This Town (30 page)

And then, as soon as Romney had the nomination sewn up, he found himself surrounded by the same perennials who encrust party nominees every four years.

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T
he campaign had entered its season of the “informal adviser.” They regenerate in the local scenery like those repeating clumps of trees in the background of
The Flintstones
. It’s always the same people, in the same movie, playing the same roles for this year’s crop of self-fashioned “outsiders.” Election Day as Groundhog Day.

Romney was swimming in “informal advisers.” Start with the same old likes of Charlie Black, a prototypical “informal adviser” and familiar D.C. hybrid of campaign lifer, cable stalwart, and superlobbyist. Black, sixty-four, was among those counseling Romney. We know this because he was quoted and identified in lots of stories as an “informal adviser” to Mitt Romney. Black recycles every four years and makes himself available for old-pro advice, back-channel information, and whatever else the front-running campaign might need. That is what informal advisers do.

What they must not do is any harm, and this can be tricky, since they often embody the capital’s permanent lobbying and money class that voters detest. And some of their past ties can be unsavory. Black’s lobbying clients, for instance, have included strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.

It’s a nice arrangement, though, the “informal adviser” gig. It helps both candidate and Usual Suspect. Being publicly linked to Romney can impress Black’s clients—an important currency in This Town (informal advisers are almost never paid real currency by the campaigns, and usually don’t need the money anyway). In return, they can vouch for the candidate within the embattled but still potent Republican establishment in Washington, providing a link to donors, endorsers, and various useful eggheads.

“I have the best job I’ve had in any election,” Black told me of his latest role. He is an affable North Carolinian and veteran of nine presidential campaigns, dating back to Gerald Ford’s in 1976. “I have no responsibilities. I am not accountable for anything.”

Nice work if you can get it. And many, apparently, can.

They come out in spring, the informal advisers do, when the weather warms and the primary contests are winding down. The political calendar becomes safer for the likes of the congressman- turned-lobbyist Vin Weber, the senator-turned-high-priced-consultant Jim Talent, the former governor and White House aide John Sununu, and all-purpose insiders like Black, Wayne Berman, and (of course) Bay Buchanan—all of whom were advising the Romney campaign.

“I’m a big believer that campaigns are like a symphony orchestra,” said Ron Kaufman, a former Republican lobbyist and operative who was a regular presence at Romney’s side (and could be seen in many a hotel bar well after Mitt and Ann donned their pj’s). “You have to add certain types of music at the right time. If you add it at the wrong time, it can destroy the whole piece. This is the right time.”

Kaufman is in an elevated club of “unpaid advisers” in that he has known Romney for years and travels frequently with him, just as he did when Romney ran in 2008. He is thus a step up from being an “informal adviser,” though that’s the title that the campaign seems to prefer.

When Romney hit John McCain in 2008 for his ties to lobbyists—including the ubiquitous Black—Glen Johnson, then of the Associated Press, confronted Mittens about his own traveling buddy, Kaufman. Romney explained that he was just an informal adviser. “My campaign is not based on Washington lobbyists,” Romney said then. “I haven’t been in Washington. I don’t have lobbyists at my elbows that are arguing for one industry or another industry.”

Kaufman has since deregistered as a lobbyist. Black also gave the illusion of going straight in 2008, announcing his “retirement” from lobbying after he joined the McCain campaign. But here’s an upset: Black’s “retirement” ended shortly after the McCain campaign did.

Today, Black is chairman of Prime Policy Group, a bipartisan lobbying firm; clients include Walmart, Google, and financial firms. “After Obama won, I kiddingly told my Democratic partners, ‘Great, now I don’t have to go lobby the administration for four years,’” Black told me. “I can play more golf.”

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O
verall, This Town spent a great deal of time in Campaign 2012 longing for its star-packed predecessor. The 2008 campaign loomed like an older sibling over the 2012 cast of motley inevitables (Romney), retreads (Gingrich, Santorum), and the Great De-lustered (Obama).

As such, perhaps the marquee event of the late winter came in early March with the much-awaited opening of
Game Change
, the HBO adaptation of the bestseller about the 2008 “campaign of a lifetime.” Written by veteran political reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the book came out in early 2010 to pretty good reviews, big sales, and buzzy bombshells. It packed lots of fresh meat (Elizabeth Edwards lifting her shirt to taunt her cuckolding and battered husband!) and was the picture of mass-market success in a category—political books—that almost never produces smashes outside of Woodward. It also favored Washington with a red-carpet night at the Newseum, and what could be better than that?

The stars paraded. The rug was not red but in fact blue, which was appropriate, since the filmmakers had contributed heavily to Democratic causes. Critics used this as a data point to prove leftist Hollywood bias in a film that focused on the train-wreck campaign of McCain and his Frankenstein running mate, Sarah Palin.

Co-producer Tom Hanks showed up at the Newseum opening, as did director Jay Roach, actor Julianne Moore (who played Palin), and the evening’s Brangelina, authors Halperin and Heilemann. The much taller and oval-headed Heilemann resembled Bert from
Sesame Street
next to his shorter collaborator, Halperin (Ernie). Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski stood together and posed for photos. Ben Bradlee looked spry and game at ninety, while White House officials, senators, congressmen, lobbyists, and journalists nibbled from a buffet of marinated hanger steak with Maui onions. Everyone congratulated Heilemann and Halperin and hugged Tammy, who of course helped put this all together—part of her work for HBO.

It was a fun film, filled with billboard lines that resonated on many levels. “I am not going to ignore the people of Alaska anymore,” said an indignant Palin, just a few months before she bolted the governor’s office.

“You don’t get to go back in time to do do-overs in life,” campaign chief Steve Schmidt said at one point, referring to the need to make bold decisions. No do-overs indeed, but you can still shape events retroactively and get paid more and enhance your brand in the long run.

Looking nervous, Schmidt greeted old friends in the lobby. He is the bullet-headed Republican operative who ran the McCain campaign and is credited/blamed for convincing the trailing nominee-to-be to pick Palin. Schmidt was played by Woody Harrelson. Reliving the Palin nightmare on the screen was surreal, Schmidt said, although he had presumably gotten used to reliving the Palin nightmare while serving as a source for the book, adviser to the film, and dogged after-the-fact critic of the rogue running mate.

True to the entrenched Washington precedent of cooperative sources getting more favorable treatment, Schmidt came off in the film as a tortured hero. He was portrayed as torn between his loyalty to McCain (played nobly by Ed Harris), his revulsion for Palin, his desire to win, and—not reflected in the film but obvious in real life—his instinct for self-preservation. His
Game Change
parlay honored the finest Washington tradition of strategic ass-covering.

Around the time of the
Game Change
premiere, Politico’s Maggie Haberman reported that Schmidt’s business partner, Brian Jones, had written a memo ten days before the 2008 election about how best to shield Schmidt from blame for the campaign’s inevitable loss. “A well organized and coordinated effort is needed to defend Steve’s good reputation,” Jones wrote in the memo to two other associates, Adam Mendelsohn and Kirill Goncharenko. (Schmidt says he did not know about the memo.)

Before signing on with the McCain campaign, Schmidt worked in a variety of media strategist roles in the Bush reelection campaign of 2004 and in the White House. He took on special assignments like shepherding Supreme Court nominees through their confirmation processes. He served for a time as a special counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney. He enjoyed a reputation as a decisive and hard-charging operative, and stuck it out with McCain even when many had left his campaign for dead in 2007. He had effectively taken over the day-to-day management of the campaign by the summer of 2008.

But fair or not, Schmidt will always be known as the guy who advocated for Palin, and then revealed countless details about the whole ordeal to the authors of
Game Change,
among others. He besmirched Palin (and by extension McCain) in the most humiliating of ways.

It did not matter that both Palin and McCain maintained that the book and movie were fiction. Everyone loves a crack-up. And that’s what Schmidt was selling, the Palin crack-up. That’s what the filmmakers focused on: Palin (no room for the Hillary crack-up, or the Edwards crack-up, or the history-making winner, what’s-his-name). It was a riveting crack-up. And for that, readers and viewers owe a debt to Steve Schmidt.

To hear Schmidt speak, promoting
Game Change
on television and reflecting on the campaign, it seems his conscience really nagged at him. He did seem sincere in his pain, and was so, his friends attest. He was also speaking out, in part, as a lucrative catharsis. He spoke of how terrified he was at the prospect of Palin’s being just one seventy-two-year-old heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Schmidt was retroactively scared for his country. But not so terrified that he blew any whistles before 130 million people voted—60 million for McCain and Palin. America is a glorious land, to be sure, but self-preservation is sacred ground in This Town. Would Schmidt ever have lunch in This Town again? After being linked to this debacle? After making it impossible for John McCain to do the one thing he truly craved after 2008: to move on with his life?

Are you kidding?

Schmidt would have the run of the buffet table at the Newseum. Starstruck moviegoers kept rushing up to him with congratulations. Schmidt was a star there, as he was at the
Game
Change
opening in New York the night before. He started showing up often on TV, got a pundit gig on MSNBC. He started going on
Meet the Press
. He scored a cameo (playing himself) in an indie campaign film called
Knife Fight
about a maverick political strategist. He purchased a lovely new place on Lake Tahoe, which the cable network outfitted with an in-home TV studio so he could pontificate without walking out his front door. He did paid speeches. His whole contrition rap, the ostentatious guilt, had natural appeal.

“I’ve been involved in a lot of victories and a lot of defeats,” Schmidt told Adam Nagourney in a
Times
Sunday Styles cover story about how tortured Schmidt still was over the McCain campaign—and how much of a celebrity he had become after
Game Change
. “And the ending of that particular campaign felt like being in a car crash.”

Few genres are more media marketable than the car crash. It explains, in large part, the left’s ongoing fascination with Palin. In his public agony, Schmidt deftly cut himself into the Palin buffet line. Left-leaning operators from the Hollywood and Washington‒New York media fell deeply for him. It was another instance of the media swooning over Republicans with self-flagellating tendencies, especially when they defy conservative orthodoxy and move left (McCain being the object lesson in this with his maverick campaign of 2000, when he was the “refreshingly candid” McCain, as opposed to when he later moved right in 2008 and became the “bitter” McCain).

Schmidt was making a seven-figure income when McCain lured him to join his presidential campaign in 2007—and was doing even better after the car crash. He was now the vice chairman of public affairs at one of the world’s biggest public relations outfits, Edelman. He became an early Republican proponent of same-sex marriage (the media LOVES Republican same-sex marriage boosters). He was recognized at airports, ate lunch in the White House mess with top Obama adviser David Plouffe, and was photographed with the president himself. He was celebrity fodder at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and assorted after-parties a few weeks later. His “date” for the evening was the real Woody Harrelson, his new BFF.

You couldn’t script a better comeback story for the tortured public figure. Nor could you have provided a better test case in the political tradition of spinning glory from a fiasco, an art form whose Picasso was, of course, Sarah Palin.

•   •   •

M
any people around This Town snickered at
Game Change
. Claimed it was too gossipy. And no one here cares about gossip, no way. They are way too high-minded for that. Some critics scoffed. They said the book focused too much on the titillating tensions while ignoring the substantive policy debate. How dare they?!

Quite a few people felt aggrieved. Burned. For instance, Jim Manley, the longtime spokesman for Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid. Manley arranged a deep-background interview for Reid with the authors. In the interview, Reid fell into his bumpkin default mode and carelessly referred to Obama as a “light-skinned” African-American who didn’t have a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Uh, Senator Reid shouldn’t have said that. Not good. Luckily, this was on deep background, as Manley reminded Heilemann and Halperin, just to be triple safe, after the interview ended. Sure, sure, they said.

And then the words wound up in
Game Change
. Manley raised Holy Hell. Heilemann and Halperin had their justifications—then said something about how they would not talk about how they conducted their research for the book. There was some misunderstanding over ground rules, or something, that I never quite understood. Really, you could ask a hundred different reporters and flacks what “deep background” meant, and get a hundred different answers.