D.C. bar closely watching primaries

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON -- "Politics, war, and beer."

That’s how Paul Meagher describes the Hawk & Dove pub just steps from the US Capitol.

And it was business as usual tonight as lawyers, students, congressional staffers and political junkies young and old packed the hot and stuffy Capitol Hill watering hole for a drought and a burger and to watch the results of the Democratic primaries in Ohio, Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island.

"This has always been a political bar,” said Meagher, 64, the general manager. “Our biggest nights are election nights. Sometimes TV reporters can’t get in. Barack Obama held his first Washington fund-raiser here back in March 2004.”

The Hawk & Dove was established at the height of the Vietnam War in 1967 and prides itself on its four-decade history of heated and often drunken political debate that originally pitted the “hawks” – generally older supporters of the war in Vietnam – on one side of the bar and war opponents -- or the "doves" -- on the other.

Flashing a sarcastic grin, Meagher said he couldn’t help but see parallels between the situation overseas today and when he first sidled up to the bar after he was discharged from the military during the Vietnam War.

“Believe it or not we were fighting a land war in Asia.”

Tonight, however, the battle lines were drawn differently in the nation’s capital’s oldest Irish bar – before that a taffy factory, a blacksmith shop, Washington’s first gasoline filling station and, according to lore, even home to a “floating craps game.”

A large crowd of Obama supporters filled one of the back rooms in the bar while Hillary Clinton supporters were peppered throughout.

“Democrats have a big tent,” said Meagher. “And we have a lot of different bars.”