Let's Hear It for the Home-Grown Green!
If the Redskins or the Capitals had gone on the block a decade ago, there might have been some Washingtonians among the bidders. But we wouldn't have seen the likes of Daniel Snyder or Ted Leonsis.</br></br>That's because Snyder, who runs a fast-growing Bethesda marketing firm and is in line to buy the Redskins, and Leonsis, an executive of America Online Inc. and future majority owner of the Capitals, represent something remarkably new in the Washington region: an entrepreneurial class with widespread wealth based on a record- setting stock market and a giant wave of technological innovation.</br></br>It's too early to guess what this affluence means for the local economy and the local culture. But assuming the sales of the two teams go forward, we will soon see what happens when two of the city's most visible institutions wind up in the hands of a new breed of aggressive, impatient-for-success entrepreneurs.</br></br>Of course there were moguls of great wealth here before America went online in the mid-1990s. But fundamentally, Washington was a world capital where business took a back seat to politics. Its economy was anchored in real estate, banking and federal jobs, contracts and lobbying. Fortunes tended to grow incrementally and to be handled conservatively.</br></br>That's all changed now. The 1990-91 recession mowed down much of the Washington region's old business leadership and in its place has come a younger, opportunistic crowd. It's a clan with gobs of money, a group that seems determined to spend, invest and enjoy its wealth with the urgency and personal involvement with which that wealth was accumulated.