This Town (29 page)

“And ‘fickle,’” he wrote, “is a nice way of describing the voters of 2012, who appear to be wandering, confused and Forrest Gump–like, through the experience of a presidential campaign. It isn’t just unclear which party’s vision they’d rather embrace; it’s entirely questionable whether the great mass of voters has even the most basic grasp of the details—or for that matter, the most elementary factual components—of the national political debate.”

Yes, “fickle” is being kind. The first quote in the story was from a Democratic pollster, Tom Jensen, who neatly distilled Burns’s premise: “The first lesson you learn as a pollster is that people are stupid,” he said.

Burns, a twenty-something graduate of Harvard, drew righteous flack for his story. Erik Wemple, the media critic of the
Washington Post
, said parts of it belonged in “the Beltway Snobbery Hall of Fame” and suggested it should have been titled “Why aren’t voters as brilliant as Politico
staffers?”

“An incredibly long and unbearably daft piece,” is how Jason Linkins, a media writer for the Huffington Post, characterized it in a column headlined “Are Voters Really Stupid, or Are They Just Routinely Subjected to Terrible Political Reporting?” Linkins summed up the conceit of Burns’s “turgid pile of condescension” this way: the electorate is “made up of a big shambling pack of helpless dumbasses, who would obviously be utterly adrift in their hopeless lives without Politico
being around to occasionally mansplain things to them.”

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.

•   •   •

I
n 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.