Technically, former senators are forbidden from lobbying their old colleagues by a two-year “cooling-off period,” so Bennett and Dorgan joined Arent Fox as “senior policy advisers” in the government relations department. There is little practical difference between what a former officeholder who lobbies does and what a former officeholder who “senior advises” does. For instance, someone like Dorgan could correctly say he has not formally registered to lobby even though he also owns the title of co-chair of the firm’s government relations practice. In other words, he essentially oversees a staff of lobbyists. He talks all the time to his former lawmaking colleagues, and he can also use his specialized knowledge and access to call on old colleagues, friends, and fund-raisers to advance his clients’ interests in bending a law or provision to their favor. He knows not only whom to call but also the phone number and who hired the staffer and precisely what to say to make things “happen.”
While in the Senate, Dorgan was often quick to get all contemptuously righteous about people on the Hill cashing in their public service. When Jack Abramoff testified before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Dorgan beat him up over the “cesspool of greed” that surrounded Abramoff’s lobbying practice. In his subsequent memoir, Abramoff wrote of Dorgan, “I guess it wasn’t a cesspool when he had his hand out to take over $75,000 in campaign contributions from our team and clients.” (The Washington Post reported in 2005 that Dorgan said he would return $67,000 in donations from Indian tribes that Abramoff represented.)
When asked if his career change could be classified as “cashing in,” Robert Bennett replied, “Is there anything in the Constitution that forbids me from earning a living?”
Representative David Obey, the cantankerous liberal appropriator from Wisconsin, retired in 2010 and—to the shock of many—joined the lobbying shop run by former colleague Richard Gephardt, the former Democratic majority leader whose willingness to reverse long-held positions in the service of paying clients was egregious even by D.C.’s standards of hired-gun opportunism. Examples abound in the case of Gephardt, a Teamster’s son who represented a working-class district in eastern Missouri for twenty-eight years and was known as one of Congress’s great champions of organized labor. But that was when he was in Congress and twice ran for president, in 1988 and 2004, with the substantial backing of labor. He would don a union windbreaker and blow out Teamsters’ halls. “I’m fighting for yoouuu,” he would boom over raucous crowds, and he was always convincing. His dad drove a milk truck, even.
Gephardt was praised by AFL-CIO head John Sweeney as “a real friend of working people and a powerful voice for working families on issue after issue.” But after leaving Congress in 2005, Gephardt became a powerful force for Dick Gephardt on issue after issue. He joined the Washington offices of DLA Piper as a “senior counsel” before starting his own lobbying shop in 2007. By 2010, Gephardt Government Affairs was listing his annual billings at $6.59 million, up from a pittance of $625,000 in 2007. In addition to having a top-drawer roster of corporate clients that included Goldman Sachs ($200,000 in 2010), the Boeing Company ($440,000), and Visa Inc. ($200,000), Gephardt became a “labor consultant” for Spirit AeroSystems, where he oversaw a tough antiunion campaign; also while in Congress, he supported a House resolution condemning the Armenian genocide of 1915, only to oppose the resolution as a lobbyist who was being paid about $70,000 a month by the Turkish government, according to the Washington Post. Genocide goes down a little easier at those rates.
• • •
Some Einstein in the White House decided to christen these sticky months of July and August 2010 in Washington the “Recovery Summer.” It was a sweet turn of branding indeed, given the still-sputtering economy. The phrase was meant to highlight the “surge in Recovery Act infrastructure projects” and all of the “jobs they’ll create well into the fall and through the end of the year,” according to the White House website. As it turned out, the economy wasn’t recovering much at all, though the D.C. economy, which was humming right along, had nothing to recover from. And the sector of lame-duck lawmakers was recovering quite nicely from the collective dings and indignities they had suffered as Washington officeholders circa 2010.
Evan Bayh, for instance, was in dire need of a Recovery Summer. He was worn down and burned out. In announcing his retirement from the Senate earlier in 2010, the Indiana Democrat was extravagant in his grief over what Washington had become. Like Dodd and Bennett, Bayh was a senator’s son: daddy Birch Bayh served from 1963 to 1981. Evan was savaged in the most personal ways during the debate over health care. His wife, Susan, sat on numerous corporate boards, making more than $1 million a year since leaving as first lady of Indiana, from numerous corporate interests. (The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette described Susan Bayh as a “professional board member,” having been a director of fourteen corporations since 1994, eight since 2006.)
Evan’s insistence that his wife’s deep financial stake in the industry would have no bearing on his role in overhauling it was met with open derision. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald called Bayh the “perfectly representative face for the rotted Washington establishment,” while Matt Yglesias, writing for ThinkProgress, said Bayh was “acting to entrench the culture of narcissism and hypocrisy that’s killing the United States Congress.”
On the way out, Evan Bayh wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the New York Times cataloguing his many frustrations with politics and how the overall spirit of Washington was “certainly better in my father’s time.” He complained about the “unyielding ideology” of the Senate. He took the critique several steps further when he declared, “I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” a remark that predictably rankled many of his former colleagues. Bayh also elicited eye rolls from senators who wondered where this man had been for the last twelve years—or eye rolls because they could predict precisely what was coming next.
But Bayh didn’t stop there, soothing his deep despair over institutional conditions in Washington with dreams of “giving back” on the outside. He talked about joining a foundation. He waxed nostalgic for a previous chapter of his life in which he taught business students at the University of Indiana. He yearned to once again feel that tangible end-of-the-day satisfaction in his work. He fantasized lavishly to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein about coming home to his wife after a long day of work and saying, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.”
Bayh’s valedictory lament and corollary yearnings might have been the most memorable statements he made in an otherwise ordinary two terms in the Senate. And if he had followed through on trying to fix the ills he had described on his way out (“the corrosive system of campaign financing,” “the strident partisanship”), Bayh’s post-Senate life could have made a greater impact than his time in office did. He might have made a tiny dent in how politicians in Washington are perceived by the general public, which he characterized this way: “They look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen.”
He then showed just the shameless opportunism that would repel any used-car buyer (“Make Crazy Evan an offer!”).
After decrying “strident partisanship” and “unyielding ideology,” Bayh joined Fox News as a commentator. The man who called upon members of Congress and their constituents to engage in “a new spirit of devotion to the national welfare beyond party or self-interest” signed on as a highly paid “senior adviser” to a large private equity firm (Apollo Global Management) and to a massive law and lobbying firm (McGuireWoods). Bayh, who was a finalist to be Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008, vacuumed up as many sweet gigs as he could fit into his Club-issued trick-or-treat bag. He would eventually join the most potent business lobby in Washington, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—arguably the most fervent opponent of the Obama administration’s agenda. B
ayh and Andrew Card, the former White House chief of staff under George W. Bush, embarked on a summer “road show” on behalf of the chamber’s interest in stopping certain regulations on business. Think Thelma & Louise without the headscarves. Or think, as Steve Benen wrote in the Washington Monthly, a former senator who is “practically a caricature of what a sell-out looks like.”
• • •
Trent Lott never saw the use in hiding his intentions: the whole “I will never lobby” meme. Why bother? He was the leader of the Senate, after all, and he had earned his reward.
Two thousand ten was a year for formers to dream, and dream big. News of the latest former deals kept breaking, tantalizing: like when congressman-turned-lobbyist Billy Tauzin became the Alex Rodriguez of the revolving door, setting a new benchmark for formers by making $11.6 million in 2010 to run the chief lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America).
So why not Trent? He grew up mud poor and did his time.
Actually, Lott was a little shifty when he abruptly quit the Senate, not long after his Republican colleagues made him their whip. Everyone speculated that Lott was bolting because of a new law about to go into effect that would forbid lawmakers from lobbying their former colleagues for two years after they left office. Lott announced his resignation on November 26, 2007, just a few weeks before the new law would be enacted. By the old rules, Lott had to wait only one year out of office to lobby.
In the news conference in which Lott announced his resignation, he said the new law had no bearing whatsoever on his move. He officially left his office on December 18, 2007—and, three weeks later, announced that he and his former colleague, Democrat John Breaux of Louisiana, would start their own lobbying firm with offices just down the street from the White House. Their company would bring in $11 million in lobbying revenue in 2009, up 34 percent from 2008; it was acquired the following year by the behemoth lobbying shop, Patton Boggs, run by Tommy Boggs, son of the late House majority leader Hale Boggs.
Even at his Senate apex, or scandal low point, you could have carved “future lobbyist” into Lott’s pillowy hair. “I lived on a fixed income for thirty-nine years,” Lott told me, referring to the top tax-bracket salaries he earned over four decades in the House and Senate. He had big staffs and many perks and two homes (until Katrina wrecked the one in Mississippi). But he was never rich, he boasted, a self-testament to his up-from-nothing triumph.
Now he is, fresh millions pouring in every year. “How much is Trent clearing?” one former Republican House colleague asked me out of the blue when I mentioned Lott’s name to him. It’s something of a parlor game for many Hill alumni, trying to guess what the other formers are making. “About three or four million, maybe, for Lott?” the congressman-turned-lobbyist, a Republican, speculated. “That’s what a former leader can command.” The former congressman sheepishly rates a little more than a million a year himself, he said.
Naturally, Lott says he hates Washington. Why does he stay? The former senator/lobbyist squinted, assessing my sanity. Two reasons: “One, Washington is where all the problems are,” he said. He can still make a difference and continue to be involved with the proverbial issues he was “passionate about.”
“Washington is where the money is,” Trent Lott said. “That’s generally what keeps people here.”
The dynamic fairly glared with the outgoing Senate and House classes of 2010. Big numbers of them were announcing their retirements, saying they were worn down by the city and the gridlock and the bushels of resentment they were getting from the voters and shouting demagogues on cable and talk radio. One after another, lawmakers would grieve over the state of things and gallantly announce that they were stepping away, washing their hands of all the affectation and hypocrisy and invective and blame. It had all become so personal. All those Tea Partyers, they rued, or the “professional left,” as Robert Gibbs dismissed impatient liberal activists. The haters were all being so unfair and indiscriminate in lumping all of Washington together as a cache of smooth-talking sellouts.
And then, with light-headed speed, so many of the departing officeholders would settle into the retainer class. Even if they really hated Washington—in their bones, not just their sound bites—they can’t leave, because they are institutionalized, and the reality of it shines upon them soon enough: that maybe it’s not so bad in Washington after all. In fact, maybe it’s the greatest city in the world.
8
How It Works
Who the hell is Kurt Bardella?”
That was my first thought—and first sentence—about the ankle-biting young flack for Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California. I had mentioned to a colleague possibly writing a story about Issa. The colleague warned that doing so would mean dealing with Bardella, whom he called the most self-inflated press aide on Capitol Hill, maybe even more so than most actual members of Congress.
Bardella was also, the colleague added, probably the Hill’s most effective press secretary. As proof: the unrivaled volume of press heaped on Issa before the November 2010 midterms.
I first met Bardella in May 2010, when he was really starting to make a name for himself, along with his boss. If Republicans won the majority in November, Issa was in line to become chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform committee. Good for Darrell and, by the first law of Washington career gravity, good for Kurt: nothing elevates a staff person faster than being stapled to a rising boss. If you’re an aide lucky to be so positioned, it is vital to earn status as a “super-staffer.” Super-staffers are an advantaged subspecies of aides adept at getting noticed, either because the boss pays special attention to them or because they are believed powerful or because they have achieved good recognition outside the office. Kurt was thriving in all super-staffer categories.
The first surprise to meeting Bardella is his appearance. His Italian name, terse e-mails, and blustery phone comportment suggest a big, aggressive presence. In fact, he is a rail-thin Asian-American who looks much younger than his twenty-seven years—closer to a teenager. His pin-striped suit and matching hanky in breast pocket conjure a kid dressing up like a grown-up.
Bardella is not the classic guy you can root for. He activates your radar and not in a good way. He laughs too much and too loud. He hangs out in cigar bars. You suspect you are being worked.
I liked him instantly.
By that I mean Kurt gave me a headache but I admired that he flouted the norms of being a smooth Washington operator: that even the most rabid striving must be cloaked in a sense of ease.
Kurt never pulled this off or even tried. He was not shy about sharing—on his Facebook page—his ultimate ambition: to become the White House press secretary. He was not reticent in acknowledging a danger of his brash style: “I’m never that far away from blowing myself up completely,” he told me once. “It’s all part and parcel to my inferiority complex. I struggle with things. But generally I’m pretty good at channeling this in a way that serves Darrell Issa.”
Kurt evinced a frantic vulnerability and desperation to do well by his boss. It might make him more honest than people in Washington typically are. Or maybe “transparent” is a better word than “honest,” since Kurt in fact lies a lot, certainly to me. So maybe that’s all a bit of a contradiction, or a whopper of one, but one that can exist in This Town. Whatever, Kurt had begun to see himself as a truth-teller/whistle-blower, a particularly dangerous breed in Washington.
Something about Kurt cried out for mothering, or fathering, which I suspected might be true regardless of whether three of his fathers (one birth, one adopted, one step-) had not abandoned or alienated him on the way up. There was also a certain terror to Bardella. He said the displacement of his youth, lack of a college degree, and entry into the political workforce at a very young age (eighteen) engendered in him a profound fear that he had no business runnin
g with these bulls. It did not help, either, that Bardella had been fired from two different grown-up jobs while most of his high school peers were still in college: at nineteen, he was terminated from a job as a district rep for a California state senator (“I was just too young and immature and rubbed people the wrong way”); at twenty-one, he was sacked from the office of a San Diego city councilman (the chief of staff was easily threatened, he said, especially by him). So he was a jittery wreck, working long into the night. He needed to please Issa, or else.
“Darrell cares about me,” Kurt says. “He fills a certain void.”
Kurt stuck out among Hill deputies, but there was also something quintessentially D.C. about him. The city was his big proving ground. Capitol Hill, a self-contained village within a village, was a place for kids trying to stick at the grown-up table. That was perfect for a guy like Kurt. Like a lot of people in the city, he says he was an adult in spirit well before he became one in age.
He used to wear a coat and tie in high school and he carried a cell phone at age fifteen; this was the late 1990s, before most people were walking around with cell phones at all, let alone teenagers. Once Kurt’s phone rang in the middle of class; instead of being embarrassed, Kurt picked it up. It could be important, maybe even the mayor. “Just take it outside,” his teacher told him.
Bardella seemed very much to be measuring up and making a nice little brand for himself in Washington. He turned up quite a bit in Politico and Playbook. He loved his boss and the boss loved him back, to a point that others in the office could resent Kurt at times. But it was the right kind of resentment, the kind he would never draw if he weren’t getting traction.
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