Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

Nobody likes Washington, D. C. Even the people who love it don't like it. Climate atrocious, traffic worse: an ordinary midsize gridlocked American city, in which the plump white federal buildings make no real difference. Or rather they bring all the politicians and tourists, the lobbyists and diplomats and refugees and all the others who come from somewhere else, often for suspect reasons, and thereafter spend their time clogging he streets and hogging the shows, talking endlessly about their non-existent city on a hill, whole ignoring the actual city they are in. The bad taste of that hypocrisy can't be washed away by even the food and drink of a million very fine restaurants. No -- bastion of the world government, locked vault of the World Bank, headquarters of the world police; Rome, in the age of bread and circuses -- no one can like that.

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