This Town (35 page)

When Rubin “retired,” Clinton called him the “greatest secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton.” The former president seemed to hedge on that a decade later in an interview on ABC’s
This Week
, saying that he should have done more—against Rubin’s advice—to regulate the derivatives market, which subsequently helped tank the economy.

But never mind that. Rubin spent his “retirement” as a major sovereign at Citigroup, where he earned
a total compensation of about $126 million between 1999 and 2009—a time when many of Citigroup’s investors lost everything.

“Hey, that’s Bob Rubin,” said one of the many gawkers stationed in the lobby of the Ritz to watch this festival of pin-striped populism unfold. “This is our temporary Gucci Gulch,” gushed Rick Williams, a Democratic lobbyist who was in from Nashville, christening the one-percenty scene.

Rubin’s leathery brown skin and stunned eyes made him look like the kind of really old lizard that you can only see on those eco-tourism tours of Costa Rica (the kind of hyper-expensive expeditions loved by Ritz-Carlton Democrats). Looking tired, Rubin seemed not to notice Senator John Kerry, another paragon of the Ritz-Carlton Democrats, who was walking right past him while reporting for duty in the lobby, cell phone to ear (not to be bothered). Rubin was apparently headed up to a reception for big donors and White House officials on the eighteenth floor.

Later, in what passed for news during a convention week, Rubin fell into the pool.

He was pulled out by other guests and reported to be “in good spirits.” Politics might be swimming in money—but in this case, money was just swimming.

Back in the lobby, William Bennett, the former education secretary and drug czar, was laboring through the lobby en route to dinner next door at BLT Steak. Passing outside was Karl Rove, oblivious to the odd shouts of “Rove, you suck!” emanating from passing cars. Yes, Bennett and Rove were Republicans. But they were men of diverse affiliations and allegiances: to the media, to celebrity, and to the millionaire classes that dominate conventions. They fit.

Heather Podesta had hit the lobby, too, and collapsed into a chair. “I am exhausted,” she revealed to me while picking from a bowl of sesame-crusted almonds. After a few minutes, she hauled herself to another reception, this one at the palatial home of Erskine Bowles, the former chief of staff in the Clinton White House. Suddenly, the dull power roar of the Ritz lobby was interrupted by shrieks. Protesters—about a dozen of them, all in pink—nuisanced their way through the lobby. They were singing something (hard to make out the words) to the tune of “Hit the Road Jack” before breaking into a chant of “Get money out of politics!” They were led out by security.

•   •   •

B
y far, the star of the week—of the summer, and of maybe the whole election—was William Jefferson Clinton. His rehabilitation was total after his fiasco of 2008: his pathetic performance on the Hillary campaign, the accusations of subtle racism, whispers that he was one of those heart bypass surgery survivors who had subsequently lost his mind. Bubba was back.

He gave what was by far the best speech of either convention, rocking a strong endorsement of the president while managing to convey the reelection rationale far better than Obama or his campaign had. Obama, who wrapped his former rival in a full-on stage hug following Clinton’s Wednesday night speech, said he should name Clinton to a new position of “secretary for explaining stuff.”

Charlotte at times resembled a Clinton reunion and staging area for the Clintonites gearing up for what seemed like the inevitable: Hillary in 2016. Doug Band, Bill’s top post‒White House gatekeeper, held court in the Ritz lobby. “Hey, can you get me with him?” Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee asked me, pointing to Band. Cohen, who represented a mostly black district of Memphis,
had tried to join the Congressional Black Caucus a few years earlier but was denied (maybe because he’s white). Now he just wanted to meet Band, whom he dubbed “someone who is definitely worth knowing.”

As you’d expect, Terry McAuliffe was a Ritz stalwart all week. The Democratic moneyman was as natural to this habitat as the milk chocolate fondue, mini lobster rolls, and $420 bottles of Louis Roederer champagne.

“You can always tell by the way they move, that sense of purpose,” said Jeff Smith, a former Missouri state senator who taught political science at Washington University. I used to quote Smith from time to time in the early 2000s. He then ran for Dick Gephardt’s old seat (after the former House Democratic leader “retired” to work on i$$ues he was pa$$ionate about). Smith lost narrowly and then I lost track of him. It turns out that he had run afoul of campaign finance laws and wound up in jail for a year. Mr. Smith never got to Washington, in other words.

But he did get to Charlotte. After he got out of jail in November 2010, Smith began teaching public policy at the New School in New York and contributing to Politico. He was sitting in the lobby of the Ritz, studying that walk of the powerful. “It’s just that walk,” Smith continued. “You recognize it when you see it. It screams, ‘I’m someone, I’m rich, and I belong here!’”

As Jeff spoke, McAuliffe, who presumably had emerged from his mother doing That Walk, was blitzing his way through in the lobby, waving to everyone. “Hey, Terry!” someone yelled at him, and he detoured past the table-hopping former congressman from Tennessee, Harold Ford, whose district is now represented by Steve Cohen.

Smith was introduced to McAuliffe. An ex-girlfriend of Smith’s, Lis Smith, used to be Terry’s press secretary. “I used to date one of your biggest fans,” Jeff Smith told the former DNC chairman, “and I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual.”

“Who is that?” Mr. McAuliffe asked. “Hillary?”

Big white men are awesome!

I had seen the Macker and BFF Bill Clinton together earlier that summer in Horn Lake, Mississippi. The occasion was the grand opening of a plant that would build little electronic cars for McAuliffe’s new company, GreenTech Automotive. Haley Barbour, McAuliffe’s old green room friend and the former governor of Mississippi, was also there. It was Barbour who had helped McAuliffe secure a good deal on land and tax incentives for the plant back when he was governor. He left office in January and returned to his namesake lobbying firm. McAuliffe and Barbour were planning some paid speeches together, too—at fifty grand a pop. (Macker had done one with Rove in Texas not long before.)

Clinton, McAuliffe, and Barbour were goofing around backstage before the ceremony, getting pictures taken with a bunch of Chinese employees and investors. As the former president prepared to go onstage, I asked if he would ever consider buying a car from McAuliffe, whom he had once marveled could “talk an owl out of a tree.” “
Absolutely, I would buy a new car from Terry,” Clinton told me. “But a used car? I am not so sure about a used car.” He laughed and wheeled around and repeated the line to Barbour, slapping his fleshy back. “Listen to what I just told him. . . .”

By the last weeks of the campaign, Bill Clinton owned the country again—the citizenry that had twice elected him, the Republicans who had impeached him, and the Democrats who had disowned him, for a time, four years earlier. He even owned the president, Obama, whom he previously couldn’t stand, and who was now in his debt to a point that he was compelled to make Clinton one of the first people he called when the campaign came to a merciful close.

Clinton had lost considerable weight, which had been clear from photographs (“Big Dog” was now more “Vegan Dog”). But it was jarring still to see the svelte Clinton up close, especially since his head was as big as ever—a fact accentuated by the ruddy brightness of his face and pronounced cheekbones. Encountering Clinton these days is like meeting a skinny older guy wearing an oversize rubber Bill Clinton head.

The GreenTech opening was set up like a campaign event: big flags, balloons, bused-in guests, and a band. Everything was geared to the appearance of the politicians—McAuliffe, Barbour, and of course Clinton. The actual car-making process had thus far yielded just a few Crayola-colored cars, displayed behind a security fence, and the event had a slightly frantic feel. It was as if someone (like the Macker, maybe) had told his employees, “Hey, we have Bill Clinton down here July sixth and we need to build a crowd and start making some cars!” The car makers looked harried as guests designated as VIPs kept streaming through, many of them in from China. They arrived, dozens of them, via a Harrah’s shuttle bus with a big “Fun in Store for Those Who Ride” painted on the side. McAuliffe was later seen cruising the Mississippi River on a party boat with a bunch of his Chinese friends.

In his speech, McAuliffe said that during the nineties “President Clinton created more millionaires and billionaires than any other president in the history of this country.” At which point Barbour, who had been chatting onstage with Clinton, gave the former president a special nudge.

After the event, Barbour made his exit and McAuliffe and Clinton stayed behind to pose for a group photo with assorted staff and stragglers. “Hey, get in here,” someone called out to a young African-American aide to McAuliffe. “We need some diversity in this photo.”

“Yeah, we only got one Jewish guy in this picture,” Clinton said. “That’s not enough.” With that, Clinton headed out a back door and into his motorcade, while the Macker bounded back down the hallway like he owned the place.

•   •   •

I
n late October, I ran into Bob Barnett on a flight from Fort Lauderdale to Reagan National Airport in D.C. Barnett told me (immediately) that he would be heading to Camp David to help the president prepare for his last debate with Mitt Romney. After limited success in 2008, Barnett had finally managed to crack the Obama debate-prep circle. It helped that he continued to serve as the singular point man in helping top administration and campaign luminaries—POTUS and Hillary, Michelle and Bill—cash in. He remained perhaps the single most powerful lawyer in the world of politics, publishing, and broadcast media. Yet more remarkable was Bob’s seeming neediness, his hunger for recognition as a wise counselor to Great Men and Women—ALL OF THEM—a modern sage in the Clark Clifford and James Baker and Edward Bennett Williams tradition. So the debate-prep identification remained paramount. It put Bob in a room with the real players and principals in a non‒hired gun context. Naturally, Bob’s small role in the Obama debate sessions was already known to everyone, well before he dropped Camp David to me on the plane. Playbook had previously “SPOTTED” the “super-lawyer” at an earlier “Obama debate camp” near Las Vegas. That mention brought smirks from many members of Obama’s team, who suspected that Barnett had in fact “spotted” himself to Mikey.

During the sessions, the president would go around the room and encourage input. When he was called upon, Bob’s view usually parroted what the Obama team called “the Politico
view” or “what D.C. insiders and people in the media were talking about.” Barnett prefaced one of his remarks to the president that “the conventional wisdom is” such and such, to which Obama joked, “Bob, you ARE the conventional wisdom,” and everyone laughed, including Bob.

•   •   •

I
n the closing days of the campaign, the conventional wisdom suggested a close Election Night, although both campaigns were predicting easy victories. Before an Obama rally in Columbus, Valerie Jarrett was even wondering aloud to a group of fellow aides backstage, “I don’t know why we’re not getting 80 percent of the vote here,” she said. David Plouffe, who the question was directed to, felt compelled to give her a straight answer. Meanwhile, the Romney campaign had filed permits to celebrate Mittens’s big victory with an eight-minute fireworks display over Boston Harbor.

By ten p.m. on November 6, the results were sealed for POTUS and the $2 billion cacophony was officially in the books and e-books. Mittens’s Secret Service detail vanished like unused fireworks. Suddenly no one was tweeting anymore about his Chipotle orders.

The campaign’s end brought the requisite calls for unity. “
After Tuesday, one thing is certain: Everyone needs a break from politics,” Terry McAuliffe said in a statement he issued a few days after the election. After breaking for a full two and a half sentences, the Macker announced he would be running for governor of Virginia in 2013.

He boasted of his “proven record of working across the aisle.” He had every reason to, evidenced by his paid bipartisan “debates” with the likes of Eddie Gillespie, who had spent the previous few months on the Romney campaign, and Karl Rove, who had spent them blowing through $300 million in super PAC cash on behalf of underperforming Republicans. Rove then threw an Election Night hissy fit on Fox News over the network’s call of Ohio for Obama. Nonetheless, Fox renewed his big contract that summer, while Rove auctioned off dinner with himself to benefit victims of Hurricane Sandy. And, apropos of nothing, someone in D.C. went on Craigslist to advertise a recliner that was “once owned by Senator Max Baucus of Montana.” Another Macker debate partner, Barbour, joined GOP eminences in calling for a tough self-assessment of the party—or, as Haley delightfully put it, “
a very serious proctology exam.”

David Petraeus was, at that moment, enduring something worse. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell broke the story that the decorated general would quit as head of the CIA over an affair with his “official biographer.” “I don’t take any pleasure in this in the sense that this is really a personal tragedy,” reported Mitchell. “Having covered Gen. Petraeus myself here and overseas, I am absolutely convinced from all the communications I have had from people directly involved that this was a matter of honor.” Not long after, Mitchell and Greenspan would attend a dinner party for David and Holly Petraeus at the home of David Bradley, publisher of the
Atlantic.

Figuratively speaking, Petraeus had been in bed with the press for years. He was unfailingly generous with chatty backgrounders and cultivated “friendships” in the fourth estate. Just as unfailingly, he was portrayed as a fearless and scholarly hero, maybe even a future president. Roger Ailes, the head of Fox, reportedly kept urging him to run, and a lot of operative-media types were floating his name for VP. Not surprisingly, “official biographer” Paula Broadwell produced a gushy tome on the studly soldier.
All In
, it was titled, hilariously, but not as hilariously as the blurb from Tom Brokaw: “Petraeus is one of the most important Americans of our time,” he wrote. “In or out of uniform.”