This Town (31 page)

Everyone agreed that Reid’s remarks were “unfortunate.” Republicans called for Reid’s resignation. The majority leader called Obama immediately to apologize. Manley called Heilemann and Halperin “liars.”

Whatever.
Game Change
was coated in the pixelated dust of a commercial sensation. So were the authors. Everybody loves a winner.

Or, more to the point, is jealous of a winner. Halperin and Heilemann elicited complicated reactions to their commercial success: writing a mega-bestseller, getting a sweet HBO deal and speaking paydays all over the country and
a reported $5 million advance to write another version of
Game Change
after 2012.

The ambivalence was borne of more than jealousy. This was particularly true in the case of Halperin, a former political director for ABC News who in 2002 founded the Note, the online political tip sheet that was a precursor to Mike Allen’s Playbook. He was something of a kingmaker within “the Gang of 500,” a term he coined and a role he seemed to enjoy.

Halperin got the regular TV gig that had eluded him at ABC when MSNBC hired him as its senior political analyst on
Morning Joe
. He screwed up in 2011 when he referred to President Obama as “kind of a dick” on the air and was suspended by the network indefinitely—“indefinitely” being a most ominous word in these contexts. There was some unseemly rejoicing within the twin seats of schadenfreude America (politics and media). Halperin waited it out. He was back on the air in a few weeks. And then, here everyone was at the Newseum, applauding him and Heilemann when they were introduced before the screening.

In many cases, revelers at the
Game Change
opening were participating in a curious show of their own journalistic failure. Dozens (maybe hundreds) of participants in allegedly the most intensely covered presidential campaign in history were in fact there to celebrate a monument to just how little key information they had uncovered at the time. Maybe “Heileperin” enjoyed an advantage in that they were writing after the election. Still, if all of these juicy details and unwritten front-page stories were so plainly obvious, you’d think some blogger or embed would have stumbled onto something. Mostly,
Game Change
itself had become a franchise and a spectacle and a new institution for This Town, something to celebrate and be there for. And it was a great party!

Outside the Newseum, a small group of protesters—Palin loyalists—were handing out white and yellow fliers (designed to look like a Broadway-style
Playbill
). They reiterated the former Alaska governor’s oft-quoted charge that
Game Change
was based on a “false narrative.” Whether it was or not, much of Washington ceased being about true narratives long ago, anyway. It is about virtual reality: the video game in which we are all characters and try to be players. It brought to mind a line that I had underlined years ago, in 1993, from the late great Michael Kelly, in a
New York Times Magazine
profile of David Gergen (“Master of the Game,” it was titled). “What happens in the political world is divorced from the real world,” he wrote. “It exists for only the fleeting historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts, a never-ending and infinitely revisable docudrama. Strangely, the faithful understand that the movie is not true—yet also maintain that it is the only truth that really matters.”

12

The Presidential Campaign: Saddened, Troubled

April‒November 2012

T
he Exalted Gods of the Narrative had rendered a swift and furious judgment upon the president’s reelection campaign: It had stumbled out of the gate.

Surrogates kept skidding off message on
Meet the Press
. First, regular Joe Biden took the stand and said he was “comfortable” with gay people marrying each other. He was not supposed to “make news on that,” as the politicians like to say these days (an odd meta-term of demurral). The president—who had said his views on the subject were “evolving”—was. Supposedly the White House and reelect team had a big ROLLOUT STRATEGY planned for the president’s coming out, so to speak. It would be the culminating phase of his evolution. And yes, the evolution would be televised.

But then Biden went and ruined the rollout by blurting out the true and obvious thing—the thing that other cool Obama followers like Axe or Plouffe would be too righteously disciplined to ever say out of turn. It is for this reason hard to dislike Biden, a joyful campaigner who—unlike the introverted Obamneys—was not someone you imagined reaching for the Purell as soon as he escaped the ropeline.

It was around this time that I accompanied Biden on a trip to a union hall in Toledo, billed by the White House as an “unofficial kickoff of the campaign” (there were, like, fifty of these supposed “unofficial kickoffs” before Labor Day). En route, the VP strolled to the back of
Air Force Two
to say hello to the traveling press. One reporter asked the VP how it felt to be doing his first “legitimate campaign event.” “Legitimate?” Biden said. “Is anything I do legitimate?” He laughed, as everyone did for several seconds before his communications director, former
Washington Post
and
Wall Street Journal
reporter Shailagh Murray, ushered Biden back behind the protective curtain in the front of the plane and another press aide, Liz Allen, swept through the press cabin and tried to declare—retroactively—that Biden had been speaking off the record.

While Obama had come to like Biden, he often talked about him with a patronizing overfondness—as if the VP were the beloved family dog that kept peeing on the carpet. Obama was also protective. For the president’s comedy routine at the 2012 Correspondents’ Association dinner at the end of April, his speechwriters composed a riff on how things had changed in four years. The bit was supposed to include the line “Four years ago, I chose Joe Biden as my running mate. Four years later, I am
almost
positive I’m going with Joe again.” The president would then affect an exaggerated wink for the audience. But he told his speechwriters to kill the line, figuring it would only reactivate the “Dump Biden” chorus. More to the point, it might hurt his feelings. (Obama seemed to expend many mental calories worrying about the VP’s feelings.)

In a private meeting in the Oval Office, Biden apologized to Obama for his candor malfunction on gay marriage. Then the president went on ABC to affirm that, yes, he also thought same-sexers should be able to marry. His VP had gotten “a little bit over his skis,” POTUS said. Instead of Obama making history with his announcement, his lame sloppy seconds to Biden only called attention to the fact that he had been withholding his true convictions from voters on a momentous cultural matter, maybe for years.

Nonetheless,
Newsweek
slapped Obama on its cover over the headline “
The First Gay President.” (This was only fair, since Bill Clinton had already been dubbed “The First Black President” years ago.)

The next Sunday, another Obama surrogate, Newark mayor Cory Booker, went on
Meet the Press
and said that the Obama campaign’s attack on Romney’s work in the private equity sector was “nauseating to the American public.” (This would be the industry that Booker had relied on for a great deal of cash, so apparently it was nauseating to Booker too.) Booker’s remarks made for instant pundit catnip. Here was another talking-points failure, the second in as many
MTP
s that a hoped-for partisan robot had come unwired. Suddenly, Booker morphed into an elusive superdarling of TV talk-show bookers. The Obama people got to the mayor and his nausea cleared promptly. But not before he had created a “distraction” that contributed to a rough week for the reelection campaign.

“
Obama Stumbles out of the Gate,” declareth the big Politico
headline a few days later. The story, by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, catalogued the Biden and Booker boners, the reelection team’s “muddled message,” and the dismay among “some Democrats” about the flailing reelection effort. Suddenly, the reelection campaign found itself, yes,
on the defensive
.

The story included an unforgettable caveat in paragraph six, one that could rightly appear in 99 percent of all campaign stories.

“Surely,” went the caveat, “all of this could prove to be ephemeral and meaningless in the arc of a long presidential contest.”

•   •   •

A
nother Regrettable Remark (RR) for the reelection enterprise came in April, courtesy of Hilary Rosen, the Tammy BFF, CNN pundit, gay activist, and corporate communications hybrid who spent years as the top lobbyist for the music industry. Hilary got a little out over her skis herself when she said on CNN that Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life.” She apologized for this, sort of, the next day.

But the Romney campaign sensed an umbrage opportunity. The victim was so exorcised that Ann Romney herself called the Rosen crack an “early birthday present.” The Romney-bots were in full whirl-up-the-crap mode. They kept describing Rosen as a “confidante” to the president. This was a reach, although she had visited the White House thirty-five times since Obama took office, according to public logs. And Rosen had, just one month earlier, attended a state dinner at the White House to honor the British prime minister, David Cameron. She brought with her as her guest a corporate client, John Kelly, an executive at Microsoft. “An abuse of access” is how one high-level White House official described it to me—making sure to add that Hilary was a friend.

The Obama people tried to bury Hilary R.’s Regrettable Remark by doing the smart and sensible thing: overreacting. The White House, from the president and vice president on down, condemned the slur. Press secretary Jay Carney ran from Rosen as if she were a lesbian version of John Edwards. His initial response when asked about her was “
I know three, personally, women named Hilary Rosen.” At this point my mind went to a memory from a few years earlier of Carney and Hilary Rosen—the Hilary Rosen who, wouldn’t you know it, looked a lot like that one on CNN—dancing at a party for
Meet the Press
gatekeeper Betsy Fischer at lobbyist Jack Quinn’s house. (I recall a chain of guests being enjoined in a conga line, though Carney disputes being part of this, so we’ll leave it at “dancing.”)

This Hilary Rosen is another classic Washington survivor. As the former head of the Recording Industry Association of America lobby, she was lashed as an outspoken defender of the industry’s right to intellectual property at a time when online file sharing was becoming habitual.
A 2003 profile of Rosen in
Wired
noted that “on a scale of odiousness, devotees of the website Whatsbetter.com rated Rosen just below Illinois Nazis but better than Michael Bolton (and way above pedophile priests).” She was subjected to death threats that led her to travel with security guards. Protesters at her speeches urged other “Hilary Haters” to send her poop in the mail.

Compared with such nastiness, the Ann Romney thing was a small tummy ache. Still, Rosen realized it would be an issue as soon as she returned home from the CNN studios and her babysitter told her about a constant beeping from a computer upstairs. That’s what Rosen’s TweetDeck page did to signal each mention of @HilaryR on Twitter. She also received a call that night from Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, with a heads-up that the campaign would have to condemn her remark. Okay, sure, Hilary said. She knew the game, she understood. Anita Dunn, her business partner at the consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker, had been the president’s communications director in the White House—and remained an adviser to Team Obama. Hilary received similar consolation calls and e-mails over the next few days from friends at the campaign and in the White House as they did their public “distancing” acts. The White House wanted to kill this gaffe fast, even if their friend was collateral damage for a few days. Yes, do what you have to do, Rosen replied, though she did become annoyed at the total pile-on from so many top officials (Biden, Axelrod, Messina, etc.). Everyone assured her that she would be fine, if not enhanced, by the little dustup.

And of course she was.
Meet the Press
invited her on the following Sunday—a first-class upgrade from her usual coach seat on CNN. She declined the offer, at the request of the White House, which preferred she lie low for a while. Then she appeared on ABC’s
This Week
for the first time a few Sundays later with a bunch of green room buddies that included Ralph Reed, the conservative Christian activist and former BFF to Jack Abramoff. @RalphReed tweeted out an adorable photo of himself and Hilary grinning together backstage, both of them good sports and great patriots.

Rosen’s only real sin with the Ann Romney crack was to “provide an opening” for the other side to take up their umbrage guns. She also made a nice foil—outspoken lefty with Hollywood ties—and the Romney-bots knew they had Swing Voter Poison on their hands. They played the opening, won the cycle.

And then it was over, like a brief bout of chicken pox. Everyone stopped “distancing themselves” from Hilary R. She was back being her hot-ticket persona at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner festivities the following week, someone who could get you into parties. At a party at the White House a few months later, Michelle Obama pulled Hilary aside in a receiving line, looked her in the eye, and said, “I’ve been thinking about you. Are you okay? Are WE okay?” Of course they were okay. It was never a question.

•   •   •

A
few weeks after the Ann Romney slip, on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, Rosen joined other guests for the nuptials of NBC’s Betsy Fischer to Jonathan Martin of Politico—known as “JMart” within the Playbook community. Mike Allen himself officiated the wedding, held at an estate in Warrenton, Virginia, about an hour outside of Washington. In his toast to Jonathan and Betsy, Tom Brokaw, who had flown down from New York, dubbed theirs a union of the “two most powerful organizations in American political journalism,” Politico and NBC. “It’s . . . as if a member of the Gotti family married a member of the Gambino family,” Brokaw said, according to Allen, the wedding presider, who quoted extensively from the toast in the next day’s Playbook. “This is what our life, our culture, our country is all about,” Brokaw continued. “We’re awakened every day, these days, and reminded about what divides us. But this is what unites us: the idea that two people who care passionately about their country and about the political system that drives it, finding each other.”

Brokaw wore his special TJR (Timothy J. Russert) tie to honor Jonathan and Betsy. The garments were made special by Vineyard Vines for a select few friends of Tim after he died nearly four years earlier. Has it really been a full cycle in the life of This Town without him?

The TJR tie was adorned with little footballs and Nantuckets and Capitols—things Tim loved. Another thing Tim loved: Betsy. He was her patron, for whom she had worked for nearly two decades. “I remember the first time Tim began to tell me about Betsy and what a genius she was,” Brokaw said, “and how much she meant to him. And then we went through the emotional trauma of losing Tim, and Betsy and I formed our own bond.”

Brokaw was good at events like this. Tribal speeches are a key medium. Now seventy-two, Brokaw had become the de facto absentee mayor of The Club after Tim’s death. He was the interim host of
Meet the Press
for a few months in 2008 until David Gregory prevailed in the beauty contest to succeed if never replace Russert.

The show suffered a ratings slump through much of 2012, and rumors were flying about Gregory’s being removed. In fairness, it took years for Russert to become Russert, and Gregory—despite sometimes seeming as full of himself as many say he is—also has a reputation for wanting to improve, as a host and a person. Still, “the show’s in trouble and nobody likes Gregory,” one person identified as an “insider” told the iPad news service The Daily in an item that circulated fast through This Town after the Huffington Post played it big and linked to the story. Another insider provided the requisite “Tim Russert would be spinning in his grave” quote. (NBC slammed the story as “recklessly reported” and “categorically untrue,” and Gregory would eventually re-up as host of
Meet the Press
in early 2013.)

Brokaw is one of the few people left who drew a Russert-level reverence in Washington. He actually did work on behalf of veterans, not just tweet about them on holidays. His mega-bestseller on World War II vets,
The Greatest Generation
, made Brokaw the go-to celebrant of vets in the same way Tim, via
Big Russ and Me
, became self-appointed ambassador to the glories of fatherhood.

Brokaw spent most of his time at his ranch in Montana, with occasional cameos at big political to-dos, like the Iowa caucuses, political conventions, and debates. He tended to walk around with a wry, happy smile that indicated that he got a lot of inside jokes, not just the ones that everyone else did. He floated above at a venerable, self-amused reserve. He wore a hearing aide, though he claims it’s “a Viagra drip.”

After the 2012 Correspondents’ Association dinner a month earlier, Brokaw did an interview with Howie Kurtz in which he bemoaned what the political-media culture had become. Americans, he said, had come to view the
political system as a “closed game.” In addition, the media is now less concerned with being in tune with America than they are with promoting their own brands and worshipping celebrities. “It’s all ‘Look at Me,’ ‘Look at Me,’ ‘Look at Me,’” he said.