Another vivid Bardella trait was that he believed he was a total fraud. It hardly made him unique here: the impostor syndrome is the psychological common cold of D.C. (disproportionate numbers of residents lie about reading the Economist). But Kurt had a particularly dreadful case. He comes to it honestly in that he really was unwanted, at least by his birth parents, who abandoned him in his cradle at the front door of a church in Seoul, South Korea. He was placed in an orphanage, where the shunned baby hated to be set down in his crib. He craved human contact and made constant noise, as if he was fighting to talk well before he knew how.
The unnamed Korean baby was adopted at three months by a childless young couple in Rochester, New York. His new mom, Diane Bardella, was pursuing a degree in literature at the University of Rochester while her husband, Alfred Bardella, worked as a security guard. They named the baby “Kurt” and divorced when the little chatterbox was three.
Kurt lived with his mother and spent every other weekend with his father. He was enrolled in a Catholic school and often strayed off message with the nuns, questioning the all-knowing powers of God, among other disruptions. He was bullied and teased because he “looked Chinese.” The bullies called him “chink,” whatever that meant, he had no idea. Kurt was also named “Mr. Personality” of his kindergarten class, although Kurt suspects he was a sympathy choice.
Diane Bardella remarried; her new husband was Jim Nesser, an aspiring psychologist. They had two natural sons. Kurt would taunt his new brothers by telling them, “You were had, I was chosen.” When Kurt was ten, his stepfather was accepted into a Ph.D. program in San Diego and the family moved west, separating Kurt from his adoptive father, Alfred Bardella.
After graduating from high school in 2001, Bardella took a summer internship with a Republican state legislator, who eventually offered him a full-time job. He jumped at the chance, envisioning a political life as presented in the speedy chess game of NBC’s The West Wing, which obsessed him. The lure was enough for Kurt to blow off a planned enrollment at the University of California at Davis. Instead, Bardella spent two years answering phones and attending community outreach events for his boss. He eventually left to take a job as an assignment editor for the CBS affiliate, kicking off a brief ping-pong between local TV and politics. He jumped back into politics in 2005 to work for the San Diego mayoral campaign of Republican businessman Steve Francis. Francis lost, but Kurt’s late-night hours—especially compared with the relative sleepwalk of his nine-to-five colleagues—caught the notice of Steve Danon, a public relations and political consultant who had worked for Francis. Danon noted the insecurity behind Bardella’s drive, the eagerness to defy his lack of college training and prove he was adequate, or better. In Danon’s estimation, Bardella had super-staffer potential.
Bardella’s Washington stars first aligned in 2005 when the San Diego‒area congressman, Republican Randy “Duke” Cunningham—best known in D.C. for flipping off his constituents, referring to gays as “homos” on the House floor, and suggesting the Democratic leadership “be lined up and shot”—got hit with a sack full of white-collar criminal goodies (bribery, conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, tax evasions). The Duke headed off to jail and Kurt headed back into politics.
Danon’s firm was hired by Brian Bilbray, one of fourteen Republican candidates in a special election to fill Cunningham’s seat. Bilbray, who had served in Congress from 1995 to 2001 before leaving to become a lobbyist, will never be confused with a titan of the House. But he managed to eke by in the special election.
Bilbray’s win in 2006 was Kurt’s own passport to Washington, which might have well been a lottery ticket. Danon, who would become Bilbray’s chief of staff, hired Bardella to run the press operation in D.C. There are idealists among the fresh waves of young people who come here: civic-minded kids who come to the nation’s capital to make the axiomatic “difference.” But this was not Kurt, the whole “make a difference” deal. When I first met him, he admitted to me that he was not much of a true believer in any particular direction, at least politically. The Republicans simply found him first back when he was a teenager. But he was not so much an R or a D as he was an O—“an opportunist,” he told me. It’s crass to actually come out and speak like this, but Kurt couldn’t help himself. What Kurt believed in most deeply was the Hollywood version of Washington, the city at its most titillating and televised. Kurt was of the generation of neo-political junkies whose passions were ignited not by an inspirational candidate or officeholder like Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan but by operatives on TV, fictional (Josh Lyman) or real (James Carville). They were the players in a thrilling screen game. He wanted in.
“When I first came here,” Kurt told me, “I was standing on the street corner with my suitcase, thinking, ‘There’s no way I belong here. This is crazy. I’m going to get eaten alive.’”
But most important, he was here. He had made it, to the real-life set of Washington, D.C, compensating for his abject unfitness by working conspicuously hard and being effective and solicitous in the service of the right people.
• • •
When Kurt first got to town, he immediately noticed the people on the inside, or the people who seemed to have that air of being someone. “You can tell that there were certain people that everyone kind of gravitated to,” Bardella said. “They walked in, and people just knew who they were. I remember thinking, I wonder what it would be like to be one of those people. The cool kids.”
One cool kid was Kevin Madden, a handsome-devil press secretary for John Boehner, the Republican leader of the House. Every Monday when the House was in session, Madden presided over a meeting of Republican press secretaries on the Hill. Bardella, then working for Bilbray, always made a point of showing up early. He sat near the front of the room, nodded a lot, and asked questions. He was eager to learn and improve, and was conspicuous in a room that otherwise had the ambience of a bored college class. More important, Bardella was eager to show he was eager to learn and improve—which is itself a wonderful impression to convey.
Madden, whose resemblance to Mitt Romney’s sons disguises his Yonkers-cut edges, was amused by Kurt’s obsequiousness. He also appreciated Kurt’s hyper-earnest efforts. He, too, had been an impatient, eager-to-show press aide not long before, working the low press rungs of the Bush–Cheney reelect in 2004. He recognized what Kurt was doing; it wasn’t hard to miss. And more power to the kid. Few of the House press secretaries ever made themselves known in these meetings, if they even stayed awake or showed up. Bardella would stay after class. He would introduce himself to featured speakers and approach Madden, asking (sheepishly) whether he could steal five minutes from Kevin’s busy schedule.
He would then urge Madden to tell him if there was something he could do to improve, anything at all, because he wanted to learn and get better. He was also dangling himself before Madden in a bald effort to win his ownership as a mentor. This could bring them closer and maybe turn Kevin into an advocate for Kurt, someone who would look out for him.
• • •
As a teen political addict, Bardella read the memoir of the celebrated Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education. He enjoyed the book thoroughly and followed Stephanopoulos’s career after he left the White House and joined ABC, first as a political commentator, then as the host of This Week and eventually Good Morning America. What struck Bardella was Stephanopoulos’s description of being an altar boy in the Greek Orthodox sanctuary of his childhood in Cleveland. Being an altar boy, Stephanopoulos wrote, exposed him to the inner workings of the church in ways he had never experienced. It excited him to be within the sanctum, a privileged club, which he compared with the similar thrill he would feel as a political operative who penetrated the “inner” ring where decisions are made. This resonated with Kurt, who had been an altar boy in his Catholic church in Rochester.
“There is that place to get i
n Washington that everybody is striving for,” Kurt told me in one of our first conversations. We were eating sushi near his Capitol office. As he made his points, Kurt tended to bob his head up and down, as if his words were being set to music. When reaching his sentence crescendos, Kurt’s head went from a bob to more of a sway. “Once you get to that place, that inside place, you kind of just know it,” he says. “It’s exciting. I felt it when I was an altar boy. And there are times when you feel it here. But you’re never sure if that feeling is going to last, or if other people are seeing you as someone on the inside. It puts you on edge, constantly.”
All you know is, once you’ve experienced being on the inside, you don’t want to lose that feeling, he added.
Getting “inside,” to that place, into The Club, is a consuming pursuit in D.C. The divide between haves and have-nots is not so much economic here; House congressional aides hardly live large, but they’re not have-nots either. Rather, the divide is between people who are “inside” and not—a highly subjective and fast-changing judgment.
As a twenty-two-year-old flack for Bilbray, Bardella sent Stephanopoulos a fan note. He wrote about how much he had enjoyed All Too Human and how much he had admired Stephanopoulos. No downside to writing a note like that, right? And wouldn’t you know it: Stephanopoulos wrote back and invited Kurt to drop by next time he was in the neighborhood of ABC’s Washington bureau near Dupont Circle.
Bardella made a point of being in that neighborhood soon after. He sought career advice, which is always an effective networking Vaseline. Kurt had been thinking about taking a job in the Senate office of Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine. He asked George what he thought, a query that also carried an unspoken message that Kurt was being sought after, that he was “in play.” George offered the advice that, given Snowe’s exotic position as one of the last moderate Republicans on the Hill, she would be an object of press attention—and thus a visible place for a press aide to land. Stephanopoulos signed a copy of All Too Human for Kurt, inscribing it, “Good luck with your political education.”
Months later, Bardella was surprised to receive a call from his new friend at ABC. Stephanopoulos was working. He wanted to know if a certain immigration bill was going to pass the Republican conference in the House. Bardella believed the House measure would pass the GOP conference, which he told Stephanopoulos—and which, a few hours later, Stephanopoulos passed on to viewers of World News Tonight. He cited “congressional sources.” Kurt was a “congressional source”! He described the experience as his “first time playing with live ammunition.”
A few months later, in December 2007, Kurt jumped to the office of Senator Snowe. He spoke of being around the “much higher caliber of people” in the Senate.
But Bardella lasted less than a year with Snowe. He found the Senate boring, plodding—too gentlemanly, not his thing. He returned to the lower-chart primates in Bilbray’s office and identified his next big game: Darrell Issa.
Issa was a savvy and ambitious member who did not need the job or the money. He was already the wealthiest man in Congress, thanks to his magnificently successful car alarm company. Kurt liked that. He also admired Issa’s confidence. While Congress lacked no shortage of members who believed they were the smartest guy in the room, Issa might have had a legitimate claim, at least to the top tier. He had sixteen patents under his name from his manufacturing heyday. Like Kurt, Issa was not shy about inflicting all he knew. Or, in Issa’s case, showing it (the patents are framed on a wall of his office).
Bardella would camp out in Issa’s office, which was next door to Bilbray’s in the Cannon House Office Building. He befriended Issa’s staff and pestered them until they hired him to be Issa’s press secretary.
• • •
What Issa needed in Congress was to make a name for himself, to be more famous in The Club. This mattered to him, and was an obsession with Kurt. “I am completely focused on making Darrell a household name,” Bardella told me in the summer of 2010. “If, say, Chuck Todd is talking about something that happened that day, I want him to think of what Darrell might think.”
I was struck that Bardella and Issa were focused on the approval of the Washington insider types—the ones who were anathema to the populist Tea Party uprising that would sweep Republicans (and Issa) into the majority. Before long, Issa was getting noticed inside The Club. He was living in green rooms. He owed much of this to Kurt, who was getting noticed himself—too much. Kurt had a dangerous (for a staffer) knack for getting his name in print, and an even more dangerous knack (for a staffer) for craving more.
“There is an expression here on Capitol Hill,” Issa told me. “‘Don’t ever get between a member and a camera.’” That can be particularly harrowing in the case of Issa, who had purchased a T-shirt for Bardella that said: “It’s all about me.”
Kurt’s self-promotional bent violated a basic Capitol Hill rule that aides should stay in the background—and, ideally, out of the press.
Yet Bardella’s public imprint kept growing. It brought smirks. He was particularly eager to show off how plugged in he was at all times, an ever-churning operator. Kurt volunteered his testimony to an October 2009 Politico story that explored whether excessive BlackBerry use could be a drag on a staffer’s dating life.
And when Bardella stopped using his BlackBerry during a vacation, it was a newsworthy event in Politico. “I haven’t sent a press release, statement or ICYMI in about six days,” Bardella was quoted as saying, adding that his boss had e-mailed him during his BlackBerry silence, wondering if he was still alive.
Politico was gold for the likes of Kurt Bardella. It provided an accelerated chronicle of his amped-up life and a willing outlet to “place” stories helpful to Issa. Politico was also generous in bestowing fame (of a sort) on the traditionally innocuous staffer.
The workaholic regimen of the politically spellbound was a recurring theme in Politico. These are the aspiring Ari Golds or Josh Lymans whose stressed countenances have been copied and exaggerated as a D.C. pose. They are direct, often crude, and fully steeped in the cutting, sardonic, and somewhat snarky tones characteristic of many of the essential-to-the-operation twentysomethings around town. Politico wrote a trend piece about this (“Bring on the Snark”) in which Kurt declared that Washington “is a city that has been built on false premises and false pretenses.” Availing oneself of a sarcastic or sardonic tone can come across as more authentic, he added.
Kurt was always happy to volunteer his example as someone who was working extremely hard, day and night. “It is only 11:30 a.m. but Kurt Bardella is on his third Red Bull, and he’s got a fourth on deck,” Politico wrote of Bardella in a profile that accompanied his being named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” in 2009.
“I don’t ever stop,” Bardella was quoted on January 15, 2010, in another Politico treatment, this one posing the question “Could my job be killing me?” The story was pegged to the sudden death of then Minority Leader John Boehner’s chief of staff. But it was also about Kurt, like everything.
“It rubbed a lot of folks the wrong way that he would use that opportunity to remind everyone how hard he works,” one Republican communications aide told Washingtonian in a profile of Bardella that came a year later, when he had become really notorious.
Kurt couldn’t help himself. He had found love. Politics and Issa, sure, but also the whole thrall of the political-media experience circa 2010. There was little slog to it, as there is in so much of political office: the policy debates, the town meetings, the committee hearings, the constituent visits. Screw that. Press is immediate gratification. It’s where most politicians truly live, the realm of how others see and judge them, the hour-to-hour score sheet of their massively external definition. “Nothing is more powerful than shaping public perception on public policy,” Bardella asserted in a 2007 profile in The Hill. As such, the press and communications lieutenants on the Hill, as oppose
d to the policy advisers or legislative aides, are often the staffers who become closest to the principals.
As the 2010 midterms approached, it was looking more and more like the GOP would reclaim the majority for the first time since 2006, the year Kurt first arrived in Washington. These were fast and expectant times for Republicans on the Hill, and Kurt himself was feeling every bit ascendant in This Town. He would send talking points over to “Newt” (at his personal e-mail!) in case a particular topic came up on the former speaker’s appearance on Fox News Sunday—and Newt was writing back, thanking him. He could be seen backslapping his way through the Capitol Hill Club, preferred hangout of Hill Republicans. Kurt also did a lot of public interacting with the sexy somebodies in the media. He kept a huge whiteboard behind his cubicle that listed in boldface all the media names he was warding off at that particular crowded moment (Jessica Yellin at CNN, David Gregory at Meet the Press, “Greta” at Fox). They all wanted time with “Darrell”; Kurt would do his best to make it happen (“Greta has always been fair”), no guarantees. But first he has a call on the other line, and two hundred e-mails from bookers to deal with, and the boss calling him on the cell—Good God, does it ever stop??!!
As he graduated from starstruck to name-dropper, Kurt had no desire to hide in plain sight.
He posted Facebook updates about how he was in a meeting with “Darrell and Chairman Bernanke.”
“At the Senate barber with the Boss and Ralph Nader.”
“At CNN with the Boss who is about to go on Sit Room with Wolf at 5:28 p.m.”
Bardella was always diligent about sending out Playbook-inspired birthday messages. He would reel off the “We’ve never met before but” notes and the fan mail that fortified his fattening collection of contacts around town. That’s how I first encountered Bardella.
Kurt sent me fan e-mail in the spring of 2010 after I had written the story about Mike Allen for the New York Times Magazine. This was very nice of him. In his e-mail, Bardella said the Allen story captured the crazy acceleration of the modern D.C. news cycle.
This Town Page 18