Washington has a penchant for sending some people packing. | REUTERS D.C. exiles: Leaving 'This Town'

For a place that attracts people from around the globe, Washington also has a penchant for sending some of them packing.

“I spent the better part of 10 years camped in the nation’s Capitol and, toward the end, I just felt like I was suffocating,” said Mark McKinnon, a political strategist who worked on George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns and who hightailed it out of town for Austin, Texas, and Blue River, Colo., a few years ago. “I felt like I was becoming part of the problem and had to get away.”


He’s not the only one: There’s a group of Beltway exiles — unknown in size but not insignificant — who soured on the city they had once thrived in, decided to leave the capital in their rearview mirror, and found peace and prosperity elsewhere.

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While their reasons for making the Great Escape are sometimes partly personal, there’s one thing they don’t miss — the atmosphere that has been well documented in “This Town,” the recent best-seller from New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich, who portrays D.C. as a self-promoting cesspool filled with power hungry, interconnected politicians, strategists and journalists strong-arming and back stabbing one another.

“The book is a reminder of what I won’t miss about life in the Washington bubble: guest list envy; the Hollywood-ization of personalities; and the increasing self-branding obsession,” said Lauren Whittington, a former Roll Call reporter, who recently moved to Richmond, Va.

Kimberly Hunter, who served as a press aide for Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and later worked in Washington for the ONE Campaign, a worldwide anti-poverty effort, packed up her bags last year to travel the globe. She hasn’t looked back.

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“The world was bigger than an office with five TV’s blaring news of fiscal cliffs and congressional stalemates,” Hunter told POLITICO. “Every day felt like the movie “Groundhog Day.” My reason for leaving was to get out of the bubble and meet the real world. To see how people were making a real difference outside of Washington.”

And see the real world, she did. Hunter has visited four continents and 11 developing countries. She’s said she’s pursued lighter reading: “Game of Thrones” and “The Hunger Games” series — all of them. She ditched the 2012 election cycle and picked up a new job, making websites for guesthouses in exchange for room and board, and even made her own site: “Leaping into Life.” “I went on safari, learned Spanish, visited development projects, bummed around on beaches and wrote about all of it in my own voice for once — and not as a spokesperson,” Hunter said.

Even prominent Capitol regulars sitting atop the D.C. pecking order can grow weary of Washington’s downside. Mary Matalin and James Carville traded Washington for New Orleans in 2008, albeit primarily for personal reasons. Still, there’s plenty Matalin and her family don’t miss, “like the unavoidable transactional relationships, the myopic one-industry worldview, the programmed, mandatory parties, hours marked by news cycles and tweets,” the Republican strategist and CNN contributor said.

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“It just seems more natural to measure seasons by hurricane activity rather than election cycles,” Matalin quipped.

McKinnon said that as soon as he bolted, he felt like he “was getting oxygen to my brain and starting to see in color again.”

“When I left initially, and gave up my apartment,” he said, “I thought there would be a difficult transition period. That I would miss it. That I would want to come back regularly to get a fix. And just the opposite has happened. I don’t miss it at all. And I feel so much healthier mentally and physically being far, far away. And I feel like I get a more realistic perspective of what’s happening in the country and what people really think, because I spend more time around people who aren’t in the political rat race.”

Some exiles just need to get across I-495 to get that feeling.

Whittington, who moved to Richmond largely to be closer to family, says a break from “the bubble” is a big bonus.

“I’d be lying if I said that the decision to leave D.C. wasn’t also based on Beltway fatigue,” Whittington said. “For 14 years, I had a job where I watched Capitol Hill and Congress under a microscope. The level of dysfunction and polarization is as bad as I’ve seen it. After a while, it wears on you when you are mostly covering why things aren’t happening.”

Martha Sherrill spent 10 years at The Washington Post before she and her husband (another former Post reporter, William Powers) left in 2004 for what they thought would just be a one-year “experiment” of living up North in Massachusetts. They never came back and Sherill said they have no regrets.

“It took years of us being away until we processed all the ways being in Washington can really alter your view on everything and how differently it alters your view of the world,” Sherill said.

“I didn’t really appreciate until I left what a competitive place it is and how every exchange and conversation really has a transaction that is taking place on a competitive level,” she continued. “And that is something that just starts to happen unconsciously. You mention the last great restaurant you went to, the last great, fabulous vacation — the conversation is just loaded with all sorts of little moments that are meant to signal to everyone what kind of life you’re living and how successful you are.”

We should note, the exiles who spoke to POLITICO also had some nice things to say about D.C.

“I learned a lot, and met a lot of great people,” McKinnon said. “But, it’s a human microwave. And if you stay long, you’re going to fry a lot of brain cells and melt some of your humanity. It becomes a game and you become a player in the game.”

Some who left are so glad they did that they don’t even want to think about re-entering the old world.

“Now that I’m no longer in D.C., I don’t have to jump all over every opportunity at self-promotion,” said one former Capitol Hill reporter who moved away a couple of years ago, declining an interview request. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to pass on this one.”