The stars paraded. The rug was not red but in fact blue, which was appropriate, since the filmmakers had contributed heavily to Democratic causes. Critics used this as a data point to prove leftist Hollywood bias in a film that focused on the train-wreck campaign of McCain and his Frankenstein running mate, Sarah Palin.
Co-producer Tom Hanks showed up at the Newseum opening, as did director Jay Roach, actor Julianne Moore (who played Palin), and the evening’s Brangelina, authors Halperin and Heilemann. The much taller and oval-headed Heilemann resembled Bert from Sesame Street next to his shorter collaborator, Halperin (Ernie). Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski stood together and posed for photos. Ben Bradlee looked spry and game at ninety, while White House officials, senators, congressmen, lobbyists, and journalists nibbled from a buffet of marinated hanger steak with Maui onions. Everyone congratulated Heilemann and Halperin and hugged Tammy, who of course helped put this all together—part of her work for HBO.
It was a fun film, filled with billboard lines that resonated on many levels. “I am not going to ignore the people of Alaska anymore,” said an indignant Palin, just a few months before she bolted the governor’s office.
“You don’t get to go back in time to do do-overs in life,” campaign chief Steve Schmidt said at one point, referring to the need to make bold decisions. No do-overs indeed, but you can still shape events retroactively and get paid more and enhance your brand in the long run.
Looking nervous, Schmidt greeted old friends in the lobby. He is the bullet-headed Republican operative who ran the McCain campaign and is credited/blamed for convincing the trailing nominee-to-be to pick Palin. Schmidt was played by Woody Harrelson. Reliving the Palin nightmare on the screen was surreal, Schmidt said, although he had presumably gotten used to reliving the Palin nightmare while serving as a source for the book, adviser to the film, and dogged after-the-fact critic of the rogue running mate.
True to the entrenched Washington precedent of cooperative sources getting more favorable treatment, Schmidt came off in the film as a tortured hero. He was portrayed as torn between his loyalty to McCain (played nobly by Ed Harris), his revulsion for Palin, his desire to win, and—not reflected in the film but obvious in real life—his instinct for self-preservation. His Game Change parlay honored the finest Washington tradition of strategic ass-covering.
Around the time of the Game Change premiere, Politico’s Maggie Haberman reported that Schmidt’s business partner, Brian Jones, had written a memo ten days before the 2008 election about how best to shield Schmidt from blame for the campaign’s inevitable loss. “A well organized and coordinated effort is needed to defend Steve’s good reputation,” Jones wrote in the memo to two other associates, Adam Mendelsohn and Kirill Goncharenko. (Schmidt says he did not know about the memo.)
Before signing on with the McCain campaign, Schmidt worked in a variety of media strategist roles in the Bush reelection campaign of 2004 and in the White House. He took on special assignments like shepherding Supreme Court nominees through their confirmation processes. He served for a time as a special counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney. He enjoyed a reputation as a decisive and hard-charging operative, and stuck it out with McCain even when many had left his campaign for dead in 2007. He had effectively taken over the day-to-day management of the campaign by the summer of 2008.
But fair or not, Schmidt will always be known as the guy who advocated for Palin, and then revealed countless details about the whole ordeal to the authors of Game Change, among others. He besmirched Palin (and by extension McCain) in the most humiliating of ways.
It did not matter that both Palin and McCain maintained that the book and movie were fiction. Everyone loves a crack-up. And that’s what Schmidt was selling, the Palin crack-up. That’s what the filmmakers focused on: Palin (no room for the Hillary crack-up, or the Edwards crack-up, or the history-making winner, what’s-his-name). It was a riveting crack-up. And for that, readers and viewers owe a debt to Steve Schmidt.
To hear Schmidt speak, promoting Game Change on television and reflecting on the campaign, it seems his conscience really nagged at him. He did seem sincere in his pain, and was so, his friends attest. He was also speaking out, in part, as a lucrative catharsis. He spoke of how terrified he was at the prospect of Palin’s being just one seventy-two-year-old heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Schmidt was retroactively scared for his country. But not so terrified that he blew any whistles before 130 million people voted—60 million for McCain and Palin. America is a glorious land, to be sure, but self-preservation is sacred ground in This Town. Would Schmidt ever have lunch in This Town again? After being linked to this debacle? After making it impossible for John McCain to do the one thing he truly craved after 2008: to move on with his life?
Are you kidding?
Schmidt would have the run of the buffet table at the Newseum. Starstruck moviegoers kept rushing up to him with congratulations. Schmidt was a star there, as he was at the Game Change opening in New York the night before. He started showing up often on TV, got a pundit gig on MSNBC. He started going on Meet the Press. He scored a cameo (playing himself) in an indie campaign film called Knife Fight about a maverick political strategist. He purchased a lovely new place on Lake Tahoe, which the cable network outfitted with an in-home TV studio so he could pontificate without walking out his front door. He did paid speeches. His whole contrition rap, the ostentatious guilt, had natural appeal.
“I’ve been involved in a lot of victories and a lot of defeats,” Schmidt told Adam Nagourney in a Times Sunday Styles cover story about how tortured Schmidt still was over the McCain campaign—and how much of a celebrity he had become after Game Change. “And the ending of that particular campaign felt like being in a car crash.”
Few genres are more media marketable than the car crash. It explains, in large part, the left’s ongoing fascination with Palin. In his public agony, Schmidt deftly cut himself into the Palin buffet line. Left-leaning operators from the Hollywood and Washington‒New York media fell deeply for him. It was another instance of the media swooning over Republicans with self-flagellating tendencies, especially when they defy conservative orthodoxy and move left (McCain being the object lesson in this with his maverick campaign of 2000, when he was the “refreshingly candid” McCain, as opposed to when he later moved right in 2008 and became the “bitter” McCain).
Schmidt was making a seven-figure income when McCain lured him to join his presidential campaign in 2007—and was doing even better after the car crash. He was now the vice chairman of public affairs at one of the world’s biggest public relations outfits, Edelman. He became an early Republican proponent of same-sex marriage (the media LOVES Republican same-sex marriage boosters). He was recognized at airports, ate lunch in the White House mess with top Obama adviser David Plouffe, and was photographed with the president himself. He was celebrity fodder at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and assorted after-parties a few weeks later. His “date” for the evening was the real Woody Harrelson, his new BFF.
You couldn’t script a better comeback story for the tortured public figure. Nor could you have provided a better test case in the political tradition of spinning glory from a fiasco, an art form whose Picasso was, of course, Sarah Palin.
• • •
Many people around This Town snickered at Game Change. Claimed it was too gossipy. And no one here cares about gossip, no way. They are way too high-minded for that. Some critics scoffed. They said the book focused too much on the titillating tensions while ignoring the substantive policy debate. How dare they?!
Quite a few people felt aggrieved. Burned. For instance, Jim Manley, the longtime spokesman for Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid. Manley arranged a deep-background interview for Reid with the authors. In the interview, Reid fell into his bumpkin default mode and carelessly referred to Obama as a “light-skinned” African-American who didn’t have a “Negro dialect, u
nless he wanted to have one.”
Uh, Senator Reid shouldn’t have said that. Not good. Luckily, this was on deep background, as Manley reminded Heilemann and Halperin, just to be triple safe, after the interview ended. Sure, sure, they said.
And then the words wound up in Game Change. Manley raised Holy Hell. Heilemann and Halperin had their justifications—then said something about how they would not talk about how they conducted their research for the book. There was some misunderstanding over ground rules, or something, that I never quite understood. Really, you could ask a hundred different reporters and flacks what “deep background” meant, and get a hundred different answers.
Everyone agreed that Reid’s remarks were “unfortunate.” Republicans called for Reid’s resignation. The majority leader called Obama immediately to apologize. Manley called Heilemann and Halperin “liars.”
Whatever. Game Change was coated in the pixelated dust of a commercial sensation. So were the authors. Everybody loves a winner.
Or, more to the point, is jealous of a winner. Halperin and Heilemann elicited complicated reactions to their commercial success: writing a mega-bestseller, getting a sweet HBO deal and speaking paydays all over the country and a reported $5 million advance to write another version of Game Change after 2012.
The ambivalence was borne of more than jealousy. This was particularly true in the case of Halperin, a former political director for ABC News who in 2002 founded the Note, the online political tip sheet that was a precursor to Mike Allen’s Playbook. He was something of a kingmaker within “the Gang of 500,” a term he coined and a role he seemed to enjoy.
Halperin got the regular TV gig that had eluded him at ABC when MSNBC hired him as its senior political analyst on Morning Joe. He screwed up in 2011 when he referred to President Obama as “kind of a dick” on the air and was suspended by the network indefinitely—“indefinitely” being a most ominous word in these contexts. There was some unseemly rejoicing within the twin seats of schadenfreude America (politics and media). Halperin waited it out. He was back on the air in a few weeks. And then, here everyone was at the Newseum, applauding him and Heilemann when they were introduced before the screening.
In many cases, revelers at the Game Change opening were participating in a curious show of their own journalistic failure. Dozens (maybe hundreds) of participants in allegedly the most intensely covered presidential campaign in history were in fact there to celebrate a monument to just how little key information they had uncovered at the time. Maybe “Heileperin” enjoyed an advantage in that they were writing after the election. Still, if all of these juicy details and unwritten front-page stories were so plainly obvious, you’d think some blogger or embed would have stumbled onto something. Mostly, Game Change itself had become a franchise and a spectacle and a new institution for This Town, something to celebrate and be there for. And it was a great party!
Outside the Newseum, a small group of protesters—Palin loyalists—were handing out white and yellow fliers (designed to look like a Broadway-style Playbill). They reiterated the former Alaska governor’s oft-quoted charge that Game Change was based on a “false narrative.” Whether it was or not, much of Washington ceased being about true narratives long ago, anyway. It is about virtual reality: the video game in which we are all characters and try to be players. It brought to mind a line that I had underlined years ago, in 1993, from the late great Michael Kelly, in a New York Times Magazine profile of David Gergen (“Master of the Game,” it was titled). “What happens in the political world is divorced from the real world,” he wrote. “It exists for only the fleeting historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts, a never-ending and infinitely revisable docudrama. Strangely, the faithful understand that the movie is not true—yet also maintain that it is the only truth that really matters.”
12
The Presidential Campaign: Saddened, Troubled
April‒November 2012
The Exalted Gods of the Narrative had rendered a swift and furious judgment upon the president’s reelection campaign: It had stumbled out of the gate.
Surrogates kept skidding off message on Meet the Press. First, regular Joe Biden took the stand and said he was “comfortable” with gay people marrying each other. He was not supposed to “make news on that,” as the politicians like to say these days (an odd meta-term of demurral). The president—who had said his views on the subject were “evolving”—was. Supposedly the White House and reelect team had a big ROLLOUT STRATEGY planned for the president’s coming out, so to speak. It would be the culminating phase of his evolution. And yes, the evolution would be televised.
But then Biden went and ruined the rollout by blurting out the true and obvious thing—the thing that other cool Obama followers like Axe or Plouffe would be too righteously disciplined to ever say out of turn. It is for this reason hard to dislike Biden, a joyful campaigner who—unlike the introverted Obamneys—was not someone you imagined reaching for the Purell as soon as he escaped the ropeline.
It was around this time that I accompanied Biden on a trip to a union hall in Toledo, billed by the White House as an “unofficial kickoff of the campaign” (there were, like, fifty of these supposed “unofficial kickoffs” before Labor Day). En route, the VP strolled to the back of Air Force Two to say hello to the traveling press. One reporter asked the VP how it felt to be doing his first “legitimate campaign event.” “Legitimate?” Biden said. “Is anything I do legitimate?” He laughed, as everyone did for several seconds before his communications director, former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter Shailagh Murray, ushered Biden back behind the protective curtain in the front of the plane and another press aide, Liz Allen, swept through the press cabin and tried to declare—retroactively—that Biden had been speaking off the record.
While Obama had come to like Biden, he often talked about him with a patronizing overfondness—as if the VP were the beloved family dog that kept peeing on the carpet. Obama was also protective. For the president’s comedy routine at the 2012 Correspondents’ Association dinner at the end of April, his speechwriters composed a riff on how things had changed in four years. The bit was supposed to include the line “Four years ago, I chose Joe Biden as my running mate. Four years later, I am almost positive I’m going with Joe again.” The president would then affect an exaggerated wink for the audience. But he told his speechwriters to kill the line, figuring it would only reactivate the “Dump Biden” chorus. More to the point, it might hurt his feelings. (Obama seemed to expend many mental calories worrying about the VP’s feelings.)
In a private meeting in the Oval Office, Biden apologized to Obama for his candor malfunction on gay marriage. Then the president went on ABC to affirm that, yes, he also thought same-sexers should be able to marry. His VP had gotten “a little bit over his skis,” POTUS said. Instead of Obama making history with his announcement, his lame sloppy seconds to Biden only called attention to the fact that he had been withholding his true convictions from voters on a momentous cultural matter, maybe for years.
Nonetheless, Newsweek slapped Obama on its cover over the headline “The First Gay President.” (This was only fair, since Bill Clinton had already been dubbed “The First Black President” years ago.)
The next Sunday, another Obama surrogate, Newark mayor Cory Booker, went on Meet the Press and said that the Obama campaign’s attack on Romney’s work in the private equity sector was “nauseating to the American public.” (This would be the industry that Booker had relied on for a great deal of cash, so apparently it was nauseating to Booker too.) Booker’s remarks made for instant pundit catnip. Here was another talking-points failure, the second in as many MTPs that a hoped-for partisan robot had come unwired. Suddenly, Booker morphed into an elusive superdarling of TV talk-show bookers. The Obama people got to the mayor and his nausea cleared promptly. But not before he had created a “distraction” that contributed to a rough week for the r
eelection campaign.
“Obama Stumbles out of the Gate,” declareth the big Politico headline a few days later. The story, by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, catalogued the Biden and Booker boners, the reelection team’s “muddled message,” and the dismay among “some Democrats” about the flailing reelection effort. Suddenly, the reelection campaign found itself, yes, on the defensive.
The story included an unforgettable caveat in paragraph six, one that could rightly appear in 99 percent of all campaign stories.
“Surely,” went the caveat, “all of this could prove to be ephemeral and meaningless in the arc of a long presidential contest.”
• • •
Another Regrettable Remark (RR) for the reelection enterprise came in April, courtesy of Hilary Rosen, the Tammy BFF, CNN pundit, gay activist, and corporate communications hybrid who spent years as the top lobbyist for the music industry. Hilary got a little out over her skis herself when she said on CNN that Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life.” She apologized for this, sort of, the next day.
But the Romney campaign sensed an umbrage opportunity. The victim was so exorcised that Ann Romney herself called the Rosen crack an “early birthday present.” The Romney-bots were in full whirl-up-the-crap mode. They kept describing Rosen as a “confidante” to the president. This was a reach, although she had visited the White House thirty-five times since Obama took office, according to public logs. And Rosen had, just one month earlier, attended a state dinner at the White House to honor the British prime minister, David Cameron. She brought with her as her guest a corporate client, John Kelly, an executive at Microsoft. “An abuse of access” is how one high-level White House official described it to me—making sure to add that Hilary was a friend.
This Town Page 29