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I've lived in DC since '79 and have no plans to leave. If I were a Democrat, I'd have had to slit my wrists, but as a Republican, I can mostly laugh at it. I put up with the clowns in preference to living in the 'burbs and spending most of my non-work waking hours sitting in my car, in gridlock. The biggest sacrifice is that we are paying a small fortune for private schools, but on the other hand I can walk to the Smithsonian, walk to a major league baseball or soccer game, ride my bike to the zoo, and awe my out of town guests with the Marine Barracks parade. A fair tradeoff.

That said, the city has come a looooong way since the Marion Barry days. We went into receivership, which started to straighten things out, and then we had a goodly spell of honest and reasonably competent leadership through the Anthony Williams and Adrian Fenty eras. Not perfect, but if Williams and Fenty were the norm rather than the exceptions, we wouldn't find it so easy to use urban democrats as a punching bag.

We've now taken a step backwards, but I think it's temporary. Fenty turned Michelle Rhee loose on the schools, and she was actually able, among other things, to fire several hundred incompetent teachers. (Did I mention that we have some DC public schools that are actually turning the corner ....) This enraged the unions, and Vincent Gray ran an insurgency campaign in the democrat primary as an unabashed union tool with an implicit agenda of bringing back the old ways. He won, and the clown show is back. Sad.

Many of us, however, think our current travails are the last hurrah of the old guard. Marion Barry still hangs around in Ward 8, but he's an embarassment even to the democrats. Today he's an interesting curiousity that belongs stuffed and mounted in the Smithsonian, in an exhibit on the history of the democrat party. No longer a threat. Meanwhile, the grifters who have been unleashed since Gray took office have got a good many democrats across the city regretting that they tossed Fenty over the side.

Meanwhile, the city continues to gentrify. Traffic just gets worse in the 'burbs, and the suburban cowboys are discovering that there are great neighborhoods that don't involve crossing a bridge or crawling along I 270/95/66 twice a day. We have more kids in private and charter schools than are left in DC public schools. We were still majority black, barely, in the last census (50.7%), but we've probably tipped by now, and the old racial howl at the moon politics doesn't fly anymore. Maryland's politicians are just as silly as ours, and the hispanic gangs are taking over large swaths of northern Virginia, so the nonsense factors are evening out. I think this city has a great future, provided the Tea Party doesn't sweep the board in November and move the Capitol to Montana.