My reluctance to write about Allen dissipated, as it was clear that Playbook had become an inescapable catalyst for the day-to-day Washington conversation. Allen’s selections of which stories to highlight or disregard were pivotal in “driving” coverage throughout the day. “The people in this community, they all want to read the same ten stories,” Allen told me. “And to find all of those, you have to read one thousand stories. And we do that for you.”
As with much in today’s political world, media is a derivative operation. Mikey, who draws heavily (or “aggregates”) from the work of others, has become a de facto assignment editor for many of the time-starved (or lazy) journalists who stare at screens all day under intense pressure from similarly screen-fixated and Playbook-devouring bosses.
At eight a.m. on a campaign bus, there’s a good chance that at least half of the passengers are reading Playbook. Or they are reading a story linked from Playbook, or are e-mailing with nervous editors about chasing a story flagged in Playbook. “Washington narratives and impressions are no longer shaped by the grand pronouncements of big news organizations,” says Allen, a former reporter for three of them: the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Time magazine.
Allen’s bearing combines the rumpledness of an old-school print reporter with the sheen of a new-school “cross-platform brand” who has become accustomed to performing on camera. Every time Allen starts to speak—in person or on the air—his eyes bulge for an instant as if he has just seen a light go on. His mannerisms resemble an almost childlike mimicry of a politician—the incessant thanking, the deference, the greetings, the smiles with teeth clenched, and the ability to project belief in the purity of his own voice and motivations. He speaks in quick and certain cadences, on message, in sound bites, karate-chopping the table for emphasis. In different settings, Allen will often repeat full paragraphs almost to the word.
As Tim Russert did, Allen has an intuitive sense of Washington as a small town and interlocking power structure—Lake Wobegon with power. Allen is an unabashed Washington exceptionalist. He marvels about the “amazing times” he is living through here and all the “amazing friends” who inhabit This Town.
Allen’s “Playbook community” is an electronic corollary to the media-cluster phenomenon portrayed in The Boys on the Bus, Tim Crouse’s travelogue and critique of the elite political operatives and journalists on the 1972 presidential campaign. Crouse popularized the concept of “pack journalism,” which referred to the groupthink and implied self-censorship rules that govern the “freakish, insular existence of the press bus.” Subversion was frowned on. Even the most independent scribe could not “completely escape the pressures of the pack,” Crouse wrote.
The path from The Boys on the Bus to Playbook is not a straight line. The evolution must obviously account for the anarchic environment of the Internet, the perpetual nature of today’s news cycle, and the rise of ideological journalism, all of which Allen incorporates into his daily e-mail. The “pack” still exists, in other words; it’s just bigger and more diverse.
But the one-world notion of the “pack” remains unchanged. Whether journalists are gathered on a physical bus or reading a virtual document, it is a shared space. They are encountering the same names and characters and, after a while, acquiring a shared language and sensibility. “If there was a consensus,” Crouse wrote, “it was simply because all the national political reporters lived in Washington, saw the same people, used the same sources, belonged to the same background groups, and swore by the same omens. They arrived at their answers just as independently as a class of honest seventh-graders using the same geometry text—they did not have to cheat off each other to come up with the same answer.”
The troublemakers of the bus are stigmatized just as today’s version, Playbook, generally avoids trouble. Mikey is more of a pleaser, a delighter, and, perhaps, an enabler.
If Mikey has a bias, it is in favor of Washington—the village, the mind-set, and the big, heady dream of it all. Since Washingtonians tend to engage oppressively in inside baseball, his focus tends toward the game itself—a morning romp through the city’s thriving vanity sectors: elites listening to elites, trading sound bites, and going into business together. In the post-Russert era, Mikey was, in his own eccentric and online way, a new mayoral figure. The great presider.
• • •
Allen spent his childhood in Seal Beach, California, in Orange County, the oldest of four—two boys, two girls. He told me he had an apolitical upbringing but wanted to attend college near Washington. He enrolled at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, which he said seemed close to D.C. on a map but was in fact a five-hour Greyhound ride away.
Sometime in his teenage years, Allen became fascinated with the doings of the Capitol. He arrived in Washington as he remains now: wide-eyed, reverent, and in constant motion. Allen darts in and out of parties, at once manic and serene, chronically toting gifts, cards, and flower arrangements that seem to consume much of an annual income that is believed to exceed $250,000. He kisses women’s hands and thanks you so much for coming, even though the party is never at his home, which not even his closest friends have seen. It is as if Mikey is the host of one big party, and by showing up anywhere in Washington, you have served the Playbook community and are deserving of the impresario’s thanks (or “hat tip” in Playbookese).
Playbook has become the political-media equivalent of those food pills that futurists envision will replace meals. He offers a twist—if not a rebuttal—to the notion that the Internet promotes democratization of the news and diminishes the returns on clubby access. But Allen “wins the morning” (in the lingo of Politico) in part because of his extreme clubby access. It’s just that the political and news establishment—The Club—is so much bigger now, and includes so many wannabe insiders that it lends a more democratic feel. They love Mikey. The feeling is mutual and transactional. They use him and vice versa (“love” and “use” being mutually nonexclusive in Washington). He seems to know everyone and works at it. “I consider him a very good friend,” said Peter Watkins, a former press aide to President George W. Bush who now runs a small communications shop in Salt Lake City. “Of course, there are about fifteen thousand people in Washington that consider him to be their best friend.”
If such qualities can coexist, Mikey can be perceived as both a decent and solid friend, and also an exemplar of the D.C. operator. He is always touting Playbook, cultivating his brand as the city’s ultimate “entrepreneurial journalist,” another one of those fashionable news business terms.
“The most successful journalists have their own unique brand and circle of friends,” VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor, said. “This is the Facebook-ization of politics and D.C. The more friends or acquaintances you have, the more time you spend interacting with them via e-mail and I.M., the more information you get, move, and market.” VandeHei’s conceit equates Allen’s circle of friends to a commodity—exactly the kind of mutual back-scratching undercurrent that gives “friendship” in Washington its quotation marks. “Playbook is D.C.’s Facebook,” VandeHei concluded. “And Mike’s the most popular friend.” Allen’s closest friend is probably VandeHei, who is protective of Allen and posits him as a rare island of goodness in a racket of frauds and two-faced operators. “Mike is unique in our world,” VandeHei says. “He has authentic power while being authentically gracious, honest, and selfless. He’s the real deal—and it drives the haters mad.”
• • •
Not long ago, I received an e-mail that read: “Craig likes Craig Crawford on Facebook and suggests you like him too.”
Who is Craig Crawford and why does he like himself?
Craig is a classic poli-media specimen who has worked for places like the Hotline and Congressional Quarterly and written a few books and shows up serviceably on cable. I run into him at the occasional book party or spin room. He is jolly and frien
dly, mid-fifties-ish, giggles a lot, southern accent, slicked hair, fancy glasses, stylish suits. I wouldn’t say he is a “friend,” except maybe in the Facebook sense, although apparently that window is now closed with him, according to this auto-generated Facebook message. “Craig says, ‘I’ve reached my friend limit!’” he relayed in the deflating e-mail. “Please join me on my new Facebook fan page.—Craig”
It was nice of him to ask, but I decided I didn’t know Craig well enough to be a “fan.” It would be something for us to work toward.
Parallels between Facebook and D.C. come up a lot. Both are spaces to collect people, show off our shiny hordes, and leverage our “connections.” The Washington friendship is best kept public. What’s the use of a high-level bond with “my good friend from (state name)” if the world doesn’t know about it? It is not uncommon for senators and congressmen to have encyclopedic recall of all the colleagues who supported them publicly in leadership elections, or screwed them by endorsing someone else. But everyone is a “friend.” Protocol demands it.
Like D.C., Facebook is a vast and growing network, evolving and under some assault, but secure in its permanence as an empire. It is no surprise that a pipeline of Washington political talent has joined Facebook in recent years—most prominently Joe Lockhart, the Monica-era press secretary in the Clinton White House who was for a time the company’s head of corporate communications.
Washington, the most socially networked city in the United States, is a perfect incubator of a latter-day “network effect.” Commonly invoked in Silicon Valley, the term “network effect” refers to products gaining value through the size of the network they serve. Mikey is of course on Facebook. But his true network is the Playbook community. As of April 2013, that had included the roughly one hundred thousand who have signed up to receive it.
The Playbook community puzzles some over Allen. People wonder whether he actually lives somewhere besides the briefing rooms, newsrooms, campaign hotels, and going-away dinners for Senator So-and-so’s press secretary that seem to be his perpetual regimen. And they wonder, “Does Mikey ever sleep?”
The query tires him. He claims he tries to sleep six hours a night, which seems unrealistic for someone who says he tries to wake at two or three a.m. to start Playbook after evenings that can include multiple stops and virtual trails of midnight-stamped e-mail. He speaks all over the country and makes constant TV and radio appearances. I asked Allen if he slept during the day and he said no.
Allen has been spotted dozing in public—on campaign planes, at parties—clutching his BlackBerry with two hands against his chest like a teddy bear. He has also been seen asleep over his laptop, only to snap awake into a full and desperate type, as if momentary slumber were just a blip in the 24/7 political story Mikey is writing.
No shortage of friends will testify to Mikey’s thoughtful gestures, some in the extreme. They involve showing up at a friend’s son’s baseball game (in South Carolina) or driving from Richmond to New York to visit a fraternity brother and heading back the same night. He attends a nondenominational Protestant church and a Bible study group. “He is one of the most thoughtful people I have ever met,” Josh Deckard, a former White House press aide, says. “Philippians 2:3 said, ‘In humility, consider others better than yourselves,’ and I think Mike exemplifies that better than anyone.”
Yet even Allen’s supposed confidants say that there is a part of Mikey they will never know or ask about. He is obsessively private. I asked three of Allen’s close friends if they knew what his father did. One said “teacher,” another said “football coach,” and the third said “newspaper columnist.” A 2000 profile of Allen in the Columbia Journalism Review described his late father as an “investor.”
When sharing a cab, Allen is said to insist that the other party be dropped off first. One friend describes driving Allen home and having him get out at a corner; in the rearview mirror, the friend saw him hail a cab and set off in another direction. I’ve heard more than one instance of people who sent holiday cards to Allen’s presumed address, only to have them returned undeliverable.
Allen is a serious hoarder and pack rat. When I worked with him at the Post, enormous piles of yellowing papers, clothes, bags, and detritus leaned ominously above his cubicle. It got so bad at Time, where Allen was given his own office, that it became difficult to even open the door. (Note: Allen is hardly the only journalist with a slovenly workspace. When the Washington Post’s David Broder died in 2011, Nixon-era sandwiches were reportedly still being excavated.)
Allen has achieved a seamless merging of life and work, family and Playbook. He is deeply committed to his mother, younger brother, two younger sisters, and eight nieces and nephews scattered on both coasts. They make Playbook cameos. A former editor at the Post told me that Allen today has taken refuge in his status as a public entity. He deploys Playbook as a protective alter ego. It reminded me of something former Senator Tom Daschle told me once: that a lot of politicians are shy, private people and that they enter the business because it allows them to remain shy and private behind a public cut-and-paste persona—to hide in plain sight.
• • •
My first meeting with Allen for the New York Times Magazine story was a casual get-together in February 2010 over appetizers at the Bombay Club, an Indian restaurant near the White House. Mikey had “spotted” me the day before in Playbook (eating lunch at that same restaurant) and mentioned me again for something the next day. The first thing he asked when we sat down was when my daughters’ birthdays were so he could list them in future Playbooks. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the girls, then three, six, and nine, were not yet reading Playbook.)
Over a twenty-five-year newspaper career, Allen has been known as an unfailingly fair, fast, and prolific reporter with an insatiable need to be in the newspaper. “The worst thing you could say to Mike Allen was ‘We don’t have space for that story,’” says Maralee Schwartz, the longtime political editor at the Post. “It was like telling a child he couldn’t have his candy.”
Jim VandeHei, who is forty-two, is contemptuous of Washington’s “It used to be better” reflex as it relates to news. “Those institutions and reporters,” he says, referring to traditional ones, “were never as good as their reputations. And they limited, in consequential ways, the information flowing to people who cared about politics. It was largely—and this was true for decades—a small group of middle-aged, left-of-center, overweight men who decided how all of us should see politics and governance.”
VandeHei distills today’s “New World Order” to a few journalistic premiums: speed, information, gossip, and buzz, all of which Allen excels in. “He has built the most successful brand in journalism, Mikey, Inc.,” VandeHei says, “and its subsidiary, Playbook.”
Nowhere is Washington’s ambivalence over Politico more evident than in the Obama White House. They consider the publication a bastion of “snowflake news,” a term coined by Ron Brownstein of National Journal that refers to small, buzzy stories that are evanescent for a second but then dissolve on contact.
The Obama and Politico enterprises have had parallel ascendancies to an extent. They both fashioned themselves as tech-savvy upstarts bent on changing the established order—of politics (Obama) and of how it is covered (Politico). They started around the same time, early 2007, and their clashing agendas were apparent early. On the day that Politico published its first print edition, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, identified it as just the kind of inside-the-Beltway masturbation that might distract the campaign. He walked into the campaign’s offices and slammed a copy of the new publication on Dan Pfeiffer’s keyboard. “This,” Plouffe declared, “is going to be a problem.” Generally speaking, the Obama brigade viewed itself as a cleansing force for all that was self-centered, shallow, and divisive about Washington—whereas they believed Politico was in fact perpetuating and profiting from all of it.
White House aides have bitched interminably about what they consider Politico’s trivial attentions to Washington’s lame celebrity doings, namely their own. When a citizen paparazzo posted on the Web a photo of speechwriter Jon Favreau and press aide Tommy Vietor playing bare-chested beer pong at a Georgetown bar one Sunday, Politico ran a prominent story wondering if the Obama White House had become overexposed, suggesting that a designated “grown-up” needed to be brought on staff and declaring that some Obama “personalities” have “not disguised their pleasure at the fast-lane opportunities opened up by their new status in Washington.” The story equated the beer pong photo to reports, in 1979, that White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan had snorted coke during a visit to Studio 54 (a special counsel’s investigation resulted in no charges).
Favreau sent an e-mail to Politico editor in chief John Harris complaining that this was “another example of Politico extrapolating some larger cultural meaning or political lesson from absolutely nothing.” Harris in turn said that after the pectoral-bearing beer pong picture was published, he had been “hearing a lot of conversation about this as a minor Washington cultural moment,” thus the story was justified.
White House officials said it was an indictment of the “Washington mentality” that the city was sustaining Politico. In early March 2010, David Axelrod was sitting in his West Wing office, complaining to me about the “palace-intrigue pathology” of Washington. “I prefer living in a place where people don’t discuss Politico over dinner,” he said.
Yet most of the president’s top aides are steeped in this culture and work hard to manipulate it. “What’s notable about this administration is how ostentatiously its people proclaim to be uninterested in things they are plainly interested in,” observed Harris. Likewise, Politico’s saturation coverage of the Obama entourage has raised considerably the profiles of people like Plouffe and Axelrod, allowing them to better “monetize” their service with book, speaking, and TV deals. New-media entities such as Politico have clearly transformed not just the Washington conversation but also the city’s information economy. The six-year-old publication has taken a significant bite from the Washington Post’s “political paper of record” franchise and threatened other specialized information sources such as National Journal.
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