D.C.’s Deflated Ego : Historic global events have made sky-high headlines, but left Washington feeling like a lead balloon.

WASHINGTON —  Spring is at hand. The cherry blossoms are blooming. The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Sandinistas are on the way out. Inflation is down; campaign coffers are up. So why is Washington moping?

The city that likes to think of itself as The Nerve Center of the Free World is in a funk, just as newer, more vigorous centers of power are emerging around the globe.

In fact, Washington is sort of like a middle-age man staring in a mirror, noticing his flabby middle and anguishing over the demise of his appeal as younger, brasher guys push past him.

“In Eastern Europe, they have revolutions,” says Jeff Garin, a Democratic political pollster. “Here in Washington, all we have is Chinese water torture and self-analysis.”

It has been 50 years since World War II and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed Washington onto the center of the world stage.

But today, the limelight is elsewhere. One day a Communist bloc nation chucks the reigns of terror, the next, the Germanys talk reunification; one day South Africa is shaking off apartheid, the next, the Japanese are gobbling more New York real estate.

And all the while, the city where once bloomed the thought to send a man to the moon is bogged down by budget deadlock and the politics of the nasty.

“My boss has gotten so eager for a little attention,” confessed one Republican aide, demanding anonymity, “he’s even gotten into issues back in the district.

“At press lunches,” he adds, “all we talk about is how we wish someone would anchor all those anchormen to their desks instead of to the airlines.”

Recently, Washington has been flooded by reminders of its heady past. Dozens of bright-eyed delegations from Eastern Europe, itching to learn the ways of Uncle Sam, have hurtled through the hallways that always have been thought to ooze power. Polish journalists are hovering around editors at “Roll Call,” the newspaper of record in Congress; student interns from Hungary are trailing after senators, and recently an entourage from Czechoslovakia arrived on the doorstep of the Democratic National Party.

Mike McCurry, the DNC communications director, spent time with the Czechs. As they left for home weighed down with copies of party bylaws and notes on conventional political warfare, McCurry got this sinking feeling.

“I just had to cross my fingers and think, ‘Gee, I hope it turns out better for you guys than it has for us,’ ” he says. “Clearly, they believe in us more than we do in ourselves these days.”

Even foreign journalists and diplomats who once saw a Washington posting as the climax of a career are feeling the change.

“I was pretty happy until last spring when I saw what was going on in China on TV,” says Radio France reporter Jean Hess. “I realized I was wasting my time here. It’s not the same importance; people you talk to are less excited. Nothing big happens.”

After nine years here, Hess is heading home.

But sometimes it takes an outsider to put things in perspective. One high-ranking diplomat from an exciting European city observes that it might be a little early for people “inside the beltway”--a catch-phrase for a capital engrossed by inside politics and encircled by a busy interstate--to be singing the blues.

“America is still a pretty important place,” the diplomat said. “It’s still an important part of the world balancing act. It’s just not the only place.”

As always, the tone of official Washington is set, in large part, by the mood of the White House. And under President George Bush, whose most frequent metaphor for his job is that of a “steward”--one who receives a legacy and passes it on intact to others--the White House has become a decidely low-key place.

Three decades ago, President John F. Kennedy set a pugnacious, aggressive tone for the capital of a nation that would “pay any price, bear any burden” to see its ideas prevail. By contrast, Bush told the nation in his Inaugural Address: “Our funds are low. We have a deficit to bring down.”

More recently, speaking in San Francisco, Bush said his task was to “manage (a) period of transition. I would rather be called cautious than I would be called reckless,” he said.

The President’s defenders say his approach is exactly what the times and the voters call for. But there is no doubting the effect that a government of stewardship has had on the mood of its capital.

“The condition of being a Washington insider in the early 1990s is the condition of being stuck,” McCurry says. “We can’t devise programs to answer real needs because there’s no money. There’s no new money because we refuse to raise taxes or cut the deficit. We can’t get the political debate off dead center because no one has their ‘message’ together.

“We can’t seem to do anything,” he gasps, laughing at himself. “So we just sit here watching the world spin and feeling irrelevant.”

In the rest of America, however, Washington’s irrelevance doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

For four years, pollsters Jeff Garin and Peter Hart have asked this Washington question on polls they have done for congressional and state candidates: “Which would you prefer: an experienced person with seniority and a proven record in Washington or someone new with fresh approaches to change things in Washington?”

“Pretty consistently voters across the country are saying they want someone who’s going to change things, and it doesn’t always mean they’re going to kick out the incumbent,” Garin says. “In this election year, you’ll see a lot more incumbents spending a lot more time talking about how they’re going to bring. That’s what we’re advising our candidates to do.”

But, not surprisingly, given Washington’s history of self-obsession, the capital’s boredom with itself and image problems throughout America has become one of the city’s hottest topics.

The first musings appeared six months ago in the hometown newspaper, about the time China was convulsing and Bush was busy naming individual Americans to be “Points of Light.”

It was Washington Post columnist Dale Russakoff who first pointed out that many Washington big shots were feeling a little like Ingrid Bergman in the closing scene of “Casablanca,” where Humphrey Bogart tells her that their problems don’t amount to a hill of beans. Russakoff wrote: “In a city where self-importance is epidemic, where pomposity permeates even the business slogans . . . that constitutes quite an affront.”

But it was not until David Broder--the Post’s political heavy-hitter--weighed in that the debate really got going. Broder, a local institution, argued that Washington was being eclipsed on all fronts--internationally, economically and politically. He quoted past and present greats: the likes of ABC’s David Brinkley, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and former White House aide Clark Clifford.

Clifford likened Washington’s post-war ascent to that of Rome and Greece, and concluded that the decline was inevitable because the United States had “frittered” away its advantages and reduced “this economic Gibraltar to the largest debtor nation in the world.”

Soon the end of Washington was being heralded all over the place--Time, Newsweek, even Governing magazine, which pondered “hollow government.”

Many reporters think Washington has become mighty dull, says Jonathan Rauch, a former National Journal reporter who is about to move to Japan to write more.

“Actually, it has been dull for some time,” Rauch says. Former President Ronald “Reagan had something to do with making it less dull, simply by force of personality. But the place is really dark now, and you hear a lot of reporters commiserating that they feel like they’re covering Luxembourg.”

Not everyone agrees.

These kind of observations, insists one congressional insider, could only come from a lot of bored journalists--at the end of winter.

“They’re all out there jaw-boning,” said one top congressional aide. Said another aide, during a break in a budget session as he raced through the underground tunnel between the House and the Senate: “It’s a straw man argument. We’re up here doing crucial business and they (columnists, journalists and others) are down there criticizing. Business as usual.”

Rep. Henry Hyde (R.-Illinois) says confidently, “I think Washington is still the center of the world. The future is going to be busy, challenging, demanding, productive. All that decline-of-power stuff that they’re writing about is malarkey.”

In his view, Washington is simply in a lull. “Don’t worry,” he says with lip-smacking anticipation, “the focus will be intensified on the Hill any day now, probably as soon as we get into the budget and try to hammer out our role as the leader of the free world.”

Rep. Bill Thomas (R.-Calif.) also dismisses the moaning and groaning about whither Washington. The current outbreaks of democracy are an affirmation of America’s greatness, he says, and credits its largess over the years for bringing it about.

But even Thomas, a staunch, no-nonsense conservative, worries whether Washington is up to the tumultuous times.

“I worry about people being as bold they should be,” he says. “I worry about them thinking as great (of) thoughts as they are capable of.”

There’s a time to think great thoughts and a time to go to parties, and in Washington they are easily commingled.

But to some, the Administration’s habit of staying home by the VCR is compounding the problems. This is a city where, for years, as much business was accomplished after hours as was during the day.

Now, however, Carolyn Peachey, a party planner and longtime Washington doyen of fun, says theBush Administration has put a bit of a damper on the pigs-in-the-blanket set.

“They don’t go out,” she says. “They’re more calm, more settled, they’ve all been around for a while so they don’t feel compelled to go to parties.

“So you don’t go with the same anticipation to an event the way you used to in the . . . Reagan days. You don’t go with the anticipation that this is going to be a hot night because there’s this hot issue going on, and we’ll hear all about it and then read about it the next morning in the paper. Forget it.”

There is a lot more private entertaining going on in Washington, smaller dinners for eight friends as opposed to “trying to put an evening together with the powers that be,” she adds.

Peachey--who observes that in Washington, “there is simply no cult of personality around any more”--speaks admiringly about Czechoslovakian playwright-President Vaclav Havel and South African activist leader Nelson Mandela.

And to make matters worse, in a city that has always smugly prided itself on being impervious to swings in the national economy, real estate prices in Washington are dropping.

“You haven’t heard from the Chicken Littles in this town,” says Clarence Williams, a personal trainer at one of the toniest gyms around, “until you’ve heard them complain about their townhouses losing value. Remember this may be Washington, but it’s also America.”

Times Staff Writer David Lauter contributed to this story.