WaPo: D.C.'s New Gilded Age

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Is there a late 18th-Century Robespierre era guillotine in that glossy gift catalogue? ;-)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/04/AR2005120401017.html
By Ruth Marcus

Monday, December 5, 2005; Page A21

It was the $1,260 thigh-high giraffe-print boots that started me thinking about Jack Abramoff, Benjamin Ladner and how Washington has changed.

I happened to notice the boots as I was flipping through the latest issue of DC, "The magazine of luxury lifestyle." Oversized, overstuffed with ads for oversized jewels and undersized clothes, DC is one of a trio of glossy magazines launched this year to appeal to the region's ultra-high-end market. I don't expect -- possibly not even the people who put out DC expect -- to see anyone actually wearing these boots anytime soon. Rather, the boots -- and the $9,100 Louis Vuitton carpet bag with ostrich trim and the $1,900 mink throw featured in the same spread -- symbolize a growing Washington phenomenon: extreme wealth.

SNIP

But if having money was just fine, flaunting it was bad form. Writing about her childhood as the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Washington, albeit one with a fortune made on Wall Street, Katharine Graham recalled: "There was such an aversion to talking about money or our wealth that, ironically, there was, in some odd ways, a fairly spartan quality to our lives." What's different about Washington in this latest Gilded Age is the amount of money sloshing around this city -- this region, actually -- and the ostentatious display thereof. Consider: The number of households in the Washington area with more than $1 million in investable assets (that is, not including real estate) grew 9.6 percent between 2003 and 2004 alone, according to the demographic research firm Claritas. By contrast, total households in the region rose just 2.5 percent.

If the Old Washington path to real riches was real estate, the New Washington boasts multiple ways to that end. The region now features its own merchant bankers, its own high-tech moguls, its own entrepreneurial barons overseeing enterprises of indeterminate purpose but with endlessly flowing government contracts. Once, a life in law or lobbying was a reliable route to comfortable prosperity; now, as the stakes have gotten higher, so have the partnership draws. Seven-figure incomes are scarcely noteworthy. And if you doubt that these folks are flaunting it, take a drive out along River Road into Maryland, or Georgetown Pike in Virginia, and look at the acres upon acres of elephantine monstrosities, turreted and Palladian windowed and mega-garaged. Or look at the magnificent quarter-mile arising in Chevy Chase, where Barneys, Jimmy Choo and Dior are replacing a dowdy suburban strip mall. Not exactly Sparta on the Potomac.

The result is a strange version of increasing income inequality, Washington-style: a growing gap between the haves and the have-powers. This doesn't excuse, but it may help explain, some of the capital's more repulsive recent episodes. I was finishing up this column -- how to get back to those boots? -- when the news broke about California Republican Randy Cunningham's plea to taking $2.4 million in bribes. And as I read through the court papers detailing the luxury graft -- the Louis Phillipe period commode (circa 1850), the Rolls, the yachts, the silver candelabras and Persian rugs -- I thought: This all sounds awfully familiar. If only the paper were glossier, it would read a lot, in fact, like DC magazine.

"COLLECTABLES NEVER GO OUT OF FASHION"