On the Road Again

We had a Super Bowl feast on Sunday; the snow was piled so high around our driveway there was barely room for cars. Walls of the white stuff stacked so high and deep that a plow got wedged in a snow bank a week ago today. The embarrassed driver had to call in a Bob-Cat for a tow. 

It’s been that kind of a winter. Haven’t seen anything like it since 1996 when 22 storms blew through the valley.   

So Judy and I packed up and made our escape today. We’ll be driving down the coast to Hilton Head and back over the next few weeks. We’re in National Harbor – until recently Oxon Hill – Maryland, in a Wyndham time-share across the Potomac from the District of Columbia.  A year ago we were here on the day the health care round-table the President convened with the House and Senate leadership was televised. It was not a proud day for our democracy.  And when it was over the punditry pronounced health care reform dead. 

Three weeks later, on our route north, we got back on the day the President signed the House version of the legislative rabbit he had pulled out of the hat. Thought it seemed a scrawny beast to progressives like us who were holding out for a single payer system, we went up to Capitol Hill to join in the tempered jubilation.

Our senior Senator John Kerry’s Office was abuzz with animated conversations in every corner.  In a spirit of non-partisanship we went up to Scott Brown’s office. The pick-up driving Republican moderate had defeated Martha Coakley – a fine Attorney General but an undisputed stick of a campaigner – to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat . . . a harbinger of mid-term electoral disaster for Democrats.

So here we are again, looking across the river to the Nation’s Capitol. It has been a year of Through-the-Looking- Glass political twists and reversals. The Republicans now holding the House with promises of born-again fiscal conservatism are early favorites to win the Senate back in two years.

But the President has been a come-back kid with unprecedented legislative victories during the usually moribund lame-duck session; a White House Staff restructured to win the upper Mid-Western state’s that will decide the fate of his second term; a stunning performance of leadership in the aftermath of the massacre in Tucson; a stunningly boring State of the Union Address, strategically aimed at winning back soporific centrists; and the patience of Job forbearance to sit through fifteen minutes of Bill O’Reilly’s guff without losing his cool.

A few hours ago, Judy and I were on Route 95 in Delaware in moderate traffic when a shiny new SUV passed on our right. The passenger window rolled down, a hand reached out, the thumb twisted down and bobbed three times for emphasis.

No doubt about it, it was meant for us. But why? 

Then we remembered the faded Obama – Biden sticker on our bumper!