This Town

by Mark Leibovich

  At which point, Hillary Clinton looked up and said simply, “Fuck the White House Correspondents’ dinner.”

  10

  Anarchy in the Quiet Car

  Bin Laden was killed on Sunday, which was good because it made the world safer and, more important, did not interfere with the Correspondents’ Association dinner. The Big Get of the weekend was Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor who showed up at Katharine Graham’s old, uninhabited mansion for Tammy Haddad’s brunch. You go, Tamster!

  Palin, still considered an even bet at that point to run for president in 2012, was accompanied by her husband, Todd, her daughter Bristol, her Fox News pal Greta Van Susteren, and Van Susteren’s lawyer husband, John Coale. Palin did her red-carpet duty and then descended into the mosh pit of “lamestream media” who, at the sight of her, became kids chasing the Good Humor truck.

  Palin was a spectacle—exotic, even (from Alaska!)—and the crowds around her were three and four deep. Reporters snapped cell phone pictures and told her about their kids. In full revelation, I also chatted with Palin, though she came to me—or more like wound up next to where I was standing. Tammy snapped a picture and put it on some website somewhere. Jessica Yellin of CNN was standing between us in the photo. We (Jessica and I) both looked a tiny bit too enamored in the shot for our own good, but whatever. Palin could not have been nicer. We had met once before, for about five seconds on her campaign plane in 2008. At the brunch, I told her I had been in Alaska a few months earlier. And she opened her mouth wide in a look of genuine surprise, as if no one had ever gone to Alaska before. “Why didn’t you look me up?” she said, again sounding sincere. I made a joke about not wanting to get shot. She made me promise to look her up in Wasilla next time. (How does one “look up” Sarah Palin in Alaska, anyway? Is she listed? Can we become texting buddies?)

  A few weeks later, Palin was back in rogue mode, setting off on a bus tour of the Northeast that many thought to be a precursor to her getting into the 2012 race. She made a point of not releasing a public schedule to the press, which forced them to follow her bus on a wild-goose chase, from Virginia to New Hampshire (just missing a tornado in Western Massachusetts). Everyone bitched, Palin did not care, and all was back to normal.

  “I don’t think I owe anything to the mainstream media,” Palin said in an interview aboard her bus—with Van Susteren. Coale, Van Susteren’s husband, marveled at the media’s nerve. “They have trashed her every which way,” he said. “And they still expect to be kowtowed to?”

  Well, yes!

  But it was nice of Palin to show up and play nice on Prom Weekend. And it was a big win for the Tamster, who also “got” Rupert Murdoch to come to her megabrunch, among others. She—Tammy—was off on a great run. She seemed to be everywhere, even by her everywhere standards. At a time when Washington was getting nothing done and attracting massive scorn, Tammy was the prime mover behind the one thing This Town seemed to be doing right: celebrating itself.

  A few months before, Tammy had cohosted a book party for first-time novelist Graham Moore, the twenty-nine-year-old son of Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, Susan Sher. At one point, Tammy rushed over to me and the guy I was talking to and announced “ELIZABETH EDWARDS IS DYING! ELIZABETH EDWARDS IS DYING! I JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE WITH HER DAUGHTER!

  “Now c’mon, come meet the novelist,” Tammy said, shifting midstream and pulling me away to meet Susan Sher’s son. A woman intercepted Tammy and told her, “We’re going to your party on Wednesday night.”

  “Oh, I’m just everywhere!” Tammy replied.

  The Wednesday night party was put on by CURE, the Axelrod family’s epilepsy research group, which was honoring Tammy as its Woman of the Year. The tribute included a video montage featuring several members of the news media (David Gregory, Joe, and Mika) all testifying to Tammy’s power, stamina, and fabulousness.

  That Saturday, Tammy did another bash, this one at the elegant Jefferson hotel to honor Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister. He had written an “important new book,” Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization. Lots of dire talk in there about global poverty and income disparities, the kind of things you think of when you’re eating salmon and caviar canapés under the chandeliers of the Jefferson.

  The grand hotel, which opened in 1923, could not have sparkled brighter for the occasion. Festivities were webcast on Tammy’s WHC Insider website. The actual in-person experience was a bit crowded and hot. I tried to slip out, but Terry McAuliffe insisted I join him in a private dining room to pay respects to Tammy’s pal Connie Milstein, the real estate maven who owned the hotel and who obviously set off the sensor in the Macker’s brain stem that activates whenever he’s within thirty feet of a rich campaign donor type. As I stood in the private room, waiting for Andrea Mitchell and Chairman Greenspan to finish talking to Milstein, Tammy bounded in with Gordon Brown himself. She introduced me to the former prime minister, who looked exhausted. “He’s writing a book about how Washington works and trying to get me to participate,” Tammy explained. “And I think he’s crazy.”

  “I don’t,” Gordon Brown said, looking at me. “Just follow Tammy around. You could do worse.”

  Tammy blushed.

  The evening’s highlight came earlier, when Tammy gave her welcoming remarks praising Prime Minister Brown’s book. She made several references to this being a “special night” and an “incredible night” and an “amazing night” even though “we are going through difficult times and tough times here in Washington and around the world.” At which point, I surveyed the chandeliers, the high cream-colored ceilings, and McAuliffe standing a few feet away, raising a flute of champagne.

  • • •

  In July 2011, the Amtrak train I was riding broke down between New York and D.C., somewhere in godforsaken Delaware. All power was lost. We were without AC. It was hot. The bathrooms stank. People were cranky. The situation presented a philosophical/ethical dilemma. Do the rules of the Quiet Car apply aboard a grounded train? Some thought no, and spoke freely on their cell phones; others thought yes, glared at the alleged offenders, and in some cases yelled. A few yelled back. A third constituency urged peace. People kept talking on their phones. More stares, more yelling, back and forth. A passenger asked another if there was any news. “Shut up!” shouted a third passenger, a Quiet Car militant. “No, you shut up!” shot back a counterinsurgent. Another attempted a straight answer while another tried to be a comedian, saying they halted Amtrak service to pay down the deficit, and they should have sold off Delaware while they were at it. No one laughed.

  It was anarchy in the Quiet Car. And also an apt reflection of the collaborative spirit back in Washington. The debate over the raising of the federal debt ceiling had been raging between the White House and Congress. It was one week from the August 2 deadline when the United States government would default on its credit obligations. Everyone was arguing, nothing was moving—like our train.

  Eventually Congress and the White House struck a deal and, whaddaya know, the train started moving, too, and I got back to Washington in time to attend a going-away party for Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s White House press secretary during the darkest days of Monica. After leaving the White House, Lockhart joined with two top Gore aides—Mike Feldman and Carter Eskew—to start the Glover Park Group, a Democratic media firm that grew into a bipartisan “integrated services” colossus of lobbying and strategic communications that was bringing in $60 million in annual revenue. Lockhart was now heading to a new job as head of corporate communications at Facebook in Menlo Park.

  The Glover Park Group’s shiny downtown offices were crawling with regulars for the send-off. The gathering occurred in the midst of the News Corp. phone hacking scandal that was then roiling Great Britain and much of the media. It was a prevailing topic of seemingly every conversation at the party as we munched finger foods and sipped the cocktails cour
tesy of the Glover Park Group, which, by the way, was also a major lobbying and communications provider to News Corp.

  Not far from the outdoor patio, I struck up a conversation with Geoff Morrell, a former White House correspondent for ABC News who went on to be the chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Robert Gates under President Bush and then Obama. After four years in government, Morrell—one of Mike Allen’s closest friends—was days away from leaving the Pentagon and would soon have several big job offers to consider. Morrell didn’t say what companies he was talking to, but did mention he had retained Bob Barnett to help him navigate the process. No surprise there, and no sooner did Morrell tell me this than Barnett himself walked over to join the conversation. Barnett told me how “premium” a client Morrell was.

  I later learned Morrell had been offered a leadership role at Hill & Knowlton Strategies, U.S., the public relations colossus run by Dan Bartlett, the former top White House aide to George W. Bush whom Morrell knew from when he covered the White House, as well as one from Tony Podesta, the Democratic mega-lobbyist whose firm, the Podesta Group, was having another stellar year despite the lagging economy.

  On Labor Day, as the national unemployment rate stood at 9.1 percent, Morrell did his part to lower it, and Mike Allen broke the news in Playbook. Geoff had joined BP as its head of U.S. communications. “BP America, facing a spate of investigations and lawsuits stemming from the catastrophic Gulf oil spill, has chosen former Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell as its head of U.S. communications,” Allen wrote in his lead item. This signaled “an aggressive new effort to recover from past communications debacles and improve its image in an essential market.

  “Morrell, who starts Tuesday, will remain in Washington, with frequent travel to BP headquarters in Houston and London. . . . Morrell, forty-two, has worked both sides of the podium: He covered the White House for ABC News, then was Pentagon press secretary throughout the tenure of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, spanning two presidencies and consumed by two wars.”

  The Playbook item went on for 645 words and filled nearly 30 percent of that morning’s edition. “You got more than Obama got for killing Bin Laden,” Tony Podesta marveled to Geoff in a congratulatory e-mail. This is what is known in the political-corporate PR space as “a successful rollout.”

  When someone is leaving a government job to “pursue opportunities in the private sector,” the successful rollout is critical. It is important that a big announcement accompany news of the new position—both as a means of reminding everyone how important you were while in government and to ensure that everyone knows where to find you now that you are out “monetizing government employment.”

  Morrell’s big news illustrated the big tangle of interests that make up the D.C. self-perpetuation machine today: Old Media (ABC News), Republican administrations, Democratic administrations, corporate (BP), and New Media (Playbook) converging at the gold-plated revolving door, facilitated by Barnett.

  Morrell was recruited into the BP fold in part by his friend Dick Keil, a former White House reporter for Bloomberg who had gone to work for Purple Strategies, the bipartisan media consultancy founded by Republican pundit Alex Castellanos (CNN) and Democratic talking head Steve McMahon (MSNBC). Keil, who had gotten to know Morrell on the White House beat back when Morrell worked for ABC, is a congenial and earnest operator whom I first met years ago when he was still a reporter. Like most people in Washington, Keil is always working. I once ran into him at the market and teased him about the work Purple had been doing to help BP “reposition” its image after its little problem on the Gulf Coast. Without missing a beat, Keil unleashed his own gusher—of flackery—calling BP the “the greatest corporate turnaround story in history,” or some such, before moving on to the deli counter. Sure enough, BP was recovering quite well for itself, in part from the generosity of the United States Defense Department. Bloomberg News would later report that BP’s Pentagon contracts more than doubled in the two years after it caused the biggest spill in U.S. history (exploding to $2.51 billion, from $1.04 billion in fiscal 2010).

  Morrell’s hiring was part of an audacious trend of Obama bigwigs latching like newborns onto the teats of the administration’s biggest nemeses. If BP wasn’t the single biggest corporate villain of the first term, it certainly cracked the top three.

  Other candidates? Perhaps no company had taken more blame (or revulsion) over the economic mess that the Obama administration inherited in 2009 than Goldman Sachs. They were at the center of the subprime mortgage crisis that started the whole thing. They took bushels of emergency loans from the government and subsequently paid out similarly huge bushels in executive bonuses. So it might look slightly odd, or even unseemly, to have a top Obama Treasury official helping Goldman to de-smudge their corporate image. But a few months later, the Treasury Department counselor, Jake Siewert, announced he was leaving the Obama administration; soon after, he would become the head of global communications for Goldman Sachs. Siewert, who served as White House press secretary at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term, had decamped to Alcoa for nine years before joining Obama. He was well-known and liked within operative and media circles, and his next trip through the revolving door had been speculated upon within The Club.

  Mike Allen suggested in Playbook that Siewert could be the next head of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank that had been run by John Podesta, the former chief of staff in the Clinton White House and co-chair of the Obama transition team (and Tony Podesta’s brother). Instead, Siewert landed at Goldman. “We’re lapsing into self-parody,” one senior White House official told me on the subject of high-profile officials leaving the Obama administration and then jumping to the corporate giants the White House had done battle with.

  To complete the unholy triplet of Siewert going to Goldman and Morrell going to BP, Peter Orszag—the former director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—had previously gone to Citigroup, another prime avatar of the financial crisis, beneficiary of a government bailout, and bestower of numerous bonuses.

  In his unique way, Orszag had represented a one-nerd case study in run-amok Obama-mania during his time at the White House. For starters—and this is weird—he became an unlikely sex symbol from the moment the then president-elect announced his appointment in November 2008. Never mind that speculation raged instantly over whether Casanova with a Calculator was wearing the World’s Worst Toupee. Groupies announced themselves on a fan blog site, Orszagasm.com, devoted to the allegedly hunky brainiac who was “putting the OMG back in the OMB.”

  Rahm Emanuel declared to the New York Times that Orszag has “made nerdy sexy.” Gossip columns reported on Orszag’s dating life, while some Obama aides became worried that his profile might be getting a tad inflated and that he was getting a little big for his BlackBerry holsters (yes, plural).

  And then things got complicated for Orszag. And not in the way that sustainable growth rates are complicated. Rather, in the way that it’s complicated when a divorced father of two with a very important job gets very publicly engaged to a thirty-one-year-old financial correspondent for ABC News, Bianna Golodryga, just weeks after his ex-girlfriend gave birth to his daughter. Orszag had met Golodryga at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the same event at which President Obama had joked that the TLC network would be starting a new reality show called Jon & Kate Plus Peter Orszag.

  But the real headlines were much worse. “White House Budget Director Ditched Pregnant Girlfriend for ABC News Gal,” screamed the New York Post headline. Suddenly the “Orszag love-child story” became a full-term tabloid “distraction.” Inside Edition started calling the Office of Management and Budget. MSNBC dubbed the story the “Budget Baby Mama Drama.” Orszag asked for privacy, to which friends of the ex-girlfriend/baby mama noted that he wasn’t exactly asking for privacy a few weeks earlier when Golodryga was showing off her engagement rock on Go
od Morning America.

  As with any story of this nature in Washington, the Very Serious People who traffic in it are obliged to emphasize that such silliness is beneath them. Ken Baer, the OMB spokesman, told me that nearly every press inquiry he received on the matter was prefaced with the requisite faux sheepishness. “Everyone feels the need to say ‘I’m really sorry I have to ask you about this’ and ‘I’m only carrying out orders from my boss,’” Baer said. And, of course, the Very Serious Media were not writing the Orszag love-child story per se; they were “stepping back,” merely writing about the phenomenon of the media frenzy surrounding it.

  As fun as the Budget Baby Mama Drama was to watch, Orszag himself appeared to be having little of it in the White House. Nor did many of his colleagues love dealing with him. Orszag managed to alienate a number of top White House and cabinet officials with his petty and turf-conscious tendencies. In 2009, I wrote a profile for the Times about Ray LaHood, the former Republican congressman who went on to become President Obama’s secretary of transportation. In the story, LaHood problematically acknowledged that he did not think the White House “picked me because they thought I’d be that great a transportation person.” In fact, he said, he was no expert on transportation issues and would have been just as happy to be named secretary of agriculture.

  This was exactly the kind of refreshing candor that reporters loved about Ray LaHood. It was not always refreshing to the White House.