Mark Leibovich: ESTj (LSE-Si?) [Normalizing subtype] (LSE-Fi?) [ESTj-INFj?]


- from THIS TOWN: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital by Mark Leibovich; p. 9: Being the seat of the federal government, which isn’t moving anywhere, has usually ensured a baseline of economic stability. But in recent years Washington has defied the national economic slump and become the richest metropolitan area in the country. Getting rich has become the great bipartisan ideal: “No Democrats and Republicans in Washington anymore, only millionaires,” goes the maxim. The ultimate Green party. You still hear the term “public service” thrown around, but often with irony and full knowledge that “self-service” is now the real insider play.


- p. 10: No matter how disappointed people are in their capital, even the most tuned-in consumers have no idea what the modern cinematic version of This Town really looks like. They might know the boilerplate about “people who have been in Washington too long,” how the city is not bipartisan enough and filled with too many creatures of the Beltway. But that misses the running existential contradictions of D.C., a place where “authenticity and fantasy are close companions,” as the Washington Post’s Henry Allen once wrote. It misses that the city, far from being hopelessly divided, is in fact hopelessly interconnected. It misses the degree to which New Media has democratized the political conversation while accentuating Washington’s insular, myopic, and self-loving tendencies. It misses, most of all, a full examination of how Washington may not serve the country well but has in fact worked splendidly for Washington itself—a city of beautifully busy people constantly writing the story of their lives.


- pp. 12-13: In the words of Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, today’s Washington has become a “permanent feudal class,” a massive, self-sustaining entity that sucks people in . . . . It can turn complex, gifted, and often damaged individuals into hollowed-out Kabuki players acting in the maintenance of their fragile brands.



- p. 11: I also plead optimism: If Washington, D.C., is a civic lab rat of the Nation Exaggerated—all good and petty tendencies concentrated into a few monument-bedecked square miles—then we want to believe that what goes on here can be a flattering microcosm, right? It might not be at a given moment or decade, and surveys show an overwhelming majority of Americans judge Washington to be a mortifying perversion of national ideals. But as Barack Obama proved in 2008, hope can be a powerful force, if not necessarily sustainable (as Obama also proved).





- pp. 24-25: “John McCain, pulling up,” the soundman says. The soon-to-be GOP nominee pops out of a limo. He is in a period of transition from disruptive figure (beloved within This Town as a balm to the everyday bullshit) to a more cautious and smartly saluting standard-bearer of the party he once tormented. I last saw McCain on his campaign plane a few months earlier, just before he was fitted with his nominee’s straitjacket. He volunteered to me that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman seated nearby, “has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands” and that she earned it by “dealing drugs.” She was also “Pat Buchanan’s illegitimate daughter,” “bipolar,” “a drunk,” “someone with a lot of boyfriends” and who was “just out of Betty Ford.” Everyone misses this man.



- pp. 41-45: Obama himself possessed a post-ironic detachment from politics that was true to his personality. Whenever he lapsed into shtick, a behavioral category that incorporated much of what politicians do in public, it was with an implicit nod to the game transpiring. He was playacting, in other words, and he wanted you to know that he knew it.

In early 2005, shortly after his election to the U.S. Senate, I interviewed Obama in his temporary office in the basement of a Senate office building. He and [Robert] Gibbs were sprawled in identical postures like frat brothers watching football. They were pushing the message that Obama was no prima donna. Obama, they kept reminding me, had already sat through countless town meetings in Illinois and committee hearings on Capitol Hill. What a trouper he was! The article I wrote poked gentle fun at Obama for his and Gibb’s zealous efforts to show how unzealous Obama was about climbing the ladder. “Jeez, was it really that obvious?” Obama said to me when I ran into him and Gibbs on Capitol Hill a few weeks later. “Nice going there, Gibbs,” Obama said, pretending to smirk.

As I just demonstrated, a favorite flaunt among political insider types is to advertise how far they go back with Obama—maybe to Springfield, Illinois, or (if you’re supercool) some Indonesian sandbox. It’s a form of currency, or status marker, in the same way that people in Silicon Valley love to talk about how they used to hang out with Sergey Brin back in his Stanford days, before he cofounded Google.

Here is my less-than-awesome offering about when I first met my old pal Barry:


It was when he was a U.S. Senate candidate at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, on the eve of the keynote address that would propel his stardom. Obama’s flight had arrived from Springfield at four a.m. and he was awake at six to do Meet the Press, then Face the Nation, then CNN’s Late Edition. And now he was being forced to endure a reception hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus on a cruise ship docked in Boston Harbor. People kept coming up to the young state senator, saying how excited they were to hear his speech, how they had donated to his campaign, and whatnot; and Obama, as a mantra, kept telling everyone that he just needed a nap. It was the opposite of those politicians—Bill Clinton—who draw energy from crowds.


Like any deft officeholder/seeker, Obama can nod his head and knit his eyebrows and look interested in almost anything. He can glide from conversation to conversation, room to room, but he will sometimes sigh too audibly and tighten his face in a manner that betrays the look of a man too eagerly en route to forty winks. “I can stagger through receptions with the best of them,” he boasted to me before mentioning again that he needed a nap.


Obama appears immune to the neediness that afflicts so many politicians. Any attempt to win his favor through praise was futile, or counterproductive. This air of above-it-all confidence was also evident among Obama’s top advisers. They were a cohesive and devoted group who often evinced the temperament of loners. Like Obama, they possessed a quiet sense that the prevailing social lubricants of politics—the sycophancy, the gossip, and the cloying salesmanship—were not just distasteful but pathetic.

In a deeper sense, there was an implicit belief among the Obama people that Washingtonians constituted one of the most insincere collectives in the world. To them, members of The Club were like playactors performing weird pantomimes of the sort no one in, say, Chicago would engage in. The Obama people declared themselves consistently above the “insider Washington” game.

But “insider Washington” is much larger than it used to be, to a point where it becomes inescapable. The elite dinner party salons of Georgetown used to include a revolving class of a few hundred power brokers, wealthy socialites, and current and former members of Congress, cabinets, and White House staffs, along with a smattering of ambassadors and big-shot journalists. Today’s insider Washington has become a sprawling “conversation” in which tens of thousands partake by tweet, blog, or whatever. Jail break in the peanut gallery. Standards of local “celebrity” have dropped through the floor. The birthdays of junior Hill staffers are generally given equal weight to the president’s in Mike Allen’s Playbook. In other words, Washington is a much bigger swirl of mashed potatoes than it ever used to be—and it has never seemed smaller.


In the local literary tradition, such as it is, Washington is said to mimic high school. Meg Greenfield, the longtime editorial page editor of the Washington Post, loved and nurtured the notion, as did the New York Times columnist Russell Baker and a clique of others. The cliché is apt, to a point. There are plenty of bullies and nerds here. Familiar tableaus, like the floor of the Senate and the White House briefing room, are set up like classrooms. Congress goes out on “recess.” It also provides a useful frame for some inescapably high schoolish characters. “No one who has ever passed through American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent,” Joan Didion wrote in her book of political essays, Political Fictions. In a Rolling Stone profile of John McCain set during the 2000 presidential campaign, David Foster Wallace described the then maverick Republican as a “varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates.” McCain’s actual nickname in high school was “Punk.”


Eager-to-please crossing-guard types are certainly drawn to Washington in large proportions. Lone wolves don’t do as well here as in, say, the market-gaming Wild West of Wall Street or misfit genius labs of Silicon Valley. “Loners may be able to sell themselves electorally at home,” Greenfield wrote in her civic memoir, Washington. “But they cannot win in Washington, no matter how bad or good they are. Winning here means winning people over—sometimes by argument, sometimes by craft, sometimes by obsequiousness and favors, sometimes by pressure and sometimes by a chest-thumping, ape-type show of strength that makes it seem prudent to get with the ape’s program.”

But the high school comparison breaks down in the modern version of This Town. For one thing, Washington—like high school—used to be a transient culture. People would expect to graduate eventually or drop out. But almost no one leaves here anymore. Better to stay and monetize a Washington identity in the humming self-perpetuation machine, where people not nearly as good as Tim Russert or the Obama dynamos can make Washington “work for them.”

Quaint is the notion of a citizen-politician humbly returning to his farm, store, or medical practice back home after his time in public office is complete. “One thing our founding fathers could not foresee was a nation governed by professional politicians who had a vested interest in getting reelected,” Ronald Reagan said in 1973. “They probably envisioned a fellow serving a couple of hitches and then looking forward to getting back to the farm.”

Obama often told friends that, like Ronald Reagan, it was important for him to convey a message of a candidate who did not need the job of president. He wanted it known that he derived none of the psychic gratification that so many others seek in public life. When he was in the Senate, Obama once instructed a colleague to “shoot me” if he ever wound up staying in Washington after he left office.

One friend of Obama’s says that the president despises the “derivative culture of D.C.,” meaning that people become defined by their proximity to other people and institutions. The presidency is a popular target for those seeking derivative status. People glom on to it in some way, emphasizing their own connection as if that makes them, too, a bit presidential. The Las Vegas wedding of Ed Henry, who covered the White House for CNN and later Fox News, featured a cake that was a seventy-pound replica of the White House.

Over time, people achieve a psychic fusion to their public personas and their professional networks. The essence of self becomes lost, subsumed in a flurry of Playbook mentions and high-level name-drops. Self becomes fused with brands, and brands with other brands.



- pp. 57-60: . . . “Resist the gold rush,” went the mantra inside the new White House. The rising unemployment numbers and collapsing banks should make it easy to remain humble. Or not. Washington was fat and the love was abundant for the refreshed White House, home to what the new social secretary Desiree Rogers called “the best brand on earth: the Obama brand” in the Wall Street Journal. “Our possibilities are endless.”

The new administration made dozens of White House staffers available to the New York Times Magazine for a shiny photo essay on “Obama’s People.” It placed the staffers very much on-limits as extensions of the Obama brand. Rogers and Valerie Jarrett, a top presidential adviser and a close first family confidante, posed for a glamorous cover shoot in an exclusive “White House Insiders” edition of the thick-aged Capitol File magazine. It was a terrific play for Brand Valerie and Brand Desiree. But top aides to Obama were appalled that staffers would partake of such an ostentatious display, especially in such a frighteningly bad economy. (Jarrett told me later, “If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t have done that.”)

In a broader sense, the spectacle triggered suspicion that certain “White House insiders” were enjoying their newfound celebrity a bit too much and that Team Obama would be just the latest enterprise to campaign against Washington, only to quickly succumb to post-election charms. “Everyone here has been warm and welcoming and inclusive,” Jarrett told Capitol File. “There hasn’t been a person I’ve met who hasn’t said ‘Welcome to Washington,’ and you get the feeling they actually mean it.”

Whether they did mean it or not, Washington sucked up every crumb of “insight” on the Obama brand. The appetite was insatiable, evidenced by the items the new-media faucet kept spewing forth.


• Within the first weeks of the new presidency, Politico “broke” the story that the president’s aides sang “Happy Birthday” to the assistant press secretary, Nick Shapiro!


• And surprised him with a chocolate cake!

• And also that deputy White House press secretary Jen Psaki “was in her pajamas” when her boyfriend made dinner for her and proposed marriage!


• The Washington Examiner reported that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was spotted “getting money at the SunTrust Bank in the Safeway on the corner [of] 17th St. and Corcoran St. NW”!


• Reggie Love, Obama’s personal aide, was declared the winner of the Huffington Post’s “Who’s the White House’s hottest employee?” contest (not to be confused with the “Hottest Obama Hottie” contest that ran on Gawker.com in January, in which Mr. Emanuel triumphed)!


• The Wall Street Journal scooped the nugget that the White House Office of Management and Budget chief, Peter Orszag, enjoys Diet Coke!


In other news, the country still faced two wars and an economic crisis.









- pp. 69-71: Entrusted with a Senate supermajority and endowed with all the magnetism of a dried snail, Harry Reid owned the beleaguered face of change in 2009.

But the opening scene, at least mine—because I was in the room!—played out a few years before, on Election Night of 2006, the night Democrats regained control of the House and Senate for the first time since 1994.

Reid, then the Senate minority leader, and Chuck Schumer, who had run the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee, were watching returns in a suite at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill. The Felix-and-Oscar pair—Reid a hush-voiced Mormon from Searchlight, Nevada, and Schumer a bombastic Jew from Brooklyn—was becoming more and more silly as the night wore on. At one point Schumer, whose chin was smeared with mustard in two distinct splotches, exploded off the couch. CNN was calling the close Missouri Senate race for Democrat Claire McCaskill.

“Yeah,” Schumer grunted out through his food, holding two fists over his head.

Reid, a man of thoroughgoing cynicism, is nonetheless capable of a boyish hullabaloo at times like this. So what did Harry Reid do to mark this key step in his ascent to Senate majority leader? He rose from the couch and he kissed the TV—tenderly, caressing the screen. And then he sat back down to receive from Schumer something between a pat on the head and a noogie.

Reid then started placing congratulatory calls to the Democrats who had won. None of the calls exceeded thirty seconds, and each was punctuated by a variant of “I love you.” Reid professed his love to Senator Kent Conrad, who was reelected in North Dakota (“Love you, man”), Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Hillary Clinton in New York, who told Reid she loved him back.

I was standing a few feet away from the couch, sanctioned that night by Reid and Schumer to be a “fly on the wall,” a journalistic practice that is both a cliché and a misnomer: no one notices an actual fly on the wall while everyone is fully mindful of the maggot reporter taking notes. But these moments can be revealing, especially in the midst of such punch-drunk victories. Reid must have detected my amusement at the “I love yous,” which he explained to me matter-of-factly. “They need to hear that,” he said.


“They” are political people. And Reid, their leader, a former Nevada gaming commissioner, parcels out love like casino chips. Whether it is real love or pseudo love doesn’t quite matter. Love is gold currency in the rolling transaction of politics, a game played by the nation’s most ambitious and insecure class. In his stooped and unassuming and easy-to-miss way, no one understands this better than Harry Reid.


A few months later, Reid showed up on the Senate floor to hear John Kerry announce that he would not run for president again in 2008. It was a difficult moment for Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee who was now shedding an ambition he appeared to have held since kindergarten. Just before the 2006 midterms, Kerry had acquired a nasty case of political cooties after attempting a laugh line about the war in Iraq—never a good idea—which many construed as a knock against U.S. soldiers. Now Kerry was making this heavy announcement to a near-empty chamber that included only Reid and Kerry’s fellow Massachusetts senator, Ted Kennedy. After Kerry finished, Reid, who was standing next to him, gave Kerry a hug and said a few words for the record.


“He is one of those people who meant so much to me,” Reid said of Kerry, belying the scorn he had expressed to others for the lanky Bay Stater over many years. Reid had observed privately to colleagues that Kerry had no friends. No matter: Reid was John Kerry’s friend today, publicly, and it felt nothing but sincere.

“So I say to John Kerry,” Reid concluded, “I love you, John Kerry.”

Kerry nodded slowly and appeared to choke back tears.



- pp. 59-65: White House officials were quite eager to share with me how ambivalent they all were about their quasi-celebrity. Some acknowledged a tension between living up to the administration’s stated goal of being “transparent” and “open” while also following the Obama staff ethic of being understated, cool, and modest. “We have a culture here that abhors all of that,” Dan Pfeiffer said. When I told Pfeiffer I was contemplating a story for the Times about “all of that,” he suggested it might “get bumped off the front page by a story about the first lady’s hair.” He was referring to a front-page article in the Times the previous week about how the new president’s hair was going gray.


Arianna Huffington hosted the signature D.C. party on the eve of Obama’s inauguration. It was held at the Newseum, a place cherished by Tim Russert, whose idea it was to inscribe the first forty-five words of the First Amendment on the building’s facade overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall.

The rise and reinvention of Huffington, impresario of the fast-growing website, the Huffington Post, had been a source of great annoyance to Russert. In 1994, when Huffington’s former husband Michael Huffington, was a Republican senatorial candidate from California and Arianna was an outspoken conservative who was orchestrating his campaign, Russert’s wife, Maureen Orth, wrote a withering profile of Arianna that characterized the Greek-born spouse as a despotic boss, a New Age flake, and the “Sir Edmund Hillary of Social Climbers.”















- from THIS TOWN: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in

America’s Gilded Capital by Mark Leibovich; p. 9: Being the seat of the federal

government, which isn’t moving anywhere, has usually ensured a baseline of economic stability.

But in recent years Washington has defied the national economic slump and become the richest

metropolitan area in the country. Getting rich has become the great bipartisan ideal: “No

Democrats and Republicans in Washington anymore, only millionaires,” goes the maxim. The

ultimate Green party. You still hear the term “public service” thrown around, but often with

irony and full knowledge that “self-service” is now the real insider play.


- p. 10: No matter how disappointed people are in their capital, even the most tuned-in

consumers have no idea what the modern cinematic version of This Town really looks like. They

might know the boilerplate about “people who have been in Washington too long,” how the city

is not bipartisan enough and filled with too many creatures of the Beltway. But that misses the

running existential contradictions of D.C., a place where “authenticity and fantasy are close

companions,” as the Washington Post’s Henry Allen once wrote. It misses that the city, far

from being hopelessly divided, is in fact hopelessly interconnected. It misses the degree to which

New Media has democratized the political conversation while accentuating Washington’s

insular, myopic, and self-loving tendencies. It misses, most of all, a full examination of how

Washington may not serve the country well but has in fact worked splendidly for Washington

itself—a city of beautifully busy people constantly writing the story of their lives.


- pp. 12-13: In the words of Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, today’s Washington

has become a “permanent feudal class,” a massive, self-sustaining entity that sucks people in . . .

It can turn complex, gifted, and often damaged individuals into hollowed-out Kabuki players

acting in the maintenance of their fragile brands.



- p. 11: I also plead optimism: If Washington, D.C., is a civic lab rat of the Nation

Exaggerated—all good and petty tendencies concentrated into a few monument-bedecked square

miles—then we want to believe that what goes on here can be a flattering microcosm, right? It

might not be at a given moment or decade, and surveys show an overwhelming majority of

Americans judge Washington to be a mortifying perversion of national ideals. But as Barack

Obama proved in 2008, hope can be a powerful force, if not necessarily sustainable (as Obama

also proved).





- pp. 24-25: “John McCain, pulling up,” the soundman says. The soon-to-be GOP nominee pops

out of a limo. He is in a period of transition from disruptive figure (beloved within This Town as

a balm to the everyday bullshit) to a more cautious and smartly saluting standard-bearer of the

party he once tormented. I last saw McCain on his campaign plane a few months earlier, just

before he was fitted with his nominee’s straitjacket. He volunteered to me that Brooke Buchanan,

his spokeswoman seated nearby, “has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands” and that

she earned it by “dealing drugs.” She was also “Pat Buchanan’s illegitimate daughter,” “bipolar,”

“a drunk,” “someone with a lot of boyfriends” and who was “just out of Betty Ford.” Everyone

misses this man.



- pp. 41-45: Obama himself possessed a post-ironic detachment from politics that was true to his

personality. Whenever he lapsed into shtick, a behavioral category that incorporated much of

what politicians do in public, it was with an implicit nod to the game transpiring. He was

playacting, in other words, and he wanted you to know that he knew it.

In early 2005, shortly after his election to the U.S. Senate, I interviewed Obama in his

temporary office in the basement of a Senate office building. He and Gibbs were sprawled in

identical postures like frat brothers watching football. They were pushing the message that

Obama was no prima donna. Obama, they kept reminding me, had already sat through countless

town meetings in Illinois and committee hearings on Capitol Hill. What a trouper he

was!The article I wrote poked gentle fun at Obama for his and Gibb’s zealous efforts to show

how unzealous Obama was about climbing the ladder. “Jeez, was it really that obvious?” Obama

said to me when I ran into him and Gibbs on Capitol Hill a few weeks later. “Nice going there,

Gibbs,” Obama said, pretending to smirk.

As I just demonstrated, a favorite flaunt among political insider types is to advertise how

far they go back with Obama—maybe to Springfield, Illinois, or (if you’re supercool) some

Indonesian sandbox. It’s a form of currency, or status marker, in the same way that people in

Silicon Valley love to talk about how they used to hang out with Sergey Brin back in his

Stanford days, before he cofounded Google.

Here is my less-than-awesome offering about when I first met my old pal Barry:


It was when he was a U.S. Senate candidate at the 2004 Democratic Convention in

Boston, on the eve of the keynote address that would propel his stardom. Obama’s flight had

arrived from Springfield at four a.m. and he was awake at six to do Meet the Press, then

Face the Nation, then CNN’s Late Edition. And now he was being forced to endure a

reception hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus on a cruise ship docked in Boston Harbor.

People kept coming up to the young state senator, saying how excited they were to hear his

speech, how they had donated to his campaign, and whatnot; and Obama, as a mantra, kept

telling everyone that he just needed a nap. It was the opposite of those politicians—Bill

Clinton—who draw energy from crowds.


Like any deft officeholder/seeker, Obama can nod his head and knit his eyebrows and

look interested in almost anything. He can glide from conversation to conversation, room to

room, but he will sometimes sigh too audibly and tighten his face in a manner that betrays the

look of a man too eagerly en route to forty winks. “I can stagger through receptions with the

best of them,” he boasted to me before mentioning again that he needed a nap.


Obama appears immune to the neediness that afflicts so many politicians. Any attempt to

win his favor through praise was futile, or counterproductive. This air of above-it-all confidence

was also evident among Obama’s top advisers. They were a cohesive and devoted group who

often evinced the temperament of loners. Like Obama, they possessed a quiet sense that the

prevailing social lubricants of politics—the sycophancy, the gossip, and the cloying

salesmanship—were not just distasteful but pathetic.

In a deeper sense, there was an implicit belief among the Obama people that

Washingtonians constituted one of the most insincere collectives in the world. To them,

members of The Club were like playactors performing weird pantomimes of the sort no one in,

say, Chicago would engage in. The Obama people declared themselves consistently above the

“insider Washington” game.

But “insider Washington” is much larger than it used to be, to a point where it becomes

inescapable. The elite dinner party salons of Georgetown used to include a revolving class of a

few hundred power brokers, wealthy socialites, and current and former members of Congress,

cabinets, and White House staffs, along with a smattering of ambassadors and big-shot

journalists. Today’s insider Washington has become a sprawling “conversation” in which tens of

thousands partake by tweet, blog, or whatever. Jail break in the peanut gallery. Standards of

local “celebrity” have dropped through the floor. The birthdays of junior Hill staffers are

generally given equal weight to the president’s in Mike Allen’s Playbook. In other words,

Washington is a much bigger swirl of mashed potatoes than it ever used to be—and it has never

seemed smaller.


In the local literary tradition, such as it is, Washington is said to mimic high school. Meg

Greenfield, the longtime editorial page editor of the Washington Post, loved and nurtured

the notion, as did the New York Times columnist Russell Baker and a clique of others. The

cliché is apt, to a point. There are plenty of bullies and nerds here. Familiar tableaus, like the

floor of the Senate and the White House briefing room, are set up like classrooms. Congress goes

out on “recess.” It also provides a useful frame for some inescapably high schoolish characters.

“No one who has ever passed through American public high school could have watched William

Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory

sexuality of the provincial adolescent,” Joan Didion wrote in her book of political essays,

Political Fictions. In a Rolling Stone profile of John McCain set during the 2000

presidential campaign, David Foster Wallace described the then maverick Republican as a

“varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with

awe by former classmates.” McCain’s actual nickname in high school was “Punk.”


Eager-to-please crossing-guard types are certainly drawn to Washington in large

proportions. Lone wolves don’t do as well here as in, say, the market-gaming Wild West of Wall

Street or misfit genius labs of Silicon Valley. “Loners may be able to sell themselves electorally

at home,” Greenfield wrote in her civic memoir, Washington. “But they cannot win in

Washington, no matter how bad or good they are. Winning here means winning people over—

sometimes by argument, sometimes by craft, sometimes by obsequiousness and favors,

sometimes by pressure and sometimes by a chest-thumping, ape-type show of strength that

makes it seem prudent to get with the ape’s program.”

But the high school comparison breaks down in the modern version of This Town. For

one thing, Washington—like high school—used to be a transient culture. People would expect to

graduate eventually or drop out. But almost no one leaves here anymore. Better to stay and

monetize a Washington identity in the humming self-perpetuation machine, where people not

nearly as good as Tim Russert or the Obama dynamos can make Washington “work for them.”

Quaint is the notion of a citizen-politician humbly returning to his farm, store, or

medical practice back home after his time in public office is complete. “One thing our

founding fathers could not foresee was a nation governed by professional politicians who had a

vested interest in getting reelected,” Ronald Reagan said in 1973. “They probably envisioned a

fellow serving a couple of hitches and then looking forward to getting back to the farm.”

Obama often told friends that, like Ronald Reagan, it was important for him to convey a

message of a candidate who did not need the job of president. He wanted it known that he

derived none of the psychic gratification that so many others seek in public life. When he was in

the Senate, Obama once instructed a colleague to “shoot me” if he ever wound up staying in

Washington after he left office.

One friend of Obama’s says that the president despises the “derivative culture of D.C.,”

meaning that people become defined by their proximity to other people and institutions. The

presidency is a popular target for those seeking derivative status. People glom on to it in some

way, emphasizing their own connection as if that makes them, too, a bit presidential. The Las

Vegas wedding of Ed Henry, who covered the White House for CNN and later Fox News,

featured a cake that was a seventy-pound replica of the White House.

Over time, people achieve a psychic fusion to their public personas and their professional

networks. The essence of self becomes lost, subsumed in a flurry of Playbook mentions and

high-level name-drops. Self becomes fused with brands, and brands with other brands.



- pp. 57-60: . . . “Resist the gold rush,” went the mantra inside the new White House. The

rising unemployment numbers and collapsing banks should make it easy to remain humble. Or

not. Washington was fat and the love was abundant for the refreshed White House, home to what

the new social secretary Desiree Rogers called “the best brand on earth: the Obama brand” in the

Wall Street Journal. “Our possibilities are endless.”

The new administration made dozens of White House staffers available to the New

York Times Magazine for a shiny photo essay on “Obama’s People.” It placed the staffers

very much on-limits as extensions of the Obama brand. Rogers and Valerie Jarrett, a top

presidential adviser and a close first family confidante, posed for a glamorous cover shoot in an

exclusive “White House Insiders” edition of the thick-aged Capitol File magazine. It was a

terrific play for Brand Valerie and Brand Desiree. But top aides to Obama were appalled that

staffers would partake of such an ostentatious display, especially in such a frighteningly bad

economy. (Jarrett told me later, “If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t have done that.”)

In a broader sense, the spectacle triggered suspicion that certain “White House insiders”

were enjoying their newfound celebrity a bit too much and that Team Obama would be just the

latest enterprise to campaign against Washington, only to quickly succumb to post-election

charms. “Everyone here has been warm and welcoming and inclusive,” Jarrett told Capitol

File. “There hasn’t been a person I’ve met who hasn’t said ‘Welcome to Washington,’ and

you get the feeling they actually mean it.”

Whether they did mean it or not, Washington sucked up every crumb of “insight” on the

Obama brand. The appetite was insatiable, evidenced by the items the new-media faucet kept

spewing forth.


• Within the first weeks of the new presidency, Politico “broke” the story that the

president’s aides sang “Happy Birthday” to the assistant press secretary, Nick Shapiro!


• And surprised him with a chocolate cake!

• And also that deputy White House press secretary Jen Psaki “was in her pajamas” when

her boyfriend made dinner for her and proposed marriage!


• The Washington Examiner reported that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel

was spotted “getting money at the SunTrust Bank in the Safeway on the corner [of] 17th St. and

Corcoran St. NW”!


• Reggie Love, Obama’s personal aide, was declared the winner of the Huffington Post’s

“Who’s the White House’s hottest employee?” contest (not to be confused with the “Hottest

Obama Hottie” contest that ran on Gawker.com in January, in which Mr. Emanuel triumphed)!


• The Wall Street Journal scooped the nugget that the White House Office of

Management and Budget chief, Peter Orszag, enjoys Diet Coke!


In other news, the country still faced two wars and an economic crisis.









- pp. 69-71: Entrusted with a Senate supermajority and endowed with all the magnetism of a

dried snail, Harry Reid owned the beleaguered face of change in 2009.

But the opening scene, at least mine—because I was in the room!—played out a few years

before, on Election Night of 2006, the night Democrats regained control of the House and Senate

for the first time since 1994.

Reid, then the Senate minority leader, and Chuck Schumer, who had run the Democrats’ Senate

campaign committee, were watching returns in a suite at the Hyatt Regency Washington on

Capitol Hill. The Felix-and-Oscar pair—Reid a hush-voiced Mormon from Searchlight, Nevada,

and Schumer a bombastic Jew from Brooklyn—was becoming more and more silly as the night

wore on. At one point Schumer, whose chin was smeared with mustard in two distinct splotches,

exploded off the couch. CNN was calling the close Missouri Senate race for Democrat Claire

McCaskill.

“Yeah,” Schumer grunted out through his food, holding two fists over his head.

Reid, a man of thoroughgoing cynicism, is nonetheless capable of a boyish hullabaloo at times

like this. So what did Harry Reid do to mark this key step in his ascent to Senate majority

leader? He rose from the couch and he kissed the TV—tenderly, caressing the screen. And then

he sat back down to receive from Schumer something between a pat on the head and a noogie.

Reid then started placing congratulatory calls to the Democrats who had won. None of

the calls exceeded thirty seconds, and each was punctuated by a variant of “I love you.” Reid

professed his love to Senator Kent Conrad, who was reelected in North Dakota (“Love you,

man”), Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Hillary Clinton in New York, who told Reid she loved him

back.

I was standing a few feet away from the couch, sanctioned that night by Reid and Schumer to be

a “fly on the wall,” a journalistic practice that is both a cliché and a misnomer: no one notices an

actual fly on the wall while everyone is fully mindful of the maggot reporter taking notes. But

these moments can be revealing, especially in the midst of such punch-drunk victories. Reid

must have detected my amusement at the “I love yous,” which he explained to me

matter-of-factly. “They need to hear that,” he said.


“They” are political people. And Reid, their leader, a former Nevada gaming commissioner,

parcels out love like casino chips. Whether it is real love or pseudo love doesn’t quite matter.

Love is gold currency in the rolling transaction of politics, a game played by the nation’s most

ambitious and insecure class. In his stooped and unassuming and easy-to-miss way, no one

understands this better than Harry Reid.


A few months later, Reid showed up on the Senate floor to hear John Kerry announce that he

would not run for president again in 2008. It was a difficult moment for Kerry, the 2004

Democratic nominee who was now shedding an ambition he appeared to have held since

kindergarten. Just before the 2006 midterms, Kerry had acquired a nasty case of political

cooties after attempting a laugh line about the war in Iraq—never a good idea—which many

construed as a knock against U.S. soldiers. Now Kerry was making this heavy announcement to

a near-empty chamber that included only Reid and Kerry’s fellow Massachusetts senator, Ted

Kennedy. After Kerry finished, Reid, who was standing next to him, gave Kerry a hug and said a

few words for the record.


“He is one of those people who meant so much to me,” Reid said of Kerry, belying the scorn he

had expressed to others for the lanky Bay Stater over many years. Reid had observed privately to

colleagues that Kerry had no friends. No matter: Reid was John Kerry’s friend today, publicly,

and it felt nothing but sincere.

“So I say to John Kerry,” Reid concluded, “I love you, John Kerry.”

Kerry nodded slowly and appeared to choke back tears.



- pp. 59-65: White House officials were quite eager to share with me how ambivalent they all

were about their quasi-celebrity. Some acknowledged a tension between living up to the

administration’s stated goal of being “transparent” and “open” while also following the Obama

staff ethic of being understated, cool, and modest. “We have a culture here that abhors all of

that,” Dan Pfeiffer said. When I told Pfeiffer I was contemplating a story for the Times

about “all of that,” he suggested it might “get bumped off the front page by a story about the first

lady’s hair.” He was referring to a front-page article in the Times the previous week about

how the new president’s hair was going gray.


Arianna Huffington hosted the signature D.C. party on the eve of Obama’s inauguration. It was

held at the Newseum, a place cherished by Tim Russert, whose idea it was to inscribe the first

forty-five words of the First Amendment on the building’s facade overlooking Pennsylvania

Avenue and the National Mall.

The rise and reinvention of Huffington, impresario of the fast-growing website, the Huffington

Post, had been a source of great annoyance to Russert. In 1994, when Huffington’s former

husband Michael Huffington, was a Republican senatorial candidate from California and

Arianna was an outspoken conservative who was orchestrating his campaign, Russert’s wife,

Maureen Orth, wrote a withering profile of Arianna that characterized the Greek-born spouse as

a despotic boss, a New Age flake, and the “Sir Edmund Hillary of Social Climbers.”