This Town

by Mark Leibovich

  Clinton also represented a killer hybrid of pop culture cachet. He was telegenic, young, and willing to discuss his underwear on MTV—and, of course, had a titillating penchant for Big Trouble in his personal life. All this lent Clinton a box-office allure. Hollywood types started showing up at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which had previously been a musty spring affair and the highlight of the local social calendar by default. The dinner has sold out every table since 1993 at a price, in recent years, of about $2,500 per, and the spectacle has festered into a glitzy cold sore of pre-parties, after-parties, and live television coverage from the red carpet.

  • • •

  Bill Clinton’s winning presidential campaign of 1992 also spawned the Rise of the Celebrity Operative. While there have always been famous or infamous political aides (Ted Sorensen for JFK, Lee Atwater for Reagan and Bush 41), the Clinton campaign ushered in a fascination with “entourage” characters such as James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, among others, who themselves became stand-alone brands. Carville, for instance, was a journeyman political gym rat who had never advised a winning national campaign until Clinton’s in 1992 and has not played a major role in advising a domestic one since. Yet with his direct and homespun drawl, urchinlike appearance, and bipartisan romance to a well-known Republican pundit—Matalin—Carville has become a marquee imprint whose five-figure speaking fees, TV pundit deals, and book projects have made him and Matalin exceedingly wealthy.

  The Carville–Matalin merger was not so much a joining of two warring tribes as it was the sanctification within the political class. Carville quotes Walter Shapiro, the veteran political reporter for Time and other publications, who marveled that anyone would treat the Carville–Matalin union as some kind of exotic mixed marriage. “If either of them had been in love with a tree surgeon from Idaho,” Shapiro said, “that really would have been something.” His larger point is that Political Washington is an inbred company town where party differences are easily subsumed by membership in The Club. Policy argument can often devolve into the trivial slap fights of televised debate: everyone playing a role, putting on a show, and then introducing a plot twist—in this case, “Hey, these people yelling at each other on TV are actually a couple and they’re getting married.”

  The joint venture of Matalin–Carville—“Brand Mataville”—itself became a potent commercial force. The couple wrote a book about their relationship, All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President, which enjoyed a solid run on the bestseller list and expanded the Mataville imprint beyond the ghetto of political junkies. One of the notable aspects of the book’s success was that it was marketed less as a political book or feel-good tale of political tolerance as it was a showbiz merger. While Carville and Matalin both packed solid middle-American appeal—Carville as a liberal bayou populist, Matalin as a smart-aunt conservative—neither was positioned in the marketplace as “average Americans.” These were political pros whose status as celebrity operatives was unquestioned and solidified by their joining forces. Casual observers of politics not inclined to buy books by celebrity operatives could instantly wonder, How do these people stand each other? as if mixed-political marriages did not exist in every suburban neighborhood in America. Still, the fact that these were celebrity partisans who promoted their views on behalf of presidential clients, and argued them on television, made the marriage appear man-bites-doggish. It infused Mataville with a crossover appeal.

  They endorsed products, like Maker’s Mark, the Kentucky-made bourbon, which paid them to make a series of videos on behalf of the distillery. Carville is an old friend of Maker’s Mark magnate Bill Samuels, who first met Carville in the 1980s when the latter ran the winning gubernatorial campaign of Kentucky Democrat Wallace G. Wilkinson. Samuels thought James and Mary would make perfect spokespeople for a marketing campaign they were doing that urged everyone to resist mainstream political parties in favor of a single, unifying platform: bourbon. It was known within Maker’s Mark as its “Cocktail Party” promotion.

  James and Mary decamped to a glorious old home in New Orleans in 2008, right as the death of Tim Russert had left them both devastated. But certainly the capital of Mataville remained Washington, D.C. One veteran Washington media consultant remembers attending a wedding party for Carville and Matalin at the White House in November of 1993. The guests included dozens of establishment Democrats and Republicans, and the party occurred on the same night that Al Gore and Ross Perot were debating the North American Free Trade Agreement on CNN’s Larry King Live. She recalls watching the debate and then the postgame commentary from pundits of both parties—many of whom had attended the White House reception earlier. There was broad agreement in support of Gore, whose position on NAFTA was consistent with the Clinton administration’s and that of most Republicans in Congress. Perot, the third-party insurgent who opposed NAFTA, was portrayed as a yahoo and a crank. Which might have been true, by the way; but the consultant, a Democrat, was struck by the juxtaposition of the White House bash attended by elites of both parties, followed by the debate and the piling on against the irritant nonmember of The Club by these same bipartisan elites. “You had a sense [that] the members of the establishment, who had literally been at the same party at the White House earlier, were now closing ranks against the party-crasher,” she said. “Perot had this contempt for Washington and had this belief that changing the place went far beyond partisan politics. And in retrospect that night proved him to be absolutely correct.”

  • • •

  Theodore H. White discovered the mass appeal of behind-the-scenes political drama with his “Making of the President” series, beginning in 1961. The debut book—about the previous year’s Kennedy–Nixon showdown—treated the backroom operatives and image makers as marquee players and stayed on the bestseller list for a year. But the Clinton years ushered in a latter-day fascination with the modern political ensemble in popular culture. The War Room, a documentary about the rapid-response operation of the Clinton campaign headquarters in Little Rock, became a cult classic and helped solidify Carville and Stephanopoulos as sellable media imprints. Primary Colors, the anonymously written political bestseller by (it was later revealed) journalist Joe Klein, was based on the Clinton experience. Late in the Clinton years, the hit NBC show The West Wing romanticized the fast-paced, high-stakes action of the modern White House.

  These successes also complemented the exhaustive reach of political television coverage. Members of Congress say their body changed dramatically when C-SPAN began live coverage of their proceedings in 1979 (with a speech by an upstart Democrat from Tennessee, Al Gore). Same with the White House press corps after Clinton press secretary Michael McCurry began allowing live coverage of the daily media briefing in 1995. The environment fostered a play-to-the-cameras feel in so many environments that were previously more businesslike, anonymous, and, God forbid, kind of boring.

  These true-to-life fictional tableaus coincided with a sustained growth in the political news media. Its master form—and fattest market—was debate, the hotter and more partisan the better. Suddenly it appeared anyone without facial warts could call themselves a “strategist” and get on TV. Or start an e-mail newsletter, website, or, later, blog, Facebook page, or Twitter following—in other words, become Famous for Washington.

  Never before has the so-called permanent establishment of Washington included so many people in the media. They are, by and large, a cohort that is predominantly white and male and much younger than in the bygone days of pay-your-dues-on-the-city-desk-for-ten-years veterans for whom the elite political jobs were once reserved. They are aggressive, technology-savvy, and preoccupied by the quick bottom lines (Who’s winning? Who’s losing? Who gaffed?). Such shorthand is necessitated by their short deadlines, nervous editors, limited space, constrained reader attention spans, intense competition, and the fact that they are writing for wannabe (or actual) insiders like themselves.<
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  Today’s Washington media has also never been more obsessed with another topic that has long obsessed the Washington media: the Washington media.

  • • •

  In 2002, ABC launched something called the Note, a widely read tip sheet of morning and overnight political news that catered to what it called “the Gang of 500.” Coined by the Note’s founder, the ABC News political director at the time, Mark Halperin, “the Gang of 500” was a simultaneously self-deprecating and self-congratulatory term that described the expanding world of Washington political operatives, journalists, lobbyists, and self-styled insiders. The Note, which was disseminated on the Internet and via e-mail, took a horse-racy approach to covering politics and presented the day’s events in a lively and knowing way. It turned marginally known political reporters and mid-level campaign operatives into familiar names within the Gang. It was, arguably, the first online forum that leveraged “Famous for Washington” as a business model.

  The late 2000s brought an explosion of Washington’s celebrity culture and the expanded entourage. Obama was a historic candidate who defeated another one, Hillary Clinton, in the most captivating primary campaign of recent memory. The 2008 race was also the most exhaustively followed, and the first campaign that took place fully in the infinite hyperspace of New Media. New entities such as Politico and the Huffington Post devoted full-on coverage, and TV viewers tuned in in record numbers to emerging cable colossi such as Fox News. The Gang of 500 of the mid-decade had grown into a vast and self-sustaining industry. A marker of this has been the rise of Politico, the caffeinated trade site founded in 2007 by two Washington Post alumni.

  The liaison between sex appeal and Washington has always been stout but clunky. This Town is a place where for many years Henry Kissinger was considered a sex god. Now entire publications and cable shows are predicated on the day-to-day drama and personalities of the Gang. It is not so much the right or wrong or results of politics, the doing good or making a difference. Rather, it is the politics themselves. They are supposedly sexy, packed with high drama (“narrative”) and the jockeying for power, which, as Kissinger famously said, is “the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

  The formula has imposed an often absurd level of breathless attention on the prosaic grind of Washington reality. It was suddenly news in the capital when (actual items) former House speaker Dennis Hastert had his gallbladder removed, Representative William Lacy Clay of Missouri got his braces taken off, Karl Rove was spotted at a Kennedy Center performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Paul Wolfowitz was busted in a photograph that revealed holes in his socks. Never has the national political story been so awash in the burps, warts, and appendectomies of the People Who Run Your Country. (Full disclosure: I authored a story on the proliferation of flies in the White House that appeared on June 17, 2009, in the New York Times.)

  Politico often gets blamed for defining down and amping up political news today. The “haters,” as Politico’s editors call their critics, are often the same Washington insiders whom the publication reports on—and who read the thing religiously. “I’ve been in Washington about thirty years,” Mark Salter, a former chief of staff and top campaign aide to John McCain, says. “And here’s the surprising reality: on any given day, not much happens. It’s just the way it is.” Not so in the world of Politico, he says, where meetings in which senators act like themselves (maybe sarcastic or like asses) become “tension-filled” affairs. “They have taken every worst trend in reporting, every single one of them, and put them on rocket fuel,” Salter says of Politico. “It’s the shortening of the news cycle. It’s the trivialization of news. It’s the gossipy nature of news. It’s the self-promotion.”

  Politico’s mission is to “drive” conversation in the capital—“drive” being a higher-velocity version than the stodgier verb “influence.” If, say, David S. Broder and R. W. Apple Jr. were said to “influence the political discourse” through the Washington Post and the New York Times in the last decades of the twentieth century, Politico wanted to “drive the conversation” in the new-media landscape of the twenty-first. The target audience is the “insiders” and “opinion makers” with no pretense of being representative of the population at large.

  Politico’s chief franchise is Playbook, an online tip sheet delivered mostly via e-mail that has become a more influential morning document than the Note was in the early to middle 2000s. Written and sent out 365 days a year by the hyperactive and nocturnal Eagle Scout Mike Allen, Playbook is an insider’s dog’s breakfast of overnight news, press release previews, random sightings around town, and birthday greetings to people you’ve never heard of. These are “data points,” as Allen calls his dawn offering—the business of the nation in the form and voice of a summer camp newsletter. It reaches a target audience of what Politico calls “influentials”: elected officials, political operatives, lobbyists, journalists, and other political-media functionaries. This is the expanded Club or entourage of contemporary Washington—“the Playbook community,” in the words of Allen, who, around early 2009, many White House officials, members of Congress, staffers, and journalists began describing as the most influential journalist working in Washington today.

  Politico is an organization of healthy self-regard. Company higher-ups tout Allen as not just its franchise player but something greater. Fred Ryan, a former Reagan administration official who is Politico’s CEO, told me that Allen will go down as a momentous figure in the annals of American journalism. “In the same way that Murrow was with one era and Walter Cronkite was with another era,” Ryan said, “I think Mike Allen is going to be viewed as one of the defining journalists of this period.”

  Playbook’s success is emblematic of modern life in a time-starved place in which the power-and-information hierarchy has been upended. It also offers daily fodder for those who deride Washington as a clubby little town in which usual suspects talk to the same usual suspects all day.

  A big part of Allen’s appeal, I’m convinced, is the volume of names he mentions. He will sometimes list more than a dozen birthdays alone on a given morning, which he will cull from Facebook, news sources, and his enormous word-of-mouth/e-mail network. He parcels out simple recognitions, fossil fuel to the Washington ego.

  At any given time, the city is filled with formers and has-beens whom we might charitably describe as “still kicking around town.” Allen, with his mentions, gives a warm tingle of notice. The acknowledgment section of Terry McAuliffe’s memoir runs six single-spaced pages and includes the names of every member of the Democratic National Committee during his time as the party’s chairman. The index runs several more pages, making it a perfect vehicle for “the Washington read,” defined as the practice of “reading” books by scouring the index and acknowledgments for the Holy Grail, aka your name. (New York Times columnist David Brooks has an alternative definition of “Washington read”: the act of telling someone, “I didn’t read your book but did praise it on TV.”)

  “There is no sweeter word in Washington than your own name,” said Marshall Wittmann, then a top aide to Senator Joe Lieberman and one of the great career vagabonds, ideological contortionists, and political pontificators ever to inflict himself on a city full of them. Wittmann is a Trotskyite turned Zionist turned Reaganite turned bipartisan irritant turned pretty much everything in between—including chief lobbyist for the Christian Coalition, the only Jew who has ever held that position. After leaving Lieberman’s office upon the senator’s announced retirement in 2012, Marshall became the top flack for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

  Marshall was raised in Waco, Texas, worked for Cesar Chavez in the 1970s, Linda Chavez (a Republican Senate candidate from Maryland) in the 1980s, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition in the 1990s, and Bruce Reed of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in the 2000s. Above all, Wittmann reveres his many political heroes. They include Teddy Roosevelt, Kinky Friedman, and his
two most recent patrons, Lieberman and John McCain.

  Washington, Marshall says, is all about having a shtick and a role and an ability to hone them in a way that builds a brand. Seeing and hearing your name is an important part of this. It conjures a split second of mindshare. Mike Allen is the local king of mindshare. He doles out morsels of proof that your brand is ticking, that your name is out there, that you’re alive in This Town.

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  Embedding

  In early 2010, I set out reluctantly on a New York Times Magazine story about Mike Allen.

  I was reluctant for a few reasons. One, the story was an exercise in meta-journalism—journalism about journalism—that would reinforce the (largely true) notion that the media is overly self-involved. My own association with Allen would have to be a data point. I have known Mike—whom many people call “Mikey”—for more than a decade. We worked together at the Washington Post, where I also came to know Politico’s cofounders, Jim VandeHei and John Harris. We all have the same friends and run into each other a fair amount. In other words, I would write this from within the tangled web of Allen’s “Playbook community.”