Washington Imagined It Would Become a Big-time Business Town. Of Course That Never Happened.

There was something missing from yesterday’s big news about the Washington Commanders sale: Washington money.

In a region that recently cast itself as one of America’s major-league economic engines, the roster of potential buyers turned out to be distinctly minor-league — meaning the next owner of the team, that ultimate emblem of mogulhood, would have to be imported.

In the end, the winner of the reported $6 billion prize, Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils owner Josh Harris, beat out tycoons based in Houston and Toronto, in addition to Jeff Bezos, who despite owning the Washington Post calls Seattle home. While one Washington-based billionaire is part of Harris’ group, the principal would be commuting from more economically muscular climes, just like all of the also-rans.

That’s a far cry from the days when superlawyer Edward Bennett Williams, insider’s insider, man-about-town and founder of the quintessential Washington law firm, hosted a who’s-who of the Beltway’s 1970s-era ruling class in the owner’s box of what was then known as the Washington Redskins.

For that matter, it’s also a far cry from the situation in 1999, when a self-made suburban Maryland thirtysomething named Daniel Snyder bought the team and was (briefly) heralded as as an emblem of the new entrepreneurial class that proved the capital had become more than just a measly government town.

In fact, Snyder’s looming exit represents a neat bookend to a quarter-century or so when Washington’s civic boosters allowed themselves to fantasize that their city had somehow transcended its federal origins and joined the ranks of America’s high-flying business hubs.

Sports inflation has pushed team ownership beyond even the sorts of ordinary tycoons who once bought in ordinary markets — the local bankers and real-estate magnates and industrial leaders. While Washington has a few members of the more rarefied 21st-century master-of-the-universe set, it never did become a hub, despite all its pretensions to the contrary. Harris, who grew up locally, left town to make his fortune.

“Washington has a lot of money, but it doesn’t have a lot of billionaires,” says Stephen Fuller, who spent 50 years studying the regional economy at George Mason University, where the local-economy program now carries his name. “A couple of hundred million doesn’t get you front-row seats anymore.”

In reality, that just means Washington is like most American cities, some of them economically just fine. (The Denver Broncos purchaser whose $4.65 billion outlay was the previous record price was a Walmart heir, not some self-made Colorado business visionary.) But given how much emotional energy the capital invested in the idea of having joined the grown-up table of regional economies, there’s something particularly poignant in the realization.

Consider the dawn-of-a-new-era hype that surrounded Snyder’s ascent in the 1990s. “He owns the ultimate power broker's bauble, the Redskins box, but doesn't subscribe to the code of the insider,” enthused David Brooks in a lengthy New York Times Magazine profile. “He's not interested in power; he's interested in sales. It's not that he hates politics. It's worse. He's largely indifferent.”

Under the headline “A Money Player in a Power Town,” Brooks diagnosed elite snickering about Snyder’s behavior as the death rattle of a political class that knew it was being aced out. “As a colleague of his put it, politics is for losers. … The energy these days is out in the office parks, among the business types who think politics is for petty parasites.”

The profile makes for deliciously dated reading today. But its boosterish tone was actually common at the time — the function of a culture forever insecure about Washington’s relation to the real America beyond the federal ambit.

A year earlier, when two different airlines launched flights from Dulles International Airport to San Jose, California, the home airport for Silicon Valley, Washington exulted, like a Palookaville that had finally joined the big leagues. Never mind that the home airport for the capital of the United States already had flights to countless world capitals.

And then, soon after Snyder bought the football team, Virginia-based AOL bought Time Warner, unleashing a new torrent of excitement about the rise of the D.C. area as a business capital — and the tumbling cachet of the political careerists who had nothing to do with this new geyser of wealth. (One of AOL’s bigwigs, Ted Leonsis, already owned the city’s NHL team and eventually took possession of its NBA team.)

“It gave the impression that, yes, the Washington area was becoming a sort of a major player in the nation's economy,” Fuller recalled this week. “I tracked all that and I'm sure I perpetuated that story.”

Plenty of things, of course, haven’t turned out the way Americans imagined back in that happy epoch, the AOL merger prominently among them. Washington’s economy has actually weathered the gyrations of the tumultuous 21st century better than many. The city continued to clean up. The exurbs became a data-farm dominion. The whole place is richer than it used to be.

But there was no second coming of AOL. And there certainly has been no displacement of the power class by the money class.

Culturally, those petty parasites still run the show.

Which leaves Washington… pretty much where it’s always been, a place where the players who dominate government and law and politics dwarf the comparative nobodies who run the businesses (or at least the businesses that aren’t in the influence racket, the federal-contracting game or the other government-adjacent corners of D.C. capitalism).

And it means Washington also remains a place where, thanks to an accident of geography, those relatively ordinary local-business types occasionally wind up rubbing awkward elbows with globetrotting statesmen and history-shaping politicians.

At last month’s Gridiron Dinner, for instance, the guests for the annual white-tie media-and-politics gathering included Secretary of State Antony Blinken, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley. There were a slew of foreign ambassadors, who tend to occupy one of the most prestigious posts in their respective foreign services.

Anyone who scanned the list of names on the event program would also have noticed that the “Friends of the Gridiron” — the deep-pocketed folks whose donations help the thing survive — was made up of people like Mark Ein, the investor and founder of Kastle Systems, the leading office-building security-system provider, Phil De Picciotto, the leader of the A-list sports-management agency Octagon, as well as Ziad Ojakli, a vice president and government-operations chief at Boeing.

They’re legit leaders of firms doing well enough to generously underwrite a capital tradition, but their status in the global world of business isn’t really comparable to that of the giants in the city’s political or legal worlds. That’s an imbalance that likely wouldn’t exist in a country (France or Japan or the U.K., say) where the political and commercial capital were one and the same — or in an alternative America where Washington had lived up to its capital-of-the-internet hype.

Or take a peek at the Green Book, the venerable Washington publication officially known as The Social List of Washington, D.C. The $160 compendium of the region’s worthies lists the city’s power players, complete with details of their summer addresses, kids’ private schools, correct salutations and order of precedence for who gets the place of honor at a dinner party.

The first 90 or so pages list the who’s-who of the White House, the Capitol, the bureaucracy and the diplomatic world — often nationally or globally prominent people. Then comes the meat of the book, the regional civilians who just happen to have acquired private-sector money or prominence. And from here on, you’re not necessarily any more likely to have heard of most of those names than the elites who might make up similar social registers in Chicago or Atlanta.

Changes in media may actually mean this insular world of local financial power is moving farther from the part of Washington where national players do their thing. Earlier this year, when D.C. businessman-turned-philanthropist Calvin Cafritz died at 91, the scion of one of the city’s most prominent real estate families did not get an obituary in the Washington Post, which under Bezos’ ownership no longer casts itself as a zealously hometown publication.

It’s a fairly good measure of where the local Washington scene really sits in the world of national and global business news.

One way to look at this is that it’s just what the founders wanted.

In creating a capital far from the new nation’s major cities, they sought to insulate the government from outside influence. If the nation’s capital was in Manhattan, schmoozy elite gatherings would have elected officials mingling as equals with Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon and the famous titans of Wall Street. If the home of the government were collocated with the epicenter of the tech world — the real one, that is, in Silicon Valley — the decision-makers of democracy would be sharing a municipality with Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the kingpins of Meta, Apple and Alphabet.

You don’t have to be James Madison to see a potential downside there.

Better, from his 18th-century perspective, to have the capital become a place whose Business Hall of Fame inducts local car-dealership founders and regional bank executives just like in St. Louis or Phoenix.

Fuller, who became known as “Dr. Doom” because he spent so much time downplaying the hype about Washington’s supposedly inevitable economic rise, seemed more bemused than aggravated when I reached him this week in Maine, where he moved after retiring a couple years back.

The professor earned his grim reputation by spending the last decade reminding triumphalists that Washington’s economy remained overwhelmingly tied to government, and had actually grown more slowly than others once austerity hit. But he expressed a certain sympathy when I asked him about the old tic of local firms taking on airs as a result of serving the capital of the free world.

“It gives them some bragging rights,” Fuller says. “There's a certain in-the-know, from being in the capital city, that that gives you some leverage, even if you don't know anything more, actually, maybe even less than the other guys.”

The old Riggs Bank, for instance, used to bill itself as the “bank of presidents” and “the most important bank in the most important city in the world,” with a headquarters right across from the Treasury. In reality, it was a local bank in a mid-sized American market. After collapsing amid scandal, it was bought out by a bank from Pittsburgh and the financial life of presidents carried on perfectly well.

Fuller jokes that he — an academic who made a career out of studying this same mid-status economy — was guilty of it too. “I worked in Washington for 52 years. And, you know, I was sort of proud that I was from the nation's capital, and could walk down to the Capitol [when] called on for expertise. That made you important. I think there's a real danger to this because it does blind you to the realities, which are that we don't produce anything of value.”

Meanwhile, Washington partisans who feel patriotic about things like sports ownership needn’t feel completely bereft. Baseball’s Washington Nationals are also on the market. And while the names that have been bandied about as buyers include a South Korean billionaire and a New Jersey mortgage king, the most frequently mentioned figure is a genuinely popular local: Leonsis, the hockey and basketball owner who traces his fortune to the AOL moment.

But the reports about Leonsis’ interests suggest he’d need a partner: David Rubenstein, the billionaire patron of Beltway philanthropies and leader of the Carlyle Group private-equity firm. Unlike the economic titans that made Washington dream during its era of Silicon Valley pretensions, Rubenstein runs the sort of business — uber-connected in government and politics — that really does reflect the federal city.

He could be a great co-owner. But no one will ever write dawn-of-a-new-Washington stories if he manages to help snag the team.