the “Bottom-up-Review” at the Start of the Clinton debacle. Wags at the Pentagon promptly dubbed it the “Bottom’s Up Review” and the damage control from the Secretariat went on for weeks. I don’t know of any of the folks from those days who remember it as anything but the latter. If we have done bottom-to-top and top-to-bottom, I expect we will hear an East-to-West Review next.

Friday night I saw the Deputy Director of the Interagency Organization, the number three factotum in the cast-of-thousands interagency structure. She towered over our smaller Agencies, and led our fractious family with a firm but loving hand. She looked tired. She was hosting a function on a Friday night featuring her famous chili more as a tribute to her Spouse, and her basic humanity, than a desire to see anyone else from the business after the week we had all shared. It had been awful, and to make this happen I had driven from the District back out to the County, collected my spouse and returned Downtown. I laid a bed of Fritos-brand Corn Chips in the bottom of a bowl and ladled some steaming shredded beef over it. It smelled delicious. Then came a dollop of sour cream and a gentle drift of shredded cheddar cheese that melted right in and made itself at home. With some cheese-and-chili cornbread on the side it was just about heaven. I looked at her and asked how the week had been.

“Crazy,” she said, stifling a yawn. “You have no idea. And just wait till next week.”

She was right, as usual. I had a not-bad weekend, almost catching up on sleep. On Monday I dealt with some very senior out-of-towners who thought that Washington wasn’t doing them right. I promised to help, to the extent that anyone can, absent more money. Late in the afternoon, around four, I was eyeing my briefcase, thinking I might get to the Athletic Club or someplace that wasn’t located next to my phone and I got the call from the Director’s office. Vice President, Friday, three hours, need nine viewgraphs that hit everything, we may get twelve minutes. Due in 48 hours. Oh, got a President’s Budget due on the Hill on the 28th. Have you made the corrections to the Oral Testimony? How’s it doing?

O.K. Seems like the Deputy was right about the hanging chads. Could be another Crazy Week right here and now. That was what it was like to be inside the machine, waiting to see what the new people want to do. Ban oil and gas? You know, the fun we will see is just beginning.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com