Sweet Ride. Uber D.C.'s Rachel Holt in one of her company's digitally dispatched luxury sedans. Some riders use them to get groceries.
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It is a soft spring evening. The office buildings downtown are emptying out, and the bars are filling up for happy hour. Uber cars are out in force, Town Cars and Benzes rolling down 14th, up Ninth, under the overspreading oaks of Logan Circle and back down Vermont, past the Churchkey, where 555 kinds of beer are on offer. Its list gives each beer's alcohol content and country of origin, the hops used to brew it and the temperature at which it will be served. The menu offers nibbles from the other America, served with the requisite irony: disco fries, a staple of the Jersey Shore, and a deep-fried macaroni-and-cheese stick familiar to fans of Midwestern state fairs. There's also pricey charcuterie for those who don't get the joke. Seven blocks east and a few blocks south, at the edge of the Penn Quarter neighborhood, six diners take their places at Minibar. In a city quickly becoming famous for tony restaurants, they are the luckiest feeders of the night: Minibar takes reservations a minimum of a month in advance for six seats from supplicants who must call precisely at 10 a.m., usually for several days in a row, sometimes for weeks. The meal they savor has 25 to 30 courses. The cost: $150.
The optimism of ber-Washingtonians so far survives the unspoken worry about a coming age of austerity, in which government spending cuts would end the high life that Washingtonians have come to expect. They are right to be optimistic. The two most plausible deficit-reduction proposals--one by President Obama, the other by the Republican-controlled House Budget Committee--each calls for the government in 2021 to spend a trillion dollars more than it spends today.