People who make movies about power - and those who want it - can't resist setting many of them in Washington, DC - from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, to All The President's Men, to Independence Day. Even romances set in the District seem inevitably to turn to the theme of power. In the mid-1990s movie, The American President, Annette Benning played a political strategist, Sidney Ellen Wade. Michael Douglass is the President, Andrew Shepherd, recently widowed. As Hollywood would have it, they fall in love.

Very early in the movie, Sidney Wade visits the White House to meet with the president's staff, representing the interests of an environmental group. During the meeting she brashly pops off, insulting the president and his policies. Unbeknownst to her, the president walks into the room during the middle of her tirade. She is horribly embarrassed...the president, however, seems charmed. He asks to speak to her privately...and the next scene shows them alone in the oval office.

President Shepherd says to her, "Did you know that the city planners, when they sat down to design Washington, DC, their intention was to intimidate and humble foreign heads of state?"
"I didn't know that," Ms. Wade responds.

"It's true," the president, says, "The White House is the single greatest home court advantage in the modern world".

Sidney responds, "I learned that one the hard way."

Power, in Washington, often seems to be the aphrodisiac in the air we breathe and the architect of our landscapes: the White House, the Capital Building with the two houses of Congress, the U. S. Supreme Court, and the Pentagon, not to mention K Street full of lobbying groups with more money and power than many small countries. Washington graphically, unapologetically, exudes power, sheer power. Even the National Cathedral was intentionally designed to communicate a message of power; set at the highest point of the nation's capital, National Cathedral looms above it all, to convey in a not so subtle way that we are one nation under God, the power behind it all. Let us hope the Democrats and Mayor Fenty, newly heady with power, can remember how quickly things shift in climates determined and dictated by power. Power seems far easier to lose than to gain, and for those without it, some of life's advantages are simply beyond reach.

Power is also a mystery, difficult to define: energy, force, control, command, sway...it can be beneficial and useful. Power is also seductive and dangerous. For too often our concerns with power have to do with the acquisition of undue influence or with materialistic gain to the point of excess, with the exercise of strength over and against any perceived weakness, with who is in and who is out, with who can lead and who cannot, with service mainly to one's own self rather than to others. Plato recognized the seductive quality of power and once said that only "He who does not desire power is fit to hold it."