It's a season of slow. There's something surreal about Washington in the summer, as bodies and minds broil and watch and wait.

Sessile. Suspended. Maybe stuck somewhere in the humidity. Anticipation. Something's going to happen. Someone's going to care.

Even though there's a national election being run out of downtown D.C., everybody here knows that the business of the nation is taking place elsewhere: The coast of Long Island. The Georgia Dome. The congressional districts where first-term Republicans battle to save the revolution and their seats.

In Washington, we wonder about welfare and wait. Detached and impuissant.

A 13-hour FDA hearing on Ru-486, the "abortion pill," had the controversy dullified right out of it, despite some questionable queries and shady studies upon which the recommendation was based. A Los Angeles Times reporter commented somewhere around hour eight that she was "mired in the depths of journalistic hell." In other words, she was bored.

And it's not that life here is boring, exactly. But if Washington was a person and the country was a street, the capital city would be arrested for loitering.

So far this summer, the only thing that's really engaged off-hours attention has been the Joe Klein/Anonymous discord, and that's only because there's not enough passive political gossip to fuel even the most curious of wonks.

For those who missed it, Newsweek political columnist Klein was outed last week as being the anonymous author of Primary Colors. No big deal except that he had explicitly and vehemently denied his authorship not just to the public but to his journalistic colleagues, ho ended up speculating, in print, about alternate primary suspects.

"Can you believe Joe Klein lied?"

"Yes, wouldn't you?"

"I never thought he wrote that well."

"That's because he disses your boss."

The extent to which the "who is this unmasked man?!" debate has occupied the minds and chatter of Beltway barhoppers is stunning. More than it underscores the mental lethargy of Washingtonians as they steam like dumplings outside (maybe losing brain power along with water weight), it suggests a disengagement in politics by even political operatives.

I have yet to hear:

"Can you believe they're really going to hold up Kennedy-Kassenbaum because of MSAs?"