This Town (14 page)

•   •   •

M
y first meeting with Allen for the
New York Times Magazine
story was a casual get-together in February 2010 over appetizers at the Bombay Club, an Indian restaurant near the White House. Mikey had “spotted” me the day before in Playbook (eating lunch at that same restaurant) and mentioned me again for something the next day. The first thing he asked when we sat down was when my daughters’ birthdays were so he could list them in future Playbooks. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the girls, then three, six, and nine, were not yet reading Playbook.)

Over a twenty-five-year newspaper career, Allen has been known as an unfailingly fair, fast, and prolific reporter with an insatiable need to be in the newspaper. “The worst thing you could say to Mike Allen was ‘We don’t have space for that story,’” says Maralee Schwartz, the longtime political editor at the
Post
. “It was like telling a child he couldn’t have his candy.”

Jim VandeHei, who is forty-two, is contemptuous of Washington’s “It used to be better” reflex as it relates to news. “Those institutions and reporters,” he says, referring to traditional ones, “were never as good as their reputations. And they limited, in consequential ways, the information flowing to people who cared about politics. It was largely—and this was true for decades—a small group of middle-aged, left-of-center, overweight men who decided how all of us should see politics and governance.”

VandeHei distills today’s “New World Order” to a few journalistic premiums: speed, information, gossip, and buzz, all of which Allen excels in. “He has built the most successful brand in journalism, Mikey, Inc.,” VandeHei says, “and its subsidiary, Playbook.”

Nowhere is Washington’s ambivalence over Politico
more evident than in the Obama White House. They consider the publication a bastion of “snowflake news,” a term coined by Ron Brownstein of
National Journal
that refers to small, buzzy stories that are evanescent for a second but then dissolve on contact.

The Obama and Politico
enterprises have had parallel ascendancies to an extent. They both fashioned themselves as tech-savvy upstarts bent on changing the established order—of politics (Obama) and of how it is covered (Politico). They started around the same time, early 2007, and their clashing agendas were apparent early. On the day that Politico
published its first print edition, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, identified it as just the kind of inside-the-Beltway masturbation that might distract the campaign. He walked into the campaign’s offices and slammed a copy of the new publication on Dan Pfeiffer’s keyboard. “This,” Plouffe declared, “is going to be a problem.” Generally speaking, the Obama brigade viewed itself as a cleansing force for all that was self-centered, shallow, and divisive about Washington—whereas they believed Politico was in fact perpetuating and profiting from all of it.

White House aides have bitched interminably about what they consider Politico’s trivial attentions to Washington’s lame celebrity doings, namely their own. When a citizen paparazzo posted on the Web a photo of speechwriter Jon Favreau and press aide Tommy Vietor playing bare-chested beer pong at a Georgetown bar one Sunday, Politico
ran a prominent story wondering if the Obama White House had become overexposed, suggesting that a designated “grown-up” needed to be brought on staff and declaring that some Obama “personalities” have “not disguised their pleasure at the fast-lane opportunities opened up by their new status in Washington.” The story equated the beer pong photo to reports, in 1979, that White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan had snorted coke during a visit to Studio 54 (a special counsel’s investigation resulted in no charges).

Favreau sent an e-mail to Politico
editor in chief John Harris complaining that this was “another example of Politico
extrapolating some larger cultural meaning or political lesson from absolutely nothing.” Harris in turn said that after the pectoral-bearing beer pong picture was published, he had been “hearing a lot of conversation about this as a minor Washington cultural moment,” thus the story was justified.

White House officials said it was an indictment of the “Washington mentality” that the city was sustaining Politico
.
In early March 2010, David Axelrod was sitting in his West Wing office, complaining to me about the “palace-intrigue pathology” of Washington. “I prefer living in a place where people don’t discuss Politico
over dinner,” he said.

Yet most of the president’s top aides are steeped in this culture and work hard to manipulate it. “What’s notable about this administration is how ostentatiously its people proclaim to be uninterested in things they are plainly interested in,” observed Harris. Likewise, Politico’s saturation coverage of the Obama entourage has raised considerably the profiles of people like Plouffe and Axelrod, allowing them to better “monetize” their service with book, speaking, and TV deals. New-media entities such as Politico
have clearly transformed not just the Washington conversation but also the city’s information economy. The six-year-old publication has taken a significant bite from the
Washington Post
’s “political paper of record” franchise and threatened other specialized information sources such as
National Journal
.

Politico—particularly Allen—is prone to trafficking suggestive notions in the spirit of “driving the conversation.” The conversation then gets picked up on cable and blogs (“I’m hearing talk about . . .”), and then Politico
will report on “something that is getting a lot of buzz” to a point that merits coverage as a viable possibility, something that’s “out there.”

“Good Saturday morning,” Mikey wrote in April 2010 as President Obama was looking for a Supreme Court justice to replace the retiring John Paul Stevens. “For brunch convo: Why isn’t Secretary Clinton on the media short lists for the Court?” By Monday, the convo had moved from the brunch table to MSNBC’s
Morning Joe 
(where the host, Joe Scarborough, advocated for Clinton) and
Today
(where the Republican senator Orrin Hatch mentioned her too). Later that day, Ben Smith, then writing for Politico, quoted a State Department spokesman who “threw some coolish water on the Clinton-for-Scotus buzz in an e-mail.” By then the cable, blog, and Twitter chatter was fully blown. The White House issued an unusual statement that Secretary Clinton would not be nominated. Politico
then sent out a “breaking news” alert, and Smith reported that the White House had “hurriedly punctured the trial balloon.” End of convo.

For what it’s worth, Philippe Reines, a Clinton adviser, says that he told another Politico
reporter the previous Friday that the chances of his boss’s being nominated were “less than none” and added, “Something being a sexy media story shouldn’t be confused with truth.”

But, of course, it is categorically confused all the time in today’s D.C. Fact and speculation swirl in the same blizzard. As long as something is circulating “out there”—getting page views, generating buzz, driving convo—it can have impact, ephemeral or otherwise. The thrown-off nature of Twitter has turned phrases like “Hearing that,” “Word on the street is,” and “I get the feeling that” into acceptable attribution units.

Bob Woodward, the best-known investigative reporter in history, suggested in a pundit capacity on CNN that Obama might dump Biden for Hillary on the 2012 ticket (“It’s on the table”). Conservative oracle William Kristol wrote a column suggesting the same thing.
New York
magazine’s John Heilemann, coauthor of
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
, wrote an October 2010 cover story on “President Palin” (“How Sarah Barracuda Becomes President”), which set in motion the Playbook community as well as the televised breakfast nook of
Morning Joe
, where Heilemann is a regular talker, along with Woodward and Allen.

Morning Joe
innkeeper Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from the Florida Panhandle, has himself become a key impresario of the conversation. He is also a topic.

Scarborough was “discussed” as a possible candidate for president in 2012, or maybe a vice presidential candidate on an independent ticket led by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Whether either one was ever an actual possibility is beside the point—because it was
out there
,
thus meriting journalistic notice, generating “buzz.” Howard Fineman, a former
Newsweek
writer and veteran cable pundit who joined HuffPost in October 2010, heard about “the discussion.” And got a great ride out of a story he wrote about a Bloomberg–Scarborough ticket, or “the Independent Odd Couple,” as Huff-Po played it big on its website.

Scarborough confirmed speculation that discussion about the speculation had taken place, or so he speculated in a discussion with Fineman about the speculation.

“We haven’t discussed it directly,” Scarborough told Fineman, adding, “Have people discussed it in his sphere and in my sphere? I think so.”

Mikey then quoted this in Playbook, igniting more discussion in the Playbook community, which overlaps considerably with Scarborough’s and Bloomberg’s “spheres.”

When I later asked Fineman about his “Independent Odd Couple” story and the blather that ensued, he maintained that Scarborough was and is serious about the possibility of an independent candidacy. He also acknowledged that the whole episode was “probably the ultimate example of the political-media complex flying up its own asshole.”

•   •   •

O
ne of my last meetings with Mike Allen was over breakfast at D.C.’s Mayflower Renaissance Hotel. Like many reporters, Allen would much rather ask the questions than answer them. He led off with one: “What’s the most surprising thing you learned about me?”

It was what I learned about his father, I told him. Gary Allen was an icon of the far right in the 1960s and 1970s. He was affiliated with the John Birch Society and railed against the “big lies” that led to the United States’ involvement in World Wars I and II. He denounced the evils of the Trilateral Commission and “Red” teachers. Rock ’n’ roll was a “Pavlovian Communist mind-control plot.” He wrote speeches for George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama and presidential candidate. He wrote mail-order books and pamphlets distributed through a John Birch mailing list.

None of Mike Allen’s friends knew any of this about his father (or they were diverting me with other monikers, like “football coach,” which he indeed was; Gary Allen coached a Pop Warner team that included Mike, who played center—badly). In an earlier phone interview, Allen said his dad was a “writer” and “speaker.” After I mentioned his father at breakfast, Allen flashed a smile that remained frozen as I spoke. He had described his upbringing to me as nonpolitical. He said he never read anything his father wrote.

I did not want to overreach for a Rosebud. “Life isn’t binary,” Allen said a few times at breakfast. But I could not help being struck by the contrast between father and son.

Gary Allen’s writings conveyed great distrust of the established order. He saw conspiracies in both parties, despising Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for their internationalism and the “establishment media” for enabling the “communist conspiracy.” Mike Allen traverses politics with a boyish and almost starstruck quality toward the assumed order. He is diligent in addressing leaders by proper titles, ranks, “Madam Speaker,” and “Mr. President.” Friends said he seemed particularly enthralled to be covering the White House during the Bush years and was spotted at all hours around the briefing room and press area.

When Allen was preparing to leave a job at the metro section of the
New York Times
to cover the White House for the
Washington Post
, his boss, Jonathan Landman, tried to convince him to stay. “I gave him the usual reasons,” Landman recalled, which included the standard New York metro editor’s take on the White House beat (herd journalism, etc.). Allen had an unforgettable comeback: “I want to be present at great moments in history,” he said.

And at the end of our discussion about his father, Mikey made a point of ending on a sweet and orderly data point. After Gary Allen died, at fifty, many of his former Pop Warner players filled the church in tribute. Allen said he recalled no talk of his father’s political work at the memorial, but he will never forget one detail: a giant blue and gold floral arrangement in the shape of a football was placed onstage, a gift from the kids on Gary Allen’s team, the Phantoms.

As I was finishing the story about Allen, I was meeting with Politico’s John Harris in his office, when Mikey himself walked in. He welcomed me, thanked me for coming, and returned to his desk. I visited his cubicle later but Allen was gone. To the left of his desktop was a picture of Allen standing upright and asking President Obama a question at a White House news conference. His work area was notable for its lack of clutter: there were a few small stacks of magazines and newspapers and a tray of mint Girl Scout cookies on the top of his terminal.

In the days leading up to a photo shoot for the article, Allen’s work area became spotless, surfaces shining. I kept asking Politico’s then executive vice president, Kim Kingsley, “Who cleaned up Mikey’s room?” but neither she nor Allen would say. All great questions come from small questions. And some just hang there until they vanish.

6

“Thank You for Your Service”

T
he most consequential political story of 2010—maybe all of Obama’s first term—was written by a troublemaker, Michael Hastings of
Rolling Stone
. His
June profile of General Stanley McChrystal, “The Runaway General,” included a host of unflattering statements from the general’s staff about civilian government officials such as Vice President Biden, National Security Adviser James L. Jones, and ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry, among others. McChrystal apologized as soon as the story was posted, and was summoned to Washington by the commander in chief. His staff (and, by implication, McChrystal himself) had clearly spoken out of school, or “off message”—or candidly. Gaffe! The idea that speaking the truth as you see it should be a virtue is nothing but a Pollyannaish and naive notion within the great unfurling process story of life.

Bottom line: McChrystal and his aides were “ill-advised” and showed “bad judgment” by participating in the
Rolling Stone
profile. So went the logic of the almighty narrative. The substance and merit of the remarks were beside the point. Because McChrystal was playing the game wrong. He made a dumb PR move. He was not cautious. He forgot that, in the words of media writer Michael Wolff, everyone in government must behave like “a thwarted, deracinated, ever-second guessing him- or her-self, mutated individual.” He forgot what Robert Gibbs forgot that summer when he was pilloried (by Nancy Pelosi, among others) for admitting on
Meet the Press
that Republicans might win back Congress that November—
the possibility really existed, imagine that!

Within minutes of the
Rolling Stone
story’s publication, the conversation was completely given over to a classic Washington “Will he or won’t he?” cliff-hanger. As in: Will McChrystal keep his job or won’t he? Anticipation built over his fateful White House meeting with Obama. This Town loves a deathwatch.

McChrystal was swiftly fired. But in the finest D.C. tradition of failing upward, technically Obama accepted McChrystal’s resignation “with extreme regret,” and the general then set off to launch “The McChrystal Group,” the requisite lucrative postgovernment consultancy offering “leadership solutions for complex problems.” Bob Barnett hooked him up with a nice book deal, JetBlue and Navistar brought McChrystal onto their boards of directors, and he was hired to teach a graduate seminar in modern leadership at Yale. He was getting $
60,000 a pop for speaking gigs.

And The Club turned its attention to the troublemaker. After Hastings’s story was published in
Rolling Stone
, the writer was accused of violating an implied agreement not to reveal the general’s unguarded comments. Also, the military officials had apparently been drinking—the implication being that maybe Hastings should have cut them some slack. And there were rumblings within the military and among journalists that Hastings had violated an off-the-record understanding with McChrystal and company.
Some members of McChrystal’s staff said as much in
Army Times
and the
Washington Post
. But the charges, made anonymously, received little traction, McChrystal made a fulsome apology, and Hastings denied violating any ground rules.

The military’s biggest mistake was to let Hastings in to begin with, Mikey pointed out, under the cautionary headline of “Failure to Google.”

“A quick search would have showed McChrystal that caution was warranted around the irreverent reporter,” Allen wrote in Playbook. He pointed out that Hastings, a former Iraq correspondent who had previously worked for
Newsweek
, had written an article for
GQ
in 2008 titled “Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter”: “There was no small amount of hypocrisy when it came to journalists discussing the sex lives of the people they cover, since fidelity wasn’t exactly a prized virtue among reporters on the campaign trail,” Hastings wrote. “For my part, I watched a lot of porn. . . . It occurred to me . . . [that enjoying pornography] in a hotel room was not unlike the larger experience of campaign reporting.”

In other words, “troublemaker” should have been tattooed on the “irreverent reporter’s” forehead.

Hastings was quizzed on CNN’s
Reliable Sources
, the Sunday-morning show about the media hosted by longtime
Washington Post
media reporter Howard Kurtz. Kurtz, known within the pack as “Howie,” mentioned that “it’s been widely commented upon that there was some drinking going on.” To which Hastings replied, “Yes. There was drinking going on.”

David Brooks wrote in the
New York Times
that McChrystal had been victimized by the “culture of exposure” that has prevailed in journalism since the Vietnam War. He called out Hastings—a “product of the culture of exposure”—for making McChrystal’s “kvetching” the centerpiece of his story, though certainly the comments would have caused a storm whether Hastings had made them the centerpiece or not.

But the harshest criticism came from inside the pack. CBS’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan was brutal, saying that Hastings had violated an “unspoken agreement” between reporters and military officials. It is understood, she said, that journalists should not embarrass troops “by reporting insults and banter.” She implied that Hastings had disingenuously gained the trust of his subjects and even that Hastings made up the offending material—or at the very least burned the military leaders on an off-the-record agreement. “I know these people,” Logan told Kurtz on
Reliable Sources
. “They never let their guard down like that. To me, something doesn’t add up here.” She went on to say that there are many good beat reporters in the field. “And to be fair to the military, if they believe that a piece is balanced, they will let you back,” she said. It went without saying that Hastings would not be “let back.”

The criticism of Hastings from the pack had a circling-the-wagons quality. Even though his was the most talked-about story in Washington for several days and led to the ouster of a decorated war commander, Hastings was treated as a suspicious interloper. He had few defenders. His most passionate was
Rolling Stone
colleague Matt Taibbi, a wicked screed artist and one of the few legitimate heirs to Hunter S. Thompson in a blog-inspired generation of gonzo wannabes. “
If there’s a lower form of life on the planet earth than a ‘reputable’ journalist protecting his territory, I haven’t seen it,” Taibbi wrote in a blog post titled “Lara Logan, You Suck.” “If I’m hearing Logan correctly, what Hastings is supposed to have done in that situation is interrupt these drunken assholes and say, ‘Excuse me, fellas, I know we’re all having fun and all, but you’re saying things that may not be in your best interest!’”

Taibbi’s broader point is that everyone is obsessed with being “reputable” and desperate to be “part of The Club so so badly.” By “Club” he meant it not like Tim Crouse would delineate between the “pack” and the “nonpack,” “troublemakers” or “non-troublemakers.” Rather, “reputable” in terms of being a made man in the “Club” that allows for a TV deal and a Bob Barnett imprimatur and an invite to Tammy’s garden party. Someone properly in The Club who would never say—as Hastings did to Kurtz—that he used his charm and friendliness to build a rapport with his subjects so that they felt comfortable saying things to him. This is what journalists do but are not supposed to say—what Janet Malcolm wrote so famously/infamously of in the opening of “The Journalist and the Murderer”: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

The bigger point in this case concerns the place of the “reputable journalist” in the Washington Club—or lifetime banishment from it. Hastings trashed The Club. He was a skunk at the garden party. He made the other guests look bad. “Most of these reporters just want to be inside the ropeline so badly,” Taibbi concluded.

“God forbid some important person think you’re not playing for the right team!”

•   •   •

T
he McChrystal story provided a useful context for what had become a defining characteristic of life “inside” in the new century. Starting in Iraq, reporters began doing something known as “embedding” with U.S. combat units. While embedding brings an increased risk of a reporter’s losing independence and perspective, the practice certainly carries a practical benefit on the battlefield—to say nothing of a safety benefit. To some degree, embedding was a formalized version of the bunker relationships that arose organically in previous wars like Vietnam: journalists and soldiers enjoying a mutual reliance.

But around 2004, the notion of embedding had spread beyond war zones and into far less hazardous environs of domestic reporting, like presidential campaigns. Networks began designating reporters to embed with campaigns. Their charge was to provide minute-to-minute coverage of what was happening “inside” it, or at least inside the campaign bubble, which was markedly different from looking inside the actual substance of the campaign. Regardless, embedding promised readers a real-time sense of what it was like “inside” the campaigns, even if it came at the expense of the whimsy and creative and less filtered impressions a nonembedded reporter could provide away from the bubble. “The chroniclers of political and cultural debates increasingly move in a caravan with one side or another,” David Ignatius wrote in a May 2, 2010,
Washington Post
column on the dangers of “embedded journalism.”

Certainly the
Boys on the Bus
bubble of 1972 represented an earlier form of journalistic embedding from a small rank of elite, groupthinkish reporters. But the practice existed largely in the service of giving readers a single day’s roundup of what the candidate did and said. It was not so much giving them a constant sense of what life was like inside their campaign bubble—the breaking news, say, about what Mitt Romney ordered at Chipotle (a pork burrito bowl) before the big debate; or several photos tweeted instantly by reporters of Ann Romney serving muffins to other reporters on the campaign charter.

Being an “insider” has always been a coveted status in This Town. But it is now both an ethic and easily available snack food. Playbook blasts out a daily charge of Beltway knowingness (Ignatius calls Mike Allen “the town crier for a niche community of Washington insiders”). Tammy Haddad’s website is called WHC Insider—WHC standing for “White House Correspondents,” though it has little to do with the White House or its correspondents and has everything to do with the word that is actually spelled out, “insider.” Everyone can come inside, click on, and be embedded here together in this thrilling cocoon.

•   •   •

M
cChrystal’s saga played out shortly after the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the late-April affair that has grown into a multiday symbol of the city’s self-intoxication. Held at the Washington Hilton, the dinner began in 1920 and had traditionally been a sleepy social affair in which news organizations bought tables rounded out by employees, sources, and special guests—maybe a White House official or senator. In 1987, however, journalist Michael Kelly, then of the
Baltimore Sun
, invited along Fawn Hall, the mysterious and glamorous secretary for Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North during the Iran-Contra scandal. This set off an arms race among news organizations to attract celebrity guests to future dinners. Over the years, an increasingly huge showbiz contingent has invaded, as well as a posse of New York and Silicon Valley finance and media sweeties and pop culture finger foods like Ozzy, Paris, and the Donald.

Tammy’s Saturday mob-scene brunch is always a highlight of the festival, and the towering hostess has deftly seized upon the Correspondents’ Association dinner as her trademark occasion. The event, she says, is about being in the room. That’s Tammy’s thing. She is casual and transparent about it. When asked by Politico
to explain the enduring appeal of the Correspondents’ Association dinner, Tammy distilled it to its star-fucker essence: “Who doesn’t want to be in the room?” she asked. “You’re in the room with powerful people and anything can happen.”

She explained that she began hosting her brunch because “it was the only time everyone I knew from all over the country was in Washington.” In other words, all the people who come to town for the Correspondents’ Association dinner—celebrities—are people that she knows.

People snicker and complain that the brunch has gotten out of hand. Yet they show up and embed. Actor Tim Daly—the guy from the TV show
Wings
—once made the mistake of complaining in Politico
that the brunch has become too crowded and is now populated by “
too many d-bags.” Never wise to say this publicly. And Daly was compelled to bring flowers to Tammy. She was thrilled with the authenticating amends, and the picture of the flower presentation ran in Politico. All was good among the d-bags.

You could do worse to explain the disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country than to assemble a highlight reel from the Correspondents’ Association weekend’s events juxtaposed with scenes of economic despair, a simple military death toll, or montage of poor oil-soaked pelicans in the Gulf Coast, which had suffered the worst spill in history a few days before the 2010 dinner.

Just as the nation does not share in Washington’s self-love, it is not joining in the media’s Era of Good Feelings about itself. Poll respondents kept expressing overwhelming disapproval of its performance. Bureaus were closing, reporters were being laid off, and revenues were down sharply at several traditional and new media outlets. The Washington Post Company would announce that week that it was selling its venerable news magazine,
Newsweek
, which had been losing tens of millions dollars a year.

But as the White House Correspondents’ Association festivities proved, the city operates in a reality distortion field. The non-self-awareness is doubly astonishing for a place so preoccupied with how things “play.” It all unfolds in a champagne fog. Is that all actually happening? Or is it some rhetorical trope that unimaginative populists concocted to reflect Washington fat cats and insiders, a celebrating gang of d-bags?