To hear a lot of folks talk about it, the short, unhappy life of a bar called Political Pattie’s stands as an indictment of Washington, proof that it’s full of intolerant blue snowflakes who can’t even go out for a drink without dividing into partisan tribes.
That’s certainly how the now-former owners see it a week after shutting down their bipartisanship-themed watering hole, which enraged neighbors by painting a Republican elephant alongside the Democratic donkey on its storefront — and spent the rest of its 75-day existence fighting accusations of having turned a former U Street gay bar into a Trumpist front.
“I can’t even describe to you the types of offensive messages and comments that we received for what we deem a very pure intention of trying to bring people together in bipartisan conversation,” said Sydney Bradford, 40, a Democrat who left her job as a health-tech executive in order to open the establishment in September. “Our takeaway is that, frankly, people are not ready for that, at least not here and now in D.C.”
“The country should be concerned by what happened to Pattie’s,” said her Republican partner Drew Benbow, 41, who was a Department of Transportation lawyer before throwing himself into the bar. “If you are so offended by the mere sight of a symbol that represents the other party, that it drives you to anger and vitriol, then that should be concerning.”
In an expansive interview soon after their bar’s closure, Benbow and Bradford spoke to me about what went wrong. They also managed to make some news: They told me they’re reviving Political Pattie’s as a SuperPAC designed to promote political civility. “We’d like to find candidates out there in the country who we are likely to work across the aisle, and pair them up with other candidates of the other party,” Benbow said. They’ve already filed the paperwork.
By moving from hospitality to advocacy, the couple will be leaving the iffy Washington business of a bar built around bipartisan chumminess — and joining the much more secure Beltway industry of good-cause groups designed to combat partisan nastiness.
They’ll have company. As American politics has coarsened in the 21st century, millions of philanthropic dollars have flowed to Big Civility, with summits, awards and Beltway think tanks like the one launched last year by former Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan. Unfortunately, none of that work seems to have done much to detoxify our politics, or to make Washington safe for Political Pattie’s.
I don’t think that’s any coincidence.
As well-funded enthusiasts for compromise discover every election cycle, you have to give people a reason, beyond abstract love of bipartisanship, to support a cause — whether that cause is a candidate or a neighborhood bar.
Yes, Political Pattie’s and its owners faced some appalling trolling from an overwhelmingly blue cast of knuckleheads. But there are also more prosaic reasons why you might not find success, in a sophisticated corner of town, by opening a bar decorated with kitschy political memorabilia like a presidential lectern and serving cocktails festooned with civics-class names like “Filibuster Fuzz” and “Gerrymander Martini.”
Ultimately, the downfall of Political Pattie’s has as much to do with the limits of professional Washington bipartisanship as it does with the extremes of local Washington partisanship. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t a wild story — and one that should particularly disturb locals who assume, as I did, that the capital’s government-adjacent residents are actually pretty good at coexisting with political foes.
Political Patties’ origin story begins at Hampton University, where Benbow and Bradford met. The couple both had solid careers in Washington. The idea for the bar, Benbow said, followed a horrific family tragedy: His 77-year-old father was shot and killed in April, a still-unsolved crime that got him thinking about doing other things with his life. “I wanted to do something to bring people together to solve problems like that,” he told me.
The earnest roots, though, were lost on critics after the partners took over the former home of an LGBTQ+ standby called The Dirty Goose. The former gay bar now had an elephant and a donkey on the outer wall alongside the bar’s slogan: “Putting the ‘lit’ back in politics.” The owners promised debate-watching parties, political trivia nights and themed conversations. Inside, there were novelty gavels, framed photos of people like Dick Cheney and Barack Obama, and wall-sized political quotations such as Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” It would be like a sports bar, but for politics.
Even before the doors opened, the place had gone viral — and not in the good way that publicity-seeking new businesses want.
On social media, people called it “dangerous” and “tone deaf.” “Expecting us to engage in peaceful conversation with people who are actively working to strip rights and dehumanize us is just nonsensical,” someone posted. “I don’t want to get drinks with my gays, gals, and theys only to have to hear a bunch of slobbering sperry-wearing, khaki clad Republicans saying slurs,” added another.
In person, things were also tough. “I saw this woman across the street who saw the elephant and screamed, ‘Oh, my God!,” Bradford said. “She was just aghast at the imagery.” According to Bradford, even the color scheme rankled. “People were also deeply offended by the red doors,” which knocked the storefront balance between red and blue out of whack.
Benbow and Bradford told me this week that they were especially irked by the posts depicting preppy white “khaki lords” as the target customers — unaware, perhaps, that the owners were a Black couple who met at an HBCU and intentionally opened on a stretch that was once known as “Black Broadway” but where black-owned businesses are less common today.
A lot of the pile-on, of course, involved a much more reasonable critique: To many, the place felt like a cheesy tourist trap full of Smithsonian gift-shop merch, a bad fit in a part of town better known for cosmopolitan eateries. Someone started a petition to turn it into a Chili’s.
But in Washington, weeks before a tense election, the politics was always going to be front and center as media attention landed on what one food-news site dubbed the city’s “most hated bar.”
The couple tried to win over critics, repainting the exterior to get rid of both the elephant and donkey and boost the amount of blue. “We realized that the representation of the red elephant was hurtful to the community,” they said in a weirdly abject statement at the time, going on to quote Maya Angelou: “When you know better, you do better.” Ahead of the election, in which both owners voted for Kamala Harris, signs supporting the Democratic nominee appeared in the window. Now conservatives piled on, accusing the owners of knuckling under to the wokes.
The venture was doomed. “We couldn’t even give away free beer,” Bradford joked this week, recalling how they went to the annual high-heel Halloween drag-queen race and handed out flyers for drinks — but got no takers.
“There was a silent boycott,” Benbow said. “Next to us, you would have these lines down the street. I would stand outside with our security night after night and hear these comments about how we were ‘a Republican bar’ and they wouldn’t even want to come in to pregame before going to the party next door, or use the restroom.”
When Benbow and Bradford finally decided to throw in the towel this month, it was about economics, not politics: A for-profit business is supposed to make money, and this one wasn’t.
All the same, the couple — who, unlike a lot of the political class, are actually natives of the city — see the bar’s failure as a warning for Washington as it prepares for a GOP-dominated era. During the first Trump administration, there was a stream of local controversies involving unfriendly treatment of GOP bigwigs in local eateries. They were the sort of thing that made small news then. Today, those sorts of incidents could prompt action in a Congress full of legislators who would do away with self-government in the capital.
“Washingtonians in particular have to pay very close attention to what happened to Pattie’s, because come January 20, we are going to have an entirely Republican and conservative government,” Benbow said. “And if we behave in a way where we are so recalcitrant and so firmly against listening to the other side, then the home rule that we think we want, we won’t have.”
Case in point: Last week, a Capitol Hill restaurant fired a manager after she gave an interview saying she would refuse to serve administration officials who support mass deportations. Seizing on the story, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee declared that Congress should take away D.C. home rule and enact a law forbidding anti-Republican discrimination.
Unfortunately for Lee, D.C. already has such a law on the books: It’s one of the few jurisdictions that classifies party affiliation as a protected category — like race or religion — that’s legally sheltered against discrimination. Most restaurateurs just want to make money, which means getting butts in seats regardless of politics.
But it’s one thing to say you can’t discriminate against people from one party. As Benbow and Bradford learned, it’s quite another thing to get partisans to actually eat and drink together.
Even without the social-media nastiness, Political Patties’ way of doing so clearly didn’t work. In political terms, it was like a candidate with admirable ambitions about finding common ground — but policy ideas that didn’t inspire anyone and a stump speech that left people cold. Did the campaign fail because people hate bipartisanship? Or because no one was especially into whatever the candidate proposed to enact?
My suggestion: If you want to bring people together across the aisle after hours, make it about anything but politics.
Washington, in fact, has plenty of bipartisan drinking spaces. It’s just that we call them dance clubs or music venues or burger joints.
Or, especially, sports bars. The kind with actual sports, that is: As a city dense with newcomers from around the country, the capital is full of bars that, on fall Saturdays and Sundays, become home turf for fans of far-flung NFL or college football teams. Showing up to cheer for the Detroit Lions or the University of Texas, no one cares if the next table is full of conservatives or liberals. It’s all about shared love — unless a fan of the Minnesota Vikings or Texas A&M shows up.
The bipartisanship industry could take a lesson from that: Give ’em something to cheer about, together.
