A few days later, This Town was again abuzz over the news that South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, the Senate’s most celebrated spending hard-liner, had bolted for a $1 million-plus-a-year gig at the Heritage Foundation. The following week, my colleague Carl Hulse ran into former Democratic senator Christopher Dodd at a movie screening at the I Street offices of the Motion Picture Association of America, the powerful film lobby Dodd now runs. “Boy, DeMint really cashed in,” Carl said to the former Peace Corps volunteer. “He might be making more than you.”
“No, he’s not,” Dodd replied, laughing. “I checked.”
@howardfineman: Happy Thanksgiving. Much to be thankful for: family, friends and freedom in a country that, tho flawed, remains the best hope of mankind.
After everyone was done giving thanks, a troupe of Club members field-tripped to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend a quadrennial postelection debrief at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. The exercise, which had taken place after every presidential election since 1972, featured the masterminds of all the presidential campaigns and dozens of well-credentialed journalists.
Both the Obama and Romney teams fielded eight presenters, lined up along two tables facing each other. It was a weird scene: the winning team trying (not perfectly) to hide their smugness, while the losers tried to conceal their unhappiness at having to do this not even three weeks from a bitter defeat. Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager, kept flexing his cheeks and mouth into what looked like grins but were in fact full-faced grimaces. On the same day, Obama hosted Romney at the White House for the traditional “Let’s everyone be gracious” ritual.
The entire Kennedy School exercise seemed wholly forced and somewhat superfluous. Many of the self-preserving insiders had already unburdened themselves in real time via Twitter and to the various e-book authors. Late in the afternoon of one of the final sessions, much of Cambridge—including the building where the event was held—lost power. The participants kept right on talking in the dark until the sun went down outside and the event organizers canceled the rest of the program. Everyone then repaired to various taverns.
I headed to Charlie’s Kitchen, a dive across the street in Harvard Square, and walked in right behind David Axelrod, who promptly received a standing ovation from the packed college bar. A mob scene of congratulations, free beers, and photo requests ensued. He got this everywhere, apparently, as did the other Obama derivatives. But not like Axelrod did. He was the most recognizable folk hero of the Obama juggernaut. Since the political class began treating recognizable consultants as demigods, every winning campaign had one or two—Karl Rove for Bush, Begala and Carville for Clinton. But Axelrod’s über-aide status in the media was a source of some resentment among certain campaign and White House insiders. He was no longer the sacred cow inside the Obama orbit that he was when the magical ride to the White House began. Some colleagues—many of them loyal to Valerie Jarrett—believed he had become increasingly mindful of cultivating his public profile with an eye to his post-Obama celebrity life.
In the final days of the campaign, Axelrod went on Morning Joe and vowed to shave off his moustache of forty years if Obama happened to lose Michigan, Minnesota, or Pennsylvania, as the Romney campaign was suggesting he might. Such public wagers were once the province of the principals themselves—think Super Bowl bets between opposing mayors. Now, in the age of the celebrity operatives, the aides themselves had become central to the antic action. Even a duo of lower-wattage aides—DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse and his RNC counterpart, Sean Spicer—bet that the losing flack would have to shave his head, and the denouement was deemed sufficiently interesting for ABC’s esteemed Sunday show This Week to broadcast it live. Both Spicer and Woodhouse wound up getting buzz-cut together, for charity—vowing to raise $12,000 for a cancer group.
Even though Obama won all of the appointed states, Axelrod agreed to get his moustache shaved on Morning Joe anyway, provided Joe and Mika could help raise $1 million for David and his wife Susan’s foundation for epilepsy research, CURE. And they did, with help from celebrity donors like George Clooney, Tom Hanks, and billionaire Donald Trump, who in the course of the campaign had fully devolved from being merely a garish curiosity to a nativist laughingstock.
But through his generous contribution, the Donald could enjoy a sweet morsel of image rehab on national TV, and he called in to Morning Joe to share a telephonic hug with Axelrod as the latter got his ’stache slashed for a good cause. I cannot emphasize enough that this was a good cause. David and Susan Axelrod, who have been through hell with their daughter Lauren’s disability, have done heroic work. “I will pull every lever I can to get people to contribute to this cause,” Axelrod told me. “I don’t apologize for it. And I’m not going to spend any energy trying to get into Donald Trump’s head and wonder about his motives. It was a generous gesture, and I appreciated it.”
The ongoing spectacle, however, was beginning to draw some “Enough already” whispers around This Town, especially as many worthy causes and charities were struggling to raise five figures at their end-of-year benefits. To go even remotely public with this skepticism was asking for trouble, as Greg Sargent, a blogger for the Washington Post learned. On the day of the Morning Joe thing, Sargent tweeted, “Am I alone in not caring at all about @davidaxelrod’s ‘stache’?” Apparently he WAS alone, based on the hostile return-fire, and Sargent reversed course immediately.
With its enviable position on the political-celebrity-media axis, CURE continued to reap a symbiotic bounty. On the night after Axelrod’s Morning Joe shave, Tammy hosted another big party in Washington for CURE. I spent a good portion of it talking college basketball with Luke Russert, who, in the four years since his father died, had become a fixture on the Hill as MSNBC’s chief congressional correspondent. He had taken a fair amount of grief, too, for the obvious reasons—“the Nepotist Prince,” Salon called him—and I’ll cop to my share of aspersion initially too. But Luke won me over by keeping his head down and working hard to surmount a doubly tough circumstance: losing his best friend/dad and then grinding through a prematurely big job while half the city snarked over his hiring. He had a good sense of humor for his situation and for the parasitic environment he grew up in, not to mention for the swarming opportunists on the Hill who would try to get all sincere with him by invoking his dad.
Otherwise, Tammy’s epilepsy gig was a thoroughly familiar scene in an era now extended four more years: Georgetown manse, valet parking, buffet table, and a whole lot of Tammy. Joe Biden showed up and spoke for twenty minutes in that hushed and intimate way he does. There were many jokes, as one might imagine, about Axelrod’s moustache being gone. Democratic superlobbyist Heather Podesta and Republican media consultant/CNN contributor Alex Castellanos co-chaired the event.
Castellanos revealed that night that he, too, would shave his moustache if CURE could recruit an additional 500 donors in December—another reminder that there is no shame in Washington, only charity.
It also, to be sure, did not hurt Brand Alex to be so publicly involved with such a beyond-reproach pursuit, or that of Purple Strategies, his “full-service public affairs firm,” which itself had performed heroic image-buffing work on behalf of many companies in need—like BP after the Gulf spill.
On December 10, I received a blast e-mail from Castellanos in which he announced his offer. It appeared under the bizarre subject heading “David Axelrod Nude,” which grabbed my attention, and also that of my spam filter. “Everyone comes to Washington to change the world,” Castellanos wrote. “We all want to do something that matters.” He urged all of us to donate to CURE, not just for the great cause, but also for the sweetener of getting to see a marquee Republican pundit/consultant get his moustache shaved live on CNN’s Situation Room. In conjunction, Axelrod sent out an e-mail appeal directly to eighty-eight political reporter friends seeking donations. (There might have been more, though the e-mail was sent to eighty-eight addre
sses—not mine, but I received a forwarded copy.)
“Thanks for what you’re doing,” host Wolf Blitzer told Axelrod and Castellanos during a joint appearance on the show that night, a link to which was featured on the website for Purple Strategies.
• • •
Now safely victorious in the election, many top Obama officials were preparing to move on from the campaign and White House and were eager to unburden themselves of more lingering grievances. A prime target was Jarrett, the enduring confidante to the president and first lady, whom many members of Obama’s inner circle never had much use for. Her clashes with Robert Gibbs and Rahm Emanuel were well documented in the various book and magazine treatments of the first team.
My Times colleague Jo Becker wrote a profile of Jarrett that was published in September 2012. It included such tidbits as Jarrett ordering a drink from a four-star general she believed was a waiter. The anecdotes followed the theme of Jarrett becoming too enamored of the trappings of power, such as her full Secret Service detail. Jarrett was exercised over the story, she told colleagues, and was particularly galled over a quotation from Axelrod that addressed the management complications of having a senior adviser in the White House who is essentially part of the First Family. “There is an inherent challenge in managing anyone, this is not particular to Valerie, who is a senior adviser and part of a structure, and also close personally with the family,” said Axelrod. “Obviously it’s cleaner and less complicated if everyone is discussing things at the same meetings. But it’s a manageable problem.”
After Becker’s story ran—and a few weeks after the election—a top Obama aide forwarded me a set of confidential talking points that were circulated through the West Wing when Becker was reporting her story. The memo, written by deputy press secretary Jamie Smith, was titled “The Magic of Valerie.” It included an unrelenting thirty-three talking points, none of which contained the term “manageable problem.”
The magic of Valerie is her intellect and her heart. She is an incredibly kind, caring and thoughtful person with a unique ability to pinpoint the voiceless and shine a light on them and the issues they and the President care about with the ultimate goal of making a real difference in people’s lives.
Valerie is the perfect combination of smart, savvy and innovative.
Valerie has an enormous capacity for both empathy and sympathy. She balances the need to be patient and judicious with the desire to get things done and work as hard as possible for the American people from the White House.
To know what both drives Valerie Jarrett and why the President values her opinion so much, you benefit greatly from really getting to know the woman.
Valerie is very tapped in to people’s experiences, their good times and bad. She knows from her own life what it is like to believe and strive for your dreams.
Valerie expects people to work their hearts out for the President and never forget where you work and the magnitude.
Single mother, woman working to the top in a competitive male dominated world, African American, working for change from grassroots to big business.
(My personal favorite “Magic of Valerie” bullet point is the one where we learn that “Valerie is someone here who other people inside the building know they can trust. (need examples.”)
• • •
Jarrett was viewed by many inside as the true custodian of the president’s interest, and brand, or as someone who wanted to be viewed that way. “The voice of purity” rap against her from some colleagues reflected the self-righteousness she could project. But Jarrett’s defenders inside, and she had many, said that her effectiveness was based largely on her indifference to cultivating the press or concern about how she was viewed outside of the president’s orbit. “I’ve lived in Washington a long time,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the White House domestic policy adviser and a close ally of Jarrett’s. “You can spot, especially in this building, somebody who has one eye on their work and one eye on their next career move. Valerie is not one of those people. She is not trying to construct a next big thing for herself.”
Another Jarrett loyalist pointed out that during the reelection campaign, many Obama advisers seemed to be auditioning for post-election broadcast jobs. It created a dynamic in which aides would be competing with one another to get on TV—ostensibly vying for better positions in the same pundit class they made such a show of running against four years earlier. Jarrett never partook of this, said the aide, who also noted that Axelrod and Gibbs both signed substantial deals as contributors with MSNBC within a few months of the election; Plouffe, who railed against the “jackals” in the media in 2008, joined Bloomberg Television as a contributor and strategic adviser; and Politico’s Dylan Byers reported that Stephanie Cutter was talking to CNN about cohosting a relaunched version of Crossfire, the high-decibel debate show. Her conservative counterpart would be Newt Gingrich.
In early 2013 I visited Jarrett in her White House office to discuss some of the palace intrigue of the first term. She seemed completely bored by the proposition. She betrayed no defensiveness and a hint of smugness at having outlasted her detractors. The president was ensconced in the White House for another four years and many people expected Jarrett would stay at his side right through to January 2017. She kept steering the conversation about internal dynamics into the present tense, which of course carried a slap at some former colleagues. “If you talk to people who are here now, I think you’d hear people say that we have a great team, that it’s collaborative,” Jarrett said. Her overriding message seemed to be that she was still here, had learned to rise above “the parlor games,” and had outlasted her riff-raff. She spoke in an even, high-pitched voice and kept shrugging her shoulders. “This town will break your heart,” Jarrett said. “But you can’t let it.” And she shrugged her shoulders again for emphasis, or non-emphasis.
14
The Last Party
December 2012
Early on the Thursday night before Christmas, traffic was stacked up in a honking mess at the valet station on N Street, in front of Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn’s. There, in the rain, was another reminder, if one was again needed, that the movie-set streets of Georgetown were designed for bygone vehicles.
Across town on Capitol Hill, dignitaries had just finished paying respects to another bygone vehicle, Senator Daniel Inouye, the eighty-eight-year-old Democrat of Hawaii, who died a few days earlier. Colleagues praised their war-hero friend in the usual “quiet dignity,” “respect for the institution,” “disagreed without being disagreeable” ways. As mourners filed past the casket perched atop the Lincoln catafalque, everyone marked another somber recollection of the proverbial “bipartisan era that once was.”
A week earlier, a gunman had slaughtered twenty-six people—twenty of them kids—at a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school. Even by our uncomfortably numb routine of mass slaying aftermaths, this one stole your breath. Obama delivered what might have been the best speech of his presidency in Connecticut. He read the first names of the kids and made me cry.
Yet everyone knew this would all default soon enough into the familiar Kabuki. And a few days later, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, gave a rambling press conference that was ridiculed by solemn commentators, gun-control Democrats, and a growing class of hand-wringing/self-hating Republicans. It made everyone feel better to ridicule, to feel superior to, the gun nut at the podium, never mind that his NRA still had at least half of Washington by the gonads, and that Obama was conceding privately that there was probably nothing he could do to change gun laws in any major way—as was eventually borne out.
But the outrage Obama channeled was powerful, or felt powerful. As often happens here, much of the outrage turned inward. This Town was having one of its periodic “We’re not worthy of this historical moment” moments. It happens every few months, usually when some predictable circus greets a legitimate
crisis. Another was unfolding simultaneously on Capitol Hill as Republicans were blowing up a proposal that Speaker Boehner had floated to stop the “looming fiscal cliff” fiasco. By eight p.m. on the rainy Thursday night before Christmas, news came down that Boehner had adjourned the House for the holidays, and the city’s center of gridlock shifted to the clogged streets of Georgetown, in front of Ben and Sally’s Federal-style Laird-Dunlop House.
This was not just any party. It was “The Last Party,” as Sally Quinn had billed the much-anticipated get-together. The evite landed a few weeks earlier. Nearly everyone who’d received one thought initially that The Last Party referred to some special parting hurrah for the great Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, Sally’s husband, the Washington Post’s balls-out editor during the Watergate era and beyond. At ninety-one, Ben finally seemed to be reaching his last legs. He had been forgetting names and faces, appeared confused much of the time, and was less than his spit-brass self. “Not doing well” was the phrase. “Dementia” was the word, whispered. Sad. Could Ben’s be This Town’s next mega-funeral? Could this tribal assembly be a kind of “pre-game,” as Politico might call it?
Like so many in This Town, I revered Ben, whom it was of course always fashionable to revere, but I really did. I fell in love with the Jason Robards version, the dashing fire-breather he presented in his memoir, A Good Life, in which he told of his unbridled newspaper adventures with no hint of the preening insecurity that defines so much of the business today. A lot of Ben was bravado, maybe exaggerated and sprinkled in the potent mythmaking powder of Hollywood and history. But he embodied a spirit and a newspaper that wanted, more than anything, to have impact—and that actually did have impact: a White House brought down, history diverted. Who had impact now, really? Who even remembered who won last year’s Pulitzers, or last month’s ratings, or last week’s top Sunday morning “gets”? It all can feel so fleeting and entangled, and often at the same time.
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