The first thing Washington’s latest VIP made clear is that he doesn’t want to live here. “I am happily living in ‘the other Washington’ where I have a day job that I love,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wrote to his new employees after buying The Washington Post this week.
With that sentiment, Bezos will fit right into his new terrain. Much of Washington’s decision-making class never misses an opportunity to declare how happy they are to be away from the city that provides them status, power, and influence. It’s a convention of modern politics that elected officials who spend years scrambling to reach Washington must immediately demonstrate how eager they are to escape it.
Bezos is a much more accidental power broker. By all indications, he acquired The Post almost by happenstance, as if picking up an alluring, though somewhat frayed, novel on remainder. And yet by keeping his distance from his new domain, he is displaying the intuitive understanding that almost no one is enlarged by close association with the modern Washington of maximum conflict and minimum achievement.
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