This Town

by Mark Leibovich

  This is, admittedly, seizing on a fat vulnerability of the Politico story. It was nakedly condescending, elitist, self-consciously disdainful. The big centerpiece photo was of Forrest Gump himself sitting on a bench. That is precisely what I loved about the story. It offered one of the most revealing expressions of the dim view that so many residents of This Town have of the American voter. It is a belief held equally by Washington politicians, lobbyists, and certainly journalists. Inasmuch as Politico is a reflection of that local sensibility, it was a story that struck a perfect pitch for This Town.

  The “stupid” story also seemed to strike an apt reflection of the White House’s own view of the American electorate. It was an attitude that many suspected began with the president and first lady. “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual—uninvolved, uninformed,” Michelle Obama said in a 2008 campaign speech that drew little notice at the time, but could work as an off-message proxy for the “Are voters stupid?” story.

  Early in 2012, This Town was getting all lubed up about The Obamas, a new book by Times writer Jodi Kantor. Several scenes portrayed Team Obama as exasperated by the inability of the post-2008 voter to fully appreciate the president’s efforts. Kantor wrote about the first couple’s trip to Norway in 2009 in which the president accepted his Nobel Peace Prize: “The trip spurred a thought the Obamas and their friends would voice to each other again and again as the president’s popularity continued to decline: the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader.” She quoted the president’s best friend Marty Nesbitt, saying that Obama “could get 70 or 80 percent of the vote anywhere but the U.S.”

  Politicians, operatives, and journalists are no different from a lot of professionals in that they speak among themselves with repugnance for their customers. Goldman Sachs employees refer to ordinary investors as “muppets,” we learned in a March 2012 op-ed in the New York Times by an outgoing Goldman executive. Flight attendants deride infrequent leisure flyers as “Clampetts,” in reference to the Beverly Hillbillies family. Rail attendants dismiss excited train hobbyists as “foamers” (foaming at the mouth as they board their choo-choos). Barney Frank once said—to the late David Broder—something to the effect of “Everyone hates Congress, everyone hates the media, everyone hates Washington. But let me tell you something, the voters are no picnic either.” The Massachusetts Democrat demonstrated just this a few summers earlier when he told a woman at a town meeting that “trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to have an argument with a dining room table.” Political consultants often refer to rich self-funded candidates as “checkbooks.” Lobbyist Jack Abramoff referred (in e-mails) to a bilked Native American client as “the stupidest idiots in the land for sure.”

  Burns’s piece served as a perfect thought bubble for so many of the Politico-reading actors whose livelihoods and industries relied on the dumbass clientele of American voters (and taxpayers, and media end users and customers). The story worked as a serviceable “talker”—a story that provoked discussion, or “buzz.” But its real genius was that it was written at all. That Politico went there. That they dared go public with one of the great taboos of Fancy Washington life: voters are not bright. The basis of our democracy is Forrest Gump.

  As soon as I saw the Burns story, I guessed immediately how it came about. A bunch of Politico types were shooting the breeze about something or other, and the topic turned to the dumbass electorate. This could have been happening in any newsroom in Washington or beyond. And typically, after a few minutes, this mingling of thought gas would dissipate and that would be that. But this being Politico, someone went ahead and actually commissioned a story that “asked the question” about whether voters are in fact stupid (one of the great self-soothes in journalism: we’re not actually saying or endorsing an inflammatory sentiment, merely “asking the question”). Stupid voters have been around forever, but now Politico was here to explore the phenomenon explicitly.

  Sure enough, a few days later, Politico’s founding editor, John Harris, went on a new enterprise called “Politico TV” and revealed that that is exactly how the “stupid” story came about. “A lot of people’s stories generate from people’s rants,” Harris explained. “Alex Burns wrote up one of my rants.” Burns made some phone calls to prove—or “explore”—his boss’s premise that voters were stupid. Lo and behold, the premise came back rock solid.

  Alex “actually found a number of good voices from pollsters who say, ‘Yeah, that’s the first thing you learn as a pollster, that voters are stupid,’” Harris said. The pollsters did not mean that literally, Harris cautioned. Rather, they meant only that voters who respond to polls “are just expressing their opinion in a context of ignorance.”

  This was a deliciously transparent moment, courtesy of a rising media power unburdened by the traditional dictate that media arrogance must take place privately. This was an example of Politico’s turning its obsession with Washington “process” on its own fascinating-to-us ecosystem. They put it on television.

  Politico was on a nice roll through the 2012 campaign. They reported in late 2011 that then front-runner Herman Cain had some bad history with women (harassment charges, extramarital forays, etc.) that dated to his days as head of the National Restaurant Association. Their top campaign and White House reporters—Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Martin—were consistently turning out solid, authoritative, and often groundbreaking stories.

  Some of the pieces were consistent with the smarty-pants parlor gaming for which Politico had become known. A prototype of this ilk occurred in March 2012 courtesy of Thrush, who wrote a classic about Biden possibly running for president in 2016.

  From almost the day in August 2008 that Obama rescued Biden from the Senate by making him his running mate, the “Biden 2016” story has been kicking around town, thanks almost entirely to Biden and surrogates who are often begging reporters (deep background, of course) not to rule Biden out for the Big Seat down the road. Beyond the pro forma mention of how Biden “hasn’t ruled out another run for president,” no one took the prospect that seriously. He had run twice before (in 1988 and 2008) with disastrous results, would be seventy-four years old on Inauguration Day 2017, and was generally considered a lovable rodeo clown of the Obama administration, not a lot of people’s idea of an heir apparent.

  But Biden and his loyalists wanted to keep Joe “in play” to stave off the natural atrophy that sets in around a principal who is assumed to be drained of aspiration and possibility. And Politico cued up the notion perfectly with Thrush’s “Joe Biden in 2016? Not So Crazy” story, which played big on the website and elicited the requisite snickers from the West Wing directed at Politico for running the story (insular, shortsighted, trivial, typical Politico, they said) and at the Biden jock sniffers who had quite obviously pushed it.

  Biden himself was thrilled with the story, kept pointing it out to his friends, and even blew some sweet verbal perfume Politico’s way from a podium in Coconut Creek, Florida, where he was talking to a bunch of seniors. “Go online to an outfit called Politico.com,” Biden instructed the geezers, referring them to a story by Jake Sherman about the House Republican budget. “Extremely well-respected publication that all the major papers look to.” Forget that the Obama circle supposedly hated Politico, at least when they weren’t leaking self-serving items to its reporters. It was not the first or last time Biden would go off the reservation. “I guess he liked that Biden 2016 story,” one senior White House official e-mailed me.

  • • •

  In the first months of 2012, President Obama and Veep Biden were spending more of their time on the road campaigning. Unemployment numbers were trending down, with Obama’s approvals up. But then up shot gas prices, and down sank his approvals, and so it went.

  Obama’s reelect was exceedingly removed from the messianic enterprise of 2008. Hope and change were gathering dust like
garaged yard signs. Obama kept using the phrase “grinding it out,” while Biden trotted out a quote from Kevin White, the longtime mayor of Boston who had died a few weeks earlier: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty,” White had said, “compare me to the alternative.”

  By March it was clear the alternative would be Romney, perhaps the loosest, most everyday-guy-like presidential candidate from Massachusetts since John Kerry, if not Michael Dukakis. A particularly rich moment occurred in early February when Donald Trump endorsed Romney at his namesake hotel in Las Vegas. Not since Don King’s last solo press conference had so much fabulous hair adorned a single Vegas venue. “There are some things that you can’t imagine happening in your life,” Romney said in a nod to the absurdity of the moment. “And this is one of them.” By far the best part of the announcement—and maybe my favorite moment in this whole campaign—was watching Ann Romney standing off to the side, seemingly just one synapse away from an epic giggle fit.

  Mrs. Romney stood with a slight smile, hands folded at her waist, while her face kept getting redder and her lips kept pursing tighter. Mittens whispered something to her at one point, some Mormon variant of “Can you fucking believe this?” I’d guess, and Ann jerked her neck slightly forward as if the spigots were about to open. She seemed to catch herself just in time. She then flashed a look of total terror, perhaps over how close she had come to losing it. She was fine the rest of the way—a winning character test for the prospective first lady.

  Santorum quit the race in April. As losing candidates often do, he used his “concession” speech to claim victory. “We were winning,” he said. “But we were winning in a very different way.” In modern politics, “winning in a very different way” means increased speaking fees, greater demand for consulting services, and talk of a book and TV deal and return trip to Des Moines in 2016—all of which swirled around Santorum after his “victory.”

  After the media concluded its breathless narration of the “topsy-turvy GOP race,” everyone acknowledged Romney had it in the bag all along. As it turned out, his nomination was as inevitable as the news (in January) that Haley Barbour would be coming home to K Street after serving out his second term as governor of Mississippi.

  Romney was the son of the late Michigan governor George Romney, himself a onetime presidential candidate. George’s White House hopes were dashed when he claimed to have been “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam War. (This made him the butt of one of the all-time great putdowns, courtesy of Senator Eugene McCarthy: With George, the senator said, “a light rinse would have been sufficient.”)

  The Obama team was banking heavily on their guy, the Great Man, coming off as much more accessible than the exotic Mittens. The president’s image docs prescribed heavy doses of Obama-Just-Folks treatments. They do this every year or so, placing the various principals—POTUS, VPOTUS, and FLOTUS—in media settings where they can brandish their barstool bona fides. We were reminded, as we had been every March of his presidency, that the president knows tons about college basketball (and has devoted hours of ESPN interviews over four years to prove this). In this year’s edition, he ate barbecue for the cameras and sang blues with B. B. King and showed off his literacy of contemporary sitcoms by mentioning that Malia likes Parks and Recreation. Regular Joe Biden, lover of muscle cars, was sent off to Rust Belt union halls to tell stories about his blue-collar dad, while Michelle went on the Late Show with David Letterman to remind everyone that she went shopping at Target the year before.

  While pols are always straining for the proverbial “candidate you’d rather have a beer with” mantle—and such contests will never favor a milk-sipping Mormon like Romney—the president was laying it on as thick as the Guinness he drank at a barstool photo op on St. Patrick’s Day in D.C.

  “Yeah, it’s all so natural and organic,” sniffed Mike Murphy, a Republican media adviser on the topic of Obama’s being such a photo-op everyman. “The President is making a big move, switching from Evian water to Dasani.”

  The subtext to this of-the-people competition is that both candidates are loath to be seen as Washington sorts. That Obama, who never loses a chance to say how much he hates it here, is so above the self-dealing and petty silliness and opportunism that never goes on in salt-of-the-earth places like Chicago (site of his campaign headquarters, a stone’s throw from Michigan Avenue). That Romney, who had spent his primary campaign touting his nonconnections to Washington, can present himself as a gust of fumigating air from the private sector. New approaches, new faces, all that.

  And then, as soon as Romney had the nomination sewn up, he found himself surrounded by the same perennials who encrust party nominees every four years.

  • • •

  The campaign had entered its season of the “informal adviser.” They regenerate in the local scenery like those repeating clumps of trees in the background of The Flintstones. It’s always the same people, in the same movie, playing the same roles for this year’s crop of self-fashioned “outsiders.” Election Day as Groundhog Day.

  Romney was swimming in “informal advisers.” Start with the same old likes of Charlie Black, a prototypical “informal adviser” and familiar D.C. hybrid of campaign lifer, cable stalwart, and superlobbyist. Black, sixty-four, was among those counseling Romney. We know this because he was quoted and identified in lots of stories as an “informal adviser” to Mitt Romney. Black recycles every four years and makes himself available for old-pro advice, back-channel information, and whatever else the front-running campaign might need. That is what informal advisers do.

  What they must not do is any harm, and this can be tricky, since they often embody the capital’s permanent lobbying and money class that voters detest. And some of their past ties can be unsavory. Black’s lobbying clients, for instance, have included strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.

  It’s a nice arrangement, though, the “informal adviser” gig. It helps both candidate and Usual Suspect. Being publicly linked to Romney can impress Black’s clients—an important currency in This Town (informal advisers are almost never paid real currency by the campaigns, and usually don’t need the money anyway). In return, they can vouch for the candidate within the embattled but still potent Republican establishment in Washington, providing a link to donors, endorsers, and various useful eggheads.

  “I have the best job I’ve had in any election,” Black told me of his latest role. He is an affable North Carolinian and veteran of nine presidential campaigns, dating back to Gerald Ford’s in 1976. “I have no responsibilities. I am not accountable for anything.”

  Nice work if you can get it. And many, apparently, can.

  They come out in spring, the informal advisers do, when the weather warms and the primary contests are winding down. The political calendar becomes safer for the likes of the congressman- turned-lobbyist Vin Weber, the senator-turned-high-priced-consultant Jim Talent, the former governor and White House aide John Sununu, and all-purpose insiders like Black, Wayne Berman, and (of course) Bay Buchanan—all of whom were advising the Romney campaign.

  “I’m a big believer that campaigns are like a symphony orchestra,” said Ron Kaufman, a former Republican lobbyist and operative who was a regular presence at Romney’s side (and could be seen in many a hotel bar well after Mitt and Ann donned their pj’s). “You have to add certain types of music at the right time. If you add it at the wrong time, it can destroy the whole piece. This is the right time.”

  Kaufman is in an elevated club of “unpaid advisers” in that he has known Romney for years and travels frequently with him, just as he did when Romney ran in 2008. He is thus a step up from being an “informal adviser,” though that’s the title that the campaign seems to prefer.

  When Romney hit John McCain in 2008 for his ties to lobbyists—including the ubiquitous Black—Glen Johnson, then of the Associated Press, confronted Mittens about his
own traveling buddy, Kaufman. Romney explained that he was just an informal adviser. “My campaign is not based on Washington lobbyists,” Romney said then. “I haven’t been in Washington. I don’t have lobbyists at my elbows that are arguing for one industry or another industry.”

  Kaufman has since deregistered as a lobbyist. Black also gave the illusion of going straight in 2008, announcing his “retirement” from lobbying after he joined the McCain campaign. But here’s an upset: Black’s “retirement” ended shortly after the McCain campaign did.

  Today, Black is chairman of Prime Policy Group, a bipartisan lobbying firm; clients include Walmart, Google, and financial firms. “After Obama won, I kiddingly told my Democratic partners, ‘Great, now I don’t have to go lobby the administration for four years,’” Black told me. “I can play more golf.”

  • • •

  Overall, This Town spent a great deal of time in Campaign 2012 longing for its star-packed predecessor. The 2008 campaign loomed like an older sibling over the 2012 cast of motley inevitables (Romney), retreads (Gingrich, Santorum), and the Great De-lustered (Obama).

  As such, perhaps the marquee event of the late winter came in early March with the much-awaited opening of Game Change, the HBO adaptation of the bestseller about the 2008 “campaign of a lifetime.” Written by veteran political reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the book came out in early 2010 to pretty good reviews, big sales, and buzzy bombshells. It packed lots of fresh meat (Elizabeth Edwards lifting her shirt to taunt her cuckolding and battered husband!) and was the picture of mass-market success in a category—political books—that almost never produces smashes outside of Woodward. It also favored Washington with a red-carpet night at the Newseum, and what could be better than that?