This Town (11 page)

Coburn never made it to Russert’s funeral. He doesn’t go to those kinds of things. “Sounded like a scene,” he said. Coburn compares Washington to a “parasitism.”

“It is one parasite feeding off another parasite feeding off another parasite,” he says. “The reason you attach yourself to someone else is so you can gain something yourself. Parasites don’t attack our intestines because they like the environment. That’s just the milieu in which they advance their livelihood. That might sound a little harsh. But in Washington if you can’t be connected, you can’t gain anything.”

4

The Entourage

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

E
RIC
H
OFFER
The Temper of Our Time

I
n February 2010, just as Obama’s health-care bill was about to pass, Washington’s divisions appeared irreparable as ever, and
the unemployment rate was approaching 10 percent, it was time for another party.

Tammy Haddad and a cast of admirers that included David Gregory and Jon Meacham threw a fortieth-birthday party for Betsy Fischer, the New Orleans‒bred and well-loved executive producer of
Meet the Press
.

The Tamster was going to host a Mardi Gras‒themed party at the home of a neighbor and close friend, the Democratic media consultant/former lobbyist/CNN pundit Hilary Rosen, in the Palisades neighborhood of Northwest D.C. But a snowstorm would have made things hard for the valet parkers on her dead-end street. Instead the bash was held at the Northwest home of the Democratic lobbyist Jack Quinn and his wife, Susanna. No one really worried about “the appearances” of this—what it might look like for a prominent lobbyist (who represented an array of health-care interests) to host an event for the executive producer of the beyond-reproach public affairs program—a party that several members of the anti-lobbyist Obama White House would attend. Oh, maybe a few people worried: a few NBC types and Obama invitees told me they felt funny about the thing and stayed away. But the bottom line was that Betsy deserved to be celebrated, and it was a great chance for everyone to enjoy Bourbon Street decor, jambalaya, and the warm stew of one another’s company.

Maybe Tammy was also a little worried about “appearances,” because a few hours before the party she sent out an e-mail to the guest list declaring the festivities “off the record,” which everyone either laughed at or ignored. But really: the gathering was intended as “a private party among friends,” an NBC flack explained. Tammy insisted later that the off-the-record provision was to keep away a nettlesome reporter for the local media website FishbowlDC, who she feared would crash the party and write snarky things about it.

Whatever, the turnout was a swell testament to Betsy and the multilateral interests who admire her: there were members of Congress, People on TV, and White House officials, all here together. I saw many people I knew, including a woman who used to be on TV but then went to the White House and then became a “strategic consultant” for someone, I forget who, and she asked me to follow her on Twitter, the new thing that everyone was suddenly talking about, which is like one giant Larry King/
USA Today
column, everyone “tweeting” random notions back and forth all day.

Everyone at the party seemed to be congratulating someone on a recent story, book deal, job, show, speech, or haircut. A photographer for
Washington Life
magazine immortalized the doings. Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren was chatting up David Axelrod next to a tower of cupcakes. In the basement, a bipartisan conga line was coursing through the room to a loud hip-hop song. Upstairs, Gregory took the floor and—along with Meacham—gave nice speeches about Betsy. Over by the jambalaya, Alan Greenspan picked up some Mardi Gras beads and placed them around the neck of his wife, Andrea Mitchell, who bristled and quickly removed them.

On the second floor, two “video journalists” from Politico
were pulling Notables aside and inviting them to hum the
Meet the Press
theme song to honor Betsy and the franchise she represented. One of the video journalists, Politico’s Patrick Gavin, asked some of the performers whether the turnout at the party was in fact a testament to Betsy or, more to the point, to the importance of getting invited back onto
Meet the Press
. Silly question, so cynical (“It’s because they love Betsy,” Hilary Rosen assured). When invited to hum the theme song, Bob Barnett looked into the camera and demurred, saying that it would be wrong for him to “endorse” one public affairs program over the others. So instead Bob sang his college fight song, “On, Wisconsin!” which was adorable.

Terry McAuliffe was there, too, even though he has had some issues with Jack Quinn over the years. Specifically, the Macker did not like how the former White House counselor had lobbied his former boss Bill Clinton to pardon Quinn’s client Marc Rich, a massive embarrassment to Clinton, who—did McAuliffe mention?—is also Terry’s best friend. The Macker arrived just as the former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, Jack Quinn’s former lobbying partner, was skipping out.

Terry and Eddie have become outstanding friends too. Everyone is outstanding friends, yes, but especially these two. They forged a “green room marriage” after years of doing televised talking-point tangling when they were party chairmen. They eventually became partners on the paid speaker’s circuit—top dog Democrat and Republican, going at it for entertainment’s sake and fifty grand a pop. Washington coming together, disagreeing without being disagreeable! “I love Terry,” says Gillespie, explaining his love-hate relationship with McAuliffe at the beginning of their dog-and-pony show, “and I hate myself for it.”

Gillespie, who began his career on Capitol Hill as a parking lot attendant, is always telling people that he has come to despise the Washington “scene” and the whole cult of celebrity that has grown up here in recent years. But he was here at Betsy’s party because he had been on
Meet the Press
many times and also out of loyalty to Jack Quinn, his dear friend and former business partner, whom he also met in a green room.

It was the late nineties, before a joint appearance on Fox News hosted by Bush’s future press secretary Tony Snow. Both Quinn and Gillespie came from working-class Irish Catholic backgrounds in New York (Quinn) and New Jersey (Gillespie) and were lured to Washington for their love of politics and for college (Quinn to Georgetown, Gillespie to Catholic University). They were both pugnacious but generally respectful on camera, congenial and knowing off-camera. A friendship developed. Eventually, so did a lobbying partnership: Quinn Gillespie & Associates, founded in 2000, was considered perhaps the first major bipartisan “one-stop-shopping” firm that was equally adept at lobbying well-placed members of both parties.

As a class, lobbyists are not beloved. The Obama campaign and subsequently the White House have done much to vilify them, which Quinn says he does not appreciate and somewhat resents. “We have families too,” he says. In Quinn’s case, six children (from three wives) and six grandchildren, who hear all these bad things being said about what Dad/Grandpa does for a living. It’s not fair, Quinn says: the perception that they are all as scuzzy as Jack Abramoff, the notorious Republican lobbyist who at the time was doing forty-three months for fraud and conspiracy.

“That was not the world I knew,” Quinn says of Abramoff’s high-rolling “Casino Jack” playground.

Quinn worked hard, for many years. He tried to restore his good name after Marc Rich. The Rich aftermath was brutal. Quinn wondered if people were looking at him when he walked into restaurants, what they were saying. Friends abandoned him. (“Washington is a place where no one takes friendship too personally,” Tony Snow used to say.) Once, during a really low moment at the height of the Rich crisis, Quinn drove off to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, just to get away. His phone rang. It was Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, a dear friend, whom he had come to know during his time as White House counsel. He was just calling to say he was thinking of Jack, who raised a lot of money for Dodd, as he does for a lot of other senators and congressmen. A parade of them wished Jack well in a birthday video that Susanna Quinn made when Jack turned sixty in 2009.

Jack has big red cheeks and a serene chuckle and sighs a lot. He started out in politics as a true-believing lefty for Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. He now conveys an aura of someone whose main objective is to not be hassled. He does not enjoy lobbying. He would prefer to write, or read, or play golf, or spend time at the ski lodge in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He has taken on side projects, which seem to excite him far more than discussing his core business: he joined the board of Blackwater Worldwide, the private military contractor whose hired-gun security forces kept killing civilians in Iraq, which created a bit of a branding headache for the firm. Blackwater eventually changed its name, twice, first to Xe, then to Academi, though most people still referred to it with some variation on “the company that used to be Blackwater before it changed its name, for obvious reasons.”

But Jack’s primary occupation remains as the head of Quinn Gillespie’s offices in Washington. He needs the money, he says—a lot of it—to support his six kids and two ex-wives and current wife, Susanna, with her specialists and the personal makeup artist who comes over before big parties and dinners. (“It’s the same makeup artist that does Michelle Obama,” Susanna mentions.)

So yes, Jack is still a lobbyist, and despite the terrible national economy and the lingering stench of Abramoff and the hostile new president, 2009 was the most profitable year ever for the profession:
special interests collectively spent $3.47 billion lobbying the federal government in 2009, compared with $3.3 billion the previous year.

Obama’s aggressive change initiatives were in fact a boon to lobbyists. Whenever there is complicated new legislation, there will be plenty of business for lobbyists. “Complication and uncertainty is good for us,” said the Democratic mega-lobbyist Tony Podesta, who speaks with a bug-eyed intensity leavened by frequent giggles at the ends of his sentences.

“
This agenda has been great for OUR economy,” a Republican lobbyist told the Huffington Post. “We get paid to get Republicans pissed off at Democrats, which they rightfully are. It’s the easiest thing in the world. It’s like getting paid to get you to love your mother.”

Quinn pointed out that Obama’s antilobbyist rap has merely driven a lot of the business underground, or at least into thin disguise. “There are a lot of people who have been registered to lobby for years who are now calling themselves ‘public affairs consultants’ or ‘strategic advisers,’” Quinn says. At the same time, Washington is now crawling with people who are not registered to lobby but who nonetheless get paid to advocate full-time for some business, organization, or industry agenda (either directly to a powerful official or via some PR work). In other words, they are engaged in lobbying even if their work does not meet the legal standard requiring them to register as lobbyists. This ilk is known around town as “unregistered lobbyists.”

In recent years, Quinn Gillespie had been trying, with limited success, to rebrand itself as “QGA Public Affairs,” in part to deemphasize its lobbying work. Another reason is that Gillespie hasn’t been involved with the firm for several years. He is closely associated with high-profile campaigns, as he was with the Romney campaign in 2012, and would perhaps launch his own campaign for governor of Virginia one day; having your name stuck on a lobbying firm these days isn’t exactly a great voter turn-on.

Even so, Jack and Ed talk all the time and remain the closest of friends. I once asked Quinn what appealed to him about Gillespie when they first started bonding in the bipartisan DMZ of the green room. “Ed got the joke,” explained Quinn. It was not immediately clear what he meant by “the joke.” What was the joke? Who was it on? Did it refer to the conceit that much of the Washington economy—lobbying, political consulting, and cable news—is predicated on the perpetuation of conflict, not the resolution of problems? Did “the joke” refer to the fact that all of the shouting partisanship that we see on television is just winking performance art? And in reality, off-air, everyone in Washington is joined in a multilateral conga line of potential business partners? What was “the joke”? I asked Quinn. “Ed and I both appreciate that everyone involved in the world in which we operate,” Quinn said, “is a patriot.”

•   •   •

H
e
re, I will step back and proffer a brief tutorial on the recent history of the Washington entourage:

The biggest shift in Washington over the last forty or so years has been the arrival of Big Money and politics as an industry. The old Washington was certainly saturated with politics, but it was smaller and more disjointed. There were small and self-contained political consultancies that worked on campaigns or raised money for elected officials or contracted a service (i.e., direct mail). PR people tried to promote a client’s interests in the media, while lobbyists did the same by engaging directly with government actors. But that “sector,” such as it was, typically comprised mom-and-pop operations. It looked outward with some level of fear and humility. It generated some wealth but not enough to make a discernible impact on the city, its culture, and its sensibilities.

Now those subindustries not only have exploded but have been folded under a colossal umbrella of “consulting” or “government affairs.” “
No single development has altered the workings of American democracy in the last century so much as political consulting,” Jill Lepore wrote in the
New Yorker
. “In the middle decades of the twentieth century, political consultants replaced party bosses as the wielders of political power gained not by votes but by money.”

Over the last dozen years, corporate America (much of it Wall Street) has tripled the amount of money it has spent on lobbying and public affairs consulting in D.C. Relatively new businesses such as the Glover Park Group—founded by three former Clinton and Gore advisers—provide “integrated services” that include lobbying, public relations, and corporate and campaign consulting. “Politics” has become a full-grown and dynamic industry, a self-sustaining weather system all its own. And so much of its energy is directed inward.

Whenever there is an aura of money and power, an entourage grows up, and that is what’s happened in D.C. For much of the last century, the notion of a permanent D.C. was a handful of power brokers embodied by Clark Clifford. Clifford, an adviser to four presidents, was the town’s original Beltway superlawyer and wise eminence—at least until he was indicted for bank fraud. They also included a few “celebrity journalists” like James “Scotty” Reston of the
New York Times
and Jack Nelson of the
Los Angeles Times
. But the political entourage was not an industry on a par with Hollywood or Wall Street. Nor were they packaged like celebrities, with pictures splashed on blogs, stories blasted out on Twitter, and agents working multiplatform deals.