This Town

by Mark Leibovich

  The Obama people tried to bury Hilary R.’s Regrettable Remark by doing the smart and sensible thing: overreacting. The White House, from the president and vice president on down, condemned the slur. Press secretary Jay Carney ran from Rosen as if she were a lesbian version of John Edwards. His initial response when asked about her was “I know three, personally, women named Hilary Rosen.” At this point my mind went to a memory from a few years earlier of Carney and Hilary Rosen—the Hilary Rosen who, wouldn’t you know it, looked a lot like that one on CNN—dancing at a party for Meet the Press gatekeeper Betsy Fischer at lobbyist Jack Quinn’s house. (I recall a chain of guests being enjoined in a conga line, though Carney disputes being part of this, so we’ll leave it at “dancing.”)

  This Hilary Rosen is another classic Washington survivor. As the former head of the Recording Industry Association of America lobby, she was lashed as an outspoken defender of the industry’s right to intellectual property at a time when online file sharing was becoming habitual. A 2003 profile of Rosen in Wired noted that “on a scale of odiousness, devotees of the website Whatsbetter.com rated Rosen just below Illinois Nazis but better than Michael Bolton (and way above pedophile priests).” She was subjected to death threats that led her to travel with security guards. Protesters at her speeches urged other “Hilary Haters” to send her poop in the mail.

  Compared with such nastiness, the Ann Romney thing was a small tummy ache. Still, Rosen realized it would be an issue as soon as she returned home from the CNN studios and her babysitter told her about a constant beeping from a computer upstairs. That’s what Rosen’s TweetDeck page did to signal each mention of @HilaryR on Twitter. She also received a call that night from Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, with a heads-up that the campaign would have to condemn her remark. Okay, sure, Hilary said. She knew the game, she understood. Anita Dunn, her business partner at the consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker, had been the president’s communications director in the White House—and remained an adviser to Team Obama. Hilary received similar consolation calls and e-mails over the next few days from friends at the campaign and in the White House as they did their public “distancing” acts. The White House wanted to kill this gaffe fast, even if their friend was collateral damage for a few days. Yes, do what you have to do, Rosen replied, though she did become annoyed at the total pile-on from so many top officials (Biden, Axelrod, Messina, etc.). Everyone assured her that she would be fine, if not enhanced, by the little dustup.

  And of course she was. Meet the Press invited her on the following Sunday—a first-class upgrade from her usual coach seat on CNN. She declined the offer, at the request of the White House, which preferred she lie low for a while. Then she appeared on ABC’s This Week for the first time a few Sundays later with a bunch of green room buddies that included Ralph Reed, the conservative Christian activist and former BFF to Jack Abramoff. @RalphReed tweeted out an adorable photo of himself and Hilary grinning together backstage, both of them good sports and great patriots.

  Rosen’s only real sin with the Ann Romney crack was to “provide an opening” for the other side to take up their umbrage guns. She also made a nice foil—outspoken lefty with Hollywood ties—and the Romney-bots knew they had Swing Voter Poison on their hands. They played the opening, won the cycle.

  And then it was over, like a brief bout of chicken pox. Everyone stopped “distancing themselves” from Hilary R. She was back being her hot-ticket persona at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner festivities the following week, someone who could get you into parties. At a party at the White House a few months later, Michelle Obama pulled Hilary aside in a receiving line, looked her in the eye, and said, “I’ve been thinking about you. Are you okay? Are WE okay?” Of course they were okay. It was never a question.

  • • •

  A few weeks after the Ann Romney slip, on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, Rosen joined other guests for the nuptials of NBC’s Betsy Fischer to Jonathan Martin of Politico—known as “JMart” within the Playbook community. Mike Allen himself officiated the wedding, held at an estate in Warrenton, Virginia, about an hour outside of Washington. In his toast to Jonathan and Betsy, Tom Brokaw, who had flown down from New York, dubbed theirs a union of the “two most powerful organizations in American political journalism,” Politico and NBC. “It’s . . . as if a member of the Gotti family married a member of the Gambino family,” Brokaw said, according to Allen, the wedding presider, who quoted extensively from the toast in the next day’s Playbook. “This is what our life, our culture, our country is all about,” Brokaw continued. “We’re awakened every day, these days, and reminded about what divides us. But this is what unites us: the idea that two people who care passionately about their country and about the political system that drives it, finding each other.”

  Brokaw wore his special TJR (Timothy J. Russert) tie to honor Jonathan and Betsy. The garments were made special by Vineyard Vines for a select few friends of Tim after he died nearly four years earlier. Has it really been a full cycle in the life of This Town without him?

  The TJR tie was adorned with little footballs and Nantuckets and Capitols—things Tim loved. Another thing Tim loved: Betsy. He was her patron, for whom she had worked for nearly two decades. “I remember the first time Tim began to tell me about Betsy and what a genius she was,” Brokaw said, “and how much she meant to him. And then we went through the emotional trauma of losing Tim, and Betsy and I formed our own bond.”

  Brokaw was good at events like this. Tribal speeches are a key medium. Now seventy-two, Brokaw had become the de facto absentee mayor of The Club after Tim’s death. He was the interim host of Meet the Press for a few months in 2008 until David Gregory prevailed in the beauty contest to succeed if never replace Russert.

  The show suffered a ratings slump through much of 2012, and rumors were flying about Gregory’s being removed. In fairness, it took years for Russert to become Russert, and Gregory—despite sometimes seeming as full of himself as many say he is—also has a reputation for wanting to improve, as a host and a person. Still, “the show’s in trouble and nobody likes Gregory,” one person identified as an “insider” told the iPad news service The Daily in an item that circulated fast through This Town after the Huffington Post played it big and linked to the story. Another insider provided the requisite “Tim Russert would be spinning in his grave” quote. (NBC slammed the story as “recklessly reported” and “categorically untrue,” and Gregory would eventually re-up as host of Meet the Press in early 2013.)

  Brokaw is one of the few people left who drew a Russert-level reverence in Washington. He actually did work on behalf of veterans, not just tweet about them on holidays. His mega-bestseller on World War II vets, The Greatest Generation, made Brokaw the go-to celebrant of vets in the same way Tim, via Big Russ and Me, became self-appointed ambassador to the glories of fatherhood.

  Brokaw spent most of his time at his ranch in Montana, with occasional cameos at big political to-dos, like the Iowa caucuses, political conventions, and debates. He tended to walk around with a wry, happy smile that indicated that he got a lot of inside jokes, not just the ones that everyone else did. He floated above at a venerable, self-amused reserve. He wore a hearing aide, though he claims it’s “a Viagra drip.”

  After the 2012 Correspondents’ Association dinner a month earlier, Brokaw did an interview with Howie Kurtz in which he bemoaned what the political-media culture had become. Americans, he said, had come to view the political system as a “closed game.” In addition, the media is now less concerned with being in tune with America than they are with promoting their own brands and worshipping celebrities. “It’s all ‘Look at Me,’ ‘Look at Me,’ ‘Look at Me,’” he said.

  The Correspondents’ Association dinner was the perfect symbol of all that the Washington media had become, Brokaw said: a towering exercise in hedonism and manufactured celebrity. It sent the messa
ge that nothing was more important than the people inside the ballroom—which is why tens of millions of dollars were being spent on their enjoyment over several days. Who would celebrate Washington if it didn’t celebrate itself? “I do feel strongly that it’s gone way too far,” Brokaw told Kurtz about the Correspondents’ Association dinner.

  At which point, Kurtz—rather remarkably—said to Brokaw, “Well, you’re a celebrity, I hope you’ll be my guest next year.” He laughed nervously.

  “I don’t go anymore,” Brokaw said, flashing the wry smile and then putting an even finer point on it. “If you go, it will steal your soul.”

  After the Kurtz interview, Brokaw said he received dozens of e-mails and notes praising his critique. Bob Schieffer, for his part, sent over a photo of himself with his date for the evening, the actress Claire Danes.

  At the end of his remarks for Betsy and Jonathan, Brokaw invoked the Other Almighty: Russert. Brokaw said he had some “religious artifacts” to share with the newlyweds. Brokaw’s wife, Meredith, a former Miss South Dakota, brought the artifacts up and held Tom’s mike while he presented them: his and her Buffalo Bills jerseys.

  • • •

  The unemployment rate still languished at 8.2 percent a few days later. It stoked fears that the short-lived appearance of an economic recovery was an illusory blip. The Times-Picayune, in New Orleans, announced that it would cease daily print publication, making New Orleans the first major city in America without a daily paper.

  But This Town’s particular political-media boom was in the midst of another abundant harvest. It was reported the day after Memorial Day that independent super PACs loyal to Romney would spend more than a billion dollars on ads depicting Obama in the most hideous of ways. The “mega-donors” behind the anti-Obama ads would be matched by comparable efforts on the other side. Between the independent groups and the Romney and Obama fund-raising machines, upwards of $2 billion was expected to pour into the empty-calorie economy of two men destroying each other. In this gluttonous contest, casino magnates and campaign hobbyists like Sheldon Adelson would blithely send more than $20 million in pocket change to prop up Newt Gingrich against Romney during the Republican primaries—and tens of millions more to help Romney beat Obama in the general. Meanwhile, back in the United States, the median net worth of an American family dropped to $77,300, which is about where it was in the early 1990s.

  Pundits and candidates of all stripes would bemoan this on TV, the influx of so much money into politics and the cynical messages both sides would fashion. But really, This Town loved the trickle-down payday of it all. Millions more poured to the ad makers, “strategists,” and networks. The Huffington Post reported that week that during the 2012 campaign the top 150 consulting companies had already grossed more than $465 million, a great deal of which had come from outside groups. One candidate would win, one would lose, and millions of political consumers would be freshly dispirited. But once again, this year more than ever, This Town would prevail in this peculiar battle of ideas.

  That week, the end of May, Romney would win enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination. This was treated as a classic breaking news–free event by the media. It marked, once again, the end of the “bruising primary battle” and the unofficial start of the general election campaign.

  President Obama made the customary I-wish-you-and-your-family-well phone call to Romney—“cordial,” no doubt—before the two men embarked on five more months of character assassination.

  • • •

  I made a determination sometime in the summer of 2012: I would hate to be one of those people who on his deathbed wished he had spent more time speculating about potential running mates. So I decided to throw myself into just that for several weeks, studying the possibilities of whom Mitt Romney might pick to be his vice president in the event he was elected in November.

  I had guessed Joe Biden correctly as the Democratic running mate last time, though I don’t think I ever made the prediction on cable, so it was not really official or boastworthy. A friend of Biden’s once told me that the eventual VP was wary of Barack Obama’s picking him to be his running mate because, as Biden said, “the minute you agree to be someone’s running mate, you get your balls cut off.” (The Biden pal who relayed this wished to remain anonymous for fear that Biden would cut his balls off.)

  Biden apparently has some manhood insecurities. It set him apart from pretty much zero male politicians in Washington, but he had a pronounced case of it. He loves to remind people that he did not have a boss for thirty-six years in the Senate. There he prided himself on being “my own man.” If he ever felt pressured to do something, he would tell aides and Senate colleagues that “my manhood is not negotiable.”

  I remember interviewing Biden around October 2008, after he had spoken to a rally in Maumee, Ohio. He was telling me the story of how he had been trying to reach John McCain, his longtime colleague in the Senate and now his general-election opponent. Biden was ticked off because he’d heard the McCain campaign, or some affiliate thereof, had been peddling some dirt on Biden’s grown daughter. McCain wasn’t taking his calls, so Biden tried to go see him backstage at a Clinton Global Initiative event they were both attending in New York. Biden told me that an aide tried to stop him at the entrance to McCain’s holding area. “But I said I’m going back anyway.” Biden added that he “expected to be treated with more respect” than that.

  I wrote a story about Biden in the spring of 2012, right around the time he got in trouble with the president for truthfully saying that he supported gay marriage. His people arranged for Secretary of State Clinton to speak to me on the phone to vouch for Biden. I expected the predictable few minutes of happy talk about how “Joe is great” this and “I love Joe” that. Both of us, the secretary and I, knew the drill.

  But then, to my surprise, Hillary slipped me this undercutting nugget on Uncle Joe: “Being a vice president is a little like being a first lady,” Clinton said. “You are there to support and serve the president.” Whoa. How deliciously, unexpectedly emasculating! And so completely on point to Biden’s bridesmaid insecurities. I quoted the line. I knew it would kick up some wise-guy intrigue: Was the Almighty trying to put the understudy in his place? Was she undermining Biden with an eye to running against him in the 2016 Democratic primaries? This would be all over Twitter, the blogs, instantly. This would be viral gold. For about twelve hours. And then This Town would be on to something else, embarked on a summer of masturbatory guesswork on whose balls Mittens would be excising if he got elected.

  After a while, I became bored with Veepstakes and decided to instead devote my energies to getting invited to Walter Isaacson’s annual Aspen Ideas Festival. Aspen—or “Walter’s Bar Mitzvah,” as it is known—is a nourishing group bath of Club members frolicking in the Rocky Mountain resort town. Held every summer, all the mob families—journalists, corporates, pols, operatives, formers, and hybrid squid—are stoutly represented. To my great shame, I have never been invited.

  But thanks to the ubiquity and diligence of Mike Allen, it was easy to get a vicarious taste of Aspen via Playbook. “Good Monday morning from the Aspen Ideas Festival—summer camp for D.C. and the Upper East Side,” Allen dispatched in early July. He called the ideas festival “an intellectual utopia where David Brooks is God, smoothies are free and ‘overparenting’ is a problem. Actual panel: ‘Why We Don’t Want Everyone to Go to Harvard.’”

  It has become quite easy to experience the magic of Aspen via the political media, which of course treats this high-minded spittle swap as an event of great national consequence. Andrea Mitchell did her show from there. “When we come back,” Andrea reported, “we are live in Aspen with the MAN HIMSELF, Mike Allen!”

  Allen, in turn, shared via Playbook his “ASPEN PICS,” which included one of “Alan Greenspan [hanging] out, waiting to take his bride to a long-delayed breakfast, as she broadcasts MSNBC’s
‘Andrea Mitchell Reports’ live from the DLA Piper Terrace at Aspen Meadows Resort, home of the Aspen Institute. That’s Charlie Cook kneeling to kibitz with Chairman Greenspan, Peter Orszag waiting for his hit.” Aside: Jeffrey Goldberg had the privilege this year of introducing former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to Barbra Streisand. “Ms. Streisand, I would like to have you come to Pakistan when I return to the country,” the retired general told Streisand. “Pakistan,” Barbra said to Goldberg as she walked away, “is that safe?”

  Not much was going on back in D.C. anyway, other than record heat—July was the hottest month ever recorded in the lower forty-eight states, beating a mark set during the Dust Bowl. The local Washington economy hummed right along as the country’s continued to sputter. It “uncomfortably calls to mind the rapacious Capitol in Suzanne Collins’s ‘Hunger Games’ series,” wrote David Leonhardt in the Times. He reported that the District of Columbia had sucked in more stimulus cash per capita than any state in the country. Its unemployment rate checked in at 5.7 percent in June, which compared with 9.3 percent in Chicago, 9.6 percent in New York, and 10.3 percent in Los Angeles. Gallup released a poll that rated Washington the most economically confident region of the United States.

  This economic abundance was a product of, among other things, the continued growth of government, the boom in lobbying, the tidal wave of money pouring into the campaigns and super PACs—not to mention the continued and sweaty orgy raging between corporate and political enterprise.

  The most maddening beneficiary was the ever-widening “failing upward” sector. Mark Penn, the Democratic pollster who ran the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller, was hired as a top executive at Microsoft—his longtime consulting client—in the summer of 2012. Penn had been best known recently as the chief strategist on Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. He was marked there as a singularly divisive figure and considered by many inside the campaign to be the main captain of that Hindenburg. He was also an exemplar of a familiar Washington success profile that contrasted with the more popular archetype of the class president smoothie. Penn was more of a social misfit type, probably teased as a youngster and picked last in gym. But he nonetheless forged a workable, or thriving, brand as a data-mad genius type—a parlay that was also common among revenge-of-the-nerds technology entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates.