Throughout his time in office, President Barack Obama has opened many outside-the-Beltway speeches with a suggestion that he, too, feels like an outsider in the nation's baffling, frustrating capital city. He shouts to the audience about how good it is to be wherever he is that day — Cleveland, Miami, San Francisco. Then he takes pokes at the town where great success in his chosen profession has brought him.
"It is good to be out of Washington," he often says — a line that, in good times and in bad, always generates warm, sympathetic applause.
Changing Washington may not have come off as Obama promised. But for the president and his supporters, the city has been an object of contempt they can believe in.