Homo Politicus on the Campaign Trail

All the candidates talk about changing Washington, but from an anthropologist's point of view that might easier said than done. America's capital city has a culture all its own, whoever's in charge. That's according to one recent author who says, that Washington is "extraordinarily tolerant of behaviors that other cultures would immediately attribute to psychiatric disorders." Dana Milbank has written what one reviewer called "an unforgiving field study" of a strange place called Potomac Land. Milbank, a columnist for the Washington Post, calls it Homo Politicus: the Strange and Scary Tribes that Run Our Government.