This Town (32 page)

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 message 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.

•   •   •

T
he 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.

No one doubted that Penn, despite his failings, would retain his permanent meal ticket in Washington. After the Hillary fiasco, he returned to his CEO gig at one of the world’s biggest PR firms and somehow managed to retain guru status in the eyes of Bill and Hill. It helped that he was a first-class suck-up, which the Clintons were particularly susceptible to, especially in memo form. In a document that Penn wrote to Boss Hillary in 2006 (obtained by writer Joshua Green, published in the
Atlantic
), Penn flattered her with
a comparison to Margaret Thatcher and warned against excessive efforts by her other advisers to soften her persona. “A word about being human,” Penn wrote. “Bill Gates once asked me, ‘Could you make me more human?’ I said, ‘Being human is overrated.’”

In homage to Penn on the occasion of his heady flight to Microsoft, his Burson colleague Karen Hughes—the former top aide to George W. Bush—said this to Politico: “Mark brought great strategic insights and a strong focus on communications grounded in data that raised the bar for Burson’s work on behalf of our clients.”

A better summation of the D.C. reaction to Penn’s hiring by Microsoft was provided in a tweet by Politico’s Alexander Burns, channeling the company’s shareholders: “Sell!”

As Penn switched allegiances over to his new trough, other developments stirred through the poli-media pigpen.

• Ann Curry was dumped as a host of the
  Today
  show and replaced by Savannah Guthrie, NBC’s former White House correspondent and a favorite among so many of us in This Town. NBC billed Curry’s firing as a promotion into the hazy transitional role of “special correspondent.” She would “produce network specials”—typically a precursor to a formal, lucrative divorce settlement within the next year or so.
  
• Andy Griffith died at eighty-six in early July, “saddening” the president and first lady, needless to say, and Paul Begala tweeted something about how Heaven had just become “more neighborly.”
  
• Likewise, everyone was “saddened” and “deeply troubled” by the presidential campaign. It kept sucking worse and worse through the summer. The 2012 edition of the Democracy Show was the “worst I’ve ever seen,” according to whoever was writing John McCain’s tweets in the middle of August. “About as ugly as I’ve seen it get,” Brit Hume added on Fox News. Saddened, troubled.
  

Both the president’s reelection operation and Romney’s Boston-based wizards had reached twenty-seven declared “new lows” in the six weeks leading up to the two conventions (sources: each other). Neither candidate appeared to take any pleasure in campaigning for president. One exception on the periphery was Biden, who was the only thing resembling a happy warrior in this trench—though the Obama campaign was tempted to lock him in a basement at certain points.

Biden had one of his episodic accidents on the rug in August when he told a predominantly black audience that a President Romney would “put y’all back in chains.” This was an unfortunate metaphor that came in the context of a discussion about Romney “unshackling” the restraints that the Obama administration had placed on Wall Street. Biden was accused, of course, of “playing the race card” (because political rhetoric is merely one big card game, and the fraught purview of race relations is merely one card to be “played”).

But “put y’all back in chains” was one of Biden’s stupider remarks. Even his steadiest protector, Obama, just kind of shook his head over it and said, “What can you do?”