ONCE again, candidates are badmouthing Washington. Republicans and Democrats alike, even longtime denizens of D.C., talk incessantly about stopping the shenanigans in the capital.

It's been happening for years.

Of course, they're just reflecting the sentiments of the people as a whole. I, too, am disappointed in the federal leviathan.

For one thing, it's offputting that median household income in suburban Washington has ballooned to the point where it's tops in the country.

I doubt the Founding Fathers envisioned the hub of their magnificent experiment in democracy as a place to go get rich.

Furthermore, over the past 50 years, much of the District itself has dramatically changed for the worse.

Lovely residential neighborhoods and parks have given way to scary, crack-infested, crime-ridden slums with horrible schools.

 Complex reasons exist for the wholesale deterioration of one of the world's greatest cities, but leadership that has been incompetent, indifferent, or downright corrupt would have to be a significant factor.

It's difficult to conjure up now, but there was a time when it was hard to find anything bad to say about Washington except that it could be miserably hot and humid.

I can remember those days, and the heat never bothered me a bit.

As a kid in the 50s, I thrilled at the chance to visit for a week every summer with my Aunt Betty, a nurse who quit to raise a family, and Uncle Johnny, a radar trailblazer at the Naval Research Laboratory. He sometimes brought work home in a briefcase chained to his wrist.

In pre-interstate days, getting to Washington wasn't as easy as it looked.

On the map, U.S. 50 appeared to be pretty much a straight shot across West Virginia all the way to the Lincoln Memorial.

But going that way was like repeatedly struggling over the Khyber Pass.

A meandering alternate route to avoid the most challenging of the Allegheny behemoths took us from Sistersville to Washington via Morgantown, Bruceton Mills, Markleysburg, Pa., LaVale, Md. (I can still taste the fried clams and vanilla milkshakes at the Howard Johnson's there), Fort Ashby, Romney and Winchester.

Somewhere east of Winchester, at least 25 miles from Washington, you began to concentrate on catching the first glimpse of the Washington Monument piercing the night sky, much as kids on vacation nearing the beach wait anxiously for the first whiff of salt air.

My aunt organized all-day sightseeing trips all week long - to the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, the Washington Monument. Down the stairs we went, all 897 of them.

The Spirit of St. Louis had just come out in the movies. And lo and behold, there she was, the real thing suspended from the ceiling of the Smithsonian.

ONCE again, candidates are badmouthing Washington. Republicans and Democrats alike, even longtime denizens of D.C., talk incessantly about stopping the shenanigans in the capital.

It's been happening for years.

Of course, they're just reflecting the sentiments of the people as a whole. I, too, am disappointed in the federal leviathan.

For one thing, it's offputting that median household income in suburban Washington has ballooned to the point where it's tops in the country.

I doubt the Founding Fathers envisioned the hub of their magnificent experiment in democracy as a place to go get rich.

Furthermore, over the past 50 years, much of the District itself has dramatically changed for the worse.

Lovely residential neighborhoods and parks have given way to scary, crack-infested, crime-ridden slums with horrible schools.

 Complex reasons exist for the wholesale deterioration of one of the world's greatest cities, but leadership that has been incompetent, indifferent, or downright corrupt would have to be a significant factor.

It's difficult to conjure up now, but there was a time when it was hard to find anything bad to say about Washington except that it could be miserably hot and humid.

I can remember those days, and the heat never bothered me a bit.

As a kid in the 50s, I thrilled at the chance to visit for a week every summer with my Aunt Betty, a nurse who quit to raise a family, and Uncle Johnny, a radar trailblazer at the Naval Research Laboratory. He sometimes brought work home in a briefcase chained to his wrist.

In pre-interstate days, getting to Washington wasn't as easy as it looked.

On the map, U.S. 50 appeared to be pretty much a straight shot across West Virginia all the way to the Lincoln Memorial.

But going that way was like repeatedly struggling over the Khyber Pass.

A meandering alternate route to avoid the most challenging of the Allegheny behemoths took us from Sistersville to Washington via Morgantown, Bruceton Mills, Markleysburg, Pa., LaVale, Md. (I can still taste the fried clams and vanilla milkshakes at the Howard Johnson's there), Fort Ashby, Romney and Winchester.

Somewhere east of Winchester, at least 25 miles from Washington, you began to concentrate on catching the first glimpse of the Washington Monument piercing the night sky, much as kids on vacation nearing the beach wait anxiously for the first whiff of salt air.

My aunt organized all-day sightseeing trips all week long - to the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, the Washington Monument. Down the stairs we went, all 897 of them.

The Spirit of St. Louis had just come out in the movies. And lo and behold, there she was, the real thing suspended from the ceiling of the Smithsonian.

I waited in a long line to inspect the Hope Diamond and then wondered what the big deal was. It was dark, unlike a real diamond.

We checked out obscure attractions, like the medical museum that displayed slivers of Lincoln's skull in a formaldehyde-filled vessel.

We visited Mount Vernon, which was as interesting as the National Gallery of Art was boring.

I rode the bumper cars at Glen Echo Park. Nearby, I gazed in awe at the treacherous rapids of the Great Falls of the Potomac.

Our Dairy Queen at home served up banana splits in a dinky plastic boat. A place in Bethesda shoveled gallons upon gallons of ice cream into their mammoth concoctions, which could cost as much as $60.

New and unfamiliar even to Washingtonians, let alone a small town boy, a McDonald's sprang up one summer at a busy intersection where you wouldn't want to stop  now without an armed escort.

 Hamburgers, 15 cents, over 1 million sold. They tasted a lot better then.

I tried other new foods. My uncle, a Marylander to the core, fetched a bushel of blue crabs that had come out of the Chesapeake and up the Potomac to the fish market that very day. Throw away the shell and lungs and eat everything else, he advised.

I saw the Washington Senators at Griffin Stadium. I had bean soup in the Senate dining room.

Each day on our excursions, we passed Bolling Field, where hundreds of World War II fighters - aligned in neat rows with wings up - awaited consignment to the scrap heap.

One afternoon, my aunt noticed in the Washington Star that President Eisenhower would be greeting his counterpart from Thailand the next day.

So off we went to National Airport. Maybe a few dozen others gathered behind a chain link fence as Ike and his visitor strolled past, smiling and waving only a few feet away, as if security were not an issue.

What happened to those days, and will we ever see them again?

No.

But there's a chance that the ideals espoused by the great men who are memorialized in our nation's capital can be reclaimed.

All voters have to do is stop accepting empty complaints about Washington from the politicians who made Washington the way it is.

Kelly is managing editor of the Daily Mail. He may be reached at 348-1703 or bobke...@dailymail.com.