Washington Bureau

UPDATE: Heath Shuler for President?

Today, Heath Shuler is a first-term conservative Democrat in Congress from Western North Carolina. In 10 years, he'll be president -- at least, according to a piece in last weekend's Washington Post Magazine, looking at the state of the greater Washington, D.C.-area a decade from now. If you've lived in or even been to the nation's capital, the piece is worth a read. It's really a treatise on how security, economic and other concerns could change the way people in this area live. It's highly speculative, of course, but it's informed speculation.

For people following Heath Shuler's budding political career, the story was notable for the casual manner in which one of the country's leading political newspapers casually elevated the freshman congressman to president in only a decade, even if the piece was only fantasy. Shuler was elected in 2006. There will be another presidential election in 2012, followed by one in 2016. If Shuler were to win in 2016, it would go down as one of the most rapid rises in the nation's long political history -- second only, perhaps, to Barack Obama if he wins in November.

If history is a guide, he'd almost certainly have to become a senator or governor first. No one has jumped directly from the House to the White House in 130 years -- and things didn't end so well for that guy.

So why Shuler? The author, metro columnist Marc Fisher, didn't explain his choice in the story or in an online discussion of the piece. I emailed him today to ask. If he writes back, I'll let you know. An excerpt of the story is below.

UPDATE -- Wed. April 30, 8:30 A.M.

Fisher very kindly replied to my email today to explain his choice of Shuler for president. By the way, I forgot to mention that his piece laid out two possible futures, one in which Shuler becomes president, the other where Jeb Bush does.

His reply:

I chose Shuler in good part because he's a known quantity in the Washington area, more thanks to his time with the Redskins than for any political impact he's made.

In that scenario, I was looking for a southern Democrat who might have a plausible shot at higher office a decade or so down the road; a conservative Democrat who had beaten a Republican incumbent was obviously a strong contender for the fantasy promotion I was going to give out. So it was more the plausibility of his resume than any personal achievements that led to my choice. On paper, at least, Shuler has Reagan-like crossover appeal, thanks to his comfort with religious voters, his sports background, and his ability to blur party lines (for example, his support of Democratic environmental issues even as he's strong on gun rights.)

Picking Shuler as a potential president was one of the bits in the magazine piece that apparently really stood out for readers--there were several questions about it on my online chat, and some readers were so appalled at the notion that they could barely go on to read the rest of the story.

--Sean Mussenden

***

VIVIAN AND VICTOR VERVER IN MANY WAYS EPITOMIZED THE CAPITAL REGION'S "YO-YO GENERATION." After 9/11 and the next wave of terrorist attacks, motivated at least in part by fear, they moved from their apartment in Crystal City out to the edge of sprawl, to a new townhouse in Stafford County. Then, more than a decade later, they found themselves moving back to the city's core.

Late in the 21st century's second decade, the Ververs settled in Stafford along with many other refugees from Fairfax, Arlington and other close-in suburbs. After years of nationwide economic decline, energy crises and sporadic small-scale terrorist hits, Vivian and Victor's townhouse community filled with people inspired to follow President Heath Shuler's "New Pioneers" call in 2017 for Americans to decentralize, to leave behind the congested and crumbling 1960s suburbs and embark on a massive resettlement of the land beyond the exurbs. Shuler's lure was the great open spaces that were now finally fully linked to AmeriWeb, the wireless information network that extended into every community in the land, the result of the most massive public works project since the construction of the interstate highway system.

Shuler used that public investment to attract private capital, and, together with the nation's governors, he wove land development and job creation ever more tightly together. The private sector now created its own live-work communities, on the model of 19th-century factory towns, where private capital -- and employers' rules -- largely took the place of government investment.

The Second Age of Discovery, as Shuler called it, was designed to spread out the nation's population from the traffic-choked suburbs and therefore ease the road, rail and air gridlock that was strangling the economy. A more widely dispersed population, working in new urban centers such as Fredericksburg, Gainesville, Frederick, Konterra and La Plata, was supposed to strengthen the economy, enhance quality of life, let more people live near their work and bolster Americans' sense of safety in a dangerous world. Politically, AmeriWeb and the push to repopulate rural regions won support from both left and right by emphasizing the tremendous commitment to infrastructure (with millions of resulting jobs) and the strategic importance of dispersing the population and thereby diminishing the impact of any terror attacks. The old anti-sprawl ideology that was at the heart of the turn-of-the-century green movement gradually gave way to a consensus that Americans would never give up their dream of owning a nice piece of land, well separated from the neighbors.

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