DC goes slow; everywhere else speeds up!

I've been back in DC for a little over one and a half years.  I've noticed that things here go slow, much slower than in the field.  Most of the time I've been associated with government, I've been in the field--abroad a little bit and around the States, based in either San Francisco, LA, El Paso, Vegas, Reno, or Omaha and once-in-a-while in Santa Barbara (I really liked it there).

I think DC does it in slow motion--waiting for the opposition to coalesce and lead the fight, take over the headlines.  It's the English style of a gentlemen's tiff.

Take the Mueller investigation.  I perceived three months before the report was ready, that the Trump people were ganging up ready to strike in the media.  And so they did with the Barr nomination for AG.  At that point, I thought an interim report from Mueller was necessary to take command of the news coverage on the Russian hacking inquiry.  Instead, Trump's twitters took center stage prominence and dictated, virtually, the events that were to transpire in the coming months, until now, we don't know whether Mueller even wants to stay involved in defending the report his name is attached to!

The point is to stay in the lead to dictate how the matter with much controversy should unfold.

In the field, you don't know how long you'll be on any one project, so you stay on top of things and get what you need to do in the forefront of public discussion and you control the agenda of disclosure as much as you can for as long as you're involved in the particular project-subject matter.