This Town (7 page)

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-paged
Capitol
File
magazine. It was a terrific play for Brand Valerie and Brand Desirée. 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 postelection 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.

“It started as sort of a joke to treat official Washington as a celebrity culture,” said Ana Marie Cox, who helped create the genre online by starting the website Wonkette in 2004. “Now it seems that a lot of the irony has been lost and the joke has turned real.”

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.

•   •   •

A
rianna 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 façade 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.” Resentment between the parties simmered for years and boiled anew when Huffington started her website and initiated something called Russert Watch. The feature ridiculed
Meet the Press
as a hothouse of conventional wisdom, reflexive partisanship, and Beltway gamesmanship. Huffington told me later that media criticism had always been a big part of the website’s mission, and she started Russert Watch to chronicle how the host’s “kid-gloves-handling of the D.C. establishment allowed the conventional wisdom to survive unchallenged.” It had nothing to do with any personal history with Russert or Orth, she said.

Regardless, Russert, who despite his top-of-the-class station could be quite thin-skinned—and quite Irish in holding grudges—complained bitterly about Huffington’s Russert Watch. Arianna was conspicuously lukewarm (or silent) about Russert during the canonization that followed his death. She did not attend the funeral. Luke Russert says he will always refuse to shake Arianna’s hand.

Huffington’s resurrection into a new-media queen was completed three years later when AOL paid $315 million for the right to merge with the Huffington Post. The arrangement put her in charge of the whole moussaka. When the then CEO of NBC Universal, Jeff Zucker, later revealed that the network had itself pursued an acquisition of Huff-Po, it also no doubt set Russert spinning in his you-know-what. On the morning the AOL news broke, Sally Quinn, who in recent years has become fascinated with religion and now runs the “On Faith” website on WashingtonPost.com, forwarded the announcement to her old pal Orth, a devout Catholic.

“How could God let this happen?” Sally asked.

“It must be part of God’s divine plan,” Tim’s widow said.

Huffington’s red carpet on Inauguration eve was dense with Demi Moores, Ashton Kutchers, Stings, David Axelrods, and Valerie Jarretts. Arianna addressed the reveling mob from a fourth-floor balcony. She wore a black gown with a long tail and looked every bit a re-reinvented queen of a changing universe. (Disclosure: my sister Lori works for Arianna at the Huffington Post, so this could get slightly awkward.)

In the mad dash to get in with the hot young White House, Arianna, at fifty-eight, appeared to be a frontrunner. The White House press shop paid close and solicitous attention. Obama himself was dropping Arianna’s name—only her first name necessary—into interviews with the
New York
Times
. He volunteered that Arianna disapproved of his redecoration of the Oval Office. Valerie Jarrett called Huffington an “icon” and a “phenomenon” at a party Tammy Haddad threw for Huffington to celebrate her new book on the American underclass,
Third World America
. (And who knew there would be valet parking in Third World America? Or specially embroidered
Third World America
pillows!)

Outside the Newseum, the magnificent Tammy—Tim called her “the Tamster” and now so did I—was trolling the sidewalk. She was surveying the long, snaking queue of people waiting to get into the bash and kept pulling worthies out of line, declaring her D.C. Chosens in real time. Okay, I admit I was one of them. I felt like a jackass, walking ahead of everyone. But it was really cold, and Arianna had also promised “live tweeting stations” at her party, so yay for her, yay for me, and yay for the Tamster.

You gotta love the Tamster. Actually you don’t, and some don’t, though not in any deep or greatly malicious way, at least in most cases. Tammy is a contradiction in that she is also one of those people of whom it is often wondered: What exactly does she do? But she also gets points for transparency (in whatever it is she does). Or at least ubiquity. She eschews the high-minded pretense that this is anything but a festival of vanities and gossip and a variation on the Miss America Pageant that she herself has judged and still sits on the board of. She has blasted a place for herself in the city: impossible to miss, if not resist—six feet and not shy about invading your personal space and telling you about how she knows everyone (and how wonderful YOU are too) and putting you on camera. Her signature accoutrement is a little video camera she carries around, called the “Tam Cam.” With it, she walks up to people she knows—and who, by extension,
matter
—and initiates quick little ambush interviews, which she will often put online. The interviews are generally quick and painless, if somewhat intrusive, “like a light enema,” in the words of one friend/victim.

“My job is to be around the most successful people, the most up-and-coming people, and the people who have impact,” Tammy told me. She kowtows to them, or those who think they are “them,” or want to be. This group has always existed in the ornate playground of social climbing that is This Town. Only now it is big enough to contain an entire subeconomy, and a business for Tammy Haddad.

Haddad grew up in Pittsburgh, the granddaughter of Syrian immigrants and the daughter of a gas station owner. Her father, Edward David Haddad, eventually started a truck rental company above his Amoco station that grew into a large operation known as Haddad’s Trucks (the “Can-Do People”), which specializes in renting to the makers of feature films—the first being
Flashdance
, filmed in Pittsburgh in 1983. Haddad’s now operates up and down the East Coast with a particularly large and intrusive presence in New York City. The behemoth loads will often insinuate themselves into the city’s crowded streets and take up lots of space—an association that seems particularly apt for the Tamster. “Your brother’s trucks are blocking my street,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg once complained to her.

Tammy graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where she was head of the student programming council and played the flute and the piccolo in the school’s marching, jazz, and concert bands.

She went on to become an accomplished cable TV producer. That’s what she did for
Larry King Live
, a show she helped create and produce for many years. Given King’s cachet and reputation for friendly interviews, Haddad was immediately exposed to a veritable parade of fame. In other words, there were worse places to build a network of “people who matter.” She did a series of other jobs in TV, eventually landing with Chris Matthews as a producer of
Hardball
. That marriage ended in 2007, with some of Matthews’s friends worrying that if it continued, Matthews would have a nervous breakdown (in fairness, many of Tammy’s friends worried that the same would happen to her). Regardless, after leaving
Hardball
, Haddad went into full Force of Nature and reinvention mode. She became a perfect flower of an emerging Washington moment.

Part of the producer’s job is to make the talent feel comfortable and confident. That makes it easier for them to go on the air and project comfort and confidence, no matter what their ratings or what the critics say. That’s what she does, or tries to do, for fancy-pants Washington—those who are invited! “Hi, doll!” she will boom, and, “You just have to meet the supertalented author. Come with me.” Next thing you know, you’re across the room, part of a scrum waiting to meet the supertalented author. As you wait, Tammy holds court, going on about how Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s economic adviser, is such a total sweetheart, and how you have to meet him, too, and how Cate Edwards, John and Elizabeth’s oldest daughter, is engaged, and how Arianna was just telling her something or other. And here comes the big cake that Tammy arranged, and the presents, and maybe a special toast for the honored guest, or even a skit. She plants herself right in the nation’s courtyard and enables This Town’s perpetual adolescence.

Tammy loved Tim, and Tim thought Tammy was a trip and maybe a little much at times, but he appreciated her because he liked Washington originals, and that’s what the Tamster was and is. Perhaps a bit of a cartoon. And we could leave it at that, except that Tammy has made herself “necessary” and deftly ensconced herself into an Obama World that had also vowed to avoid precisely her ilk of Washington socialite.

Shortly before the first Obama inauguration, the
New York
Times
published a story on what Washington hosts were doing to attract the new president and first lady to their parties. The first step is to reach out to the people who have influence with the Obamas, Tammy was quoted as saying.
“The social question is, Who are the closest people to the Obamas personally?” she said. “Who is the hottest property inside their small circle?”

Haddad knew exactly who the hottest Obama properties were. And she got right up in their faces like that towering Great Dane from the old
Marmaduke
comic strip. Resistance was futile. They became her
really good friends
. She hosted parties “honoring” them. She welcomed them to town and celebrated their new jobs. She helped organize parties at which the featured guest was Valerie Jarrett, the Obama BFF and White House senior adviser; she organized a dinner for Dan Pfeiffer as he was ascending to White House communications director. She helped arrange events and throw parties for people, whether they wanted to be feted or not (“party rape,” one close friend of a reluctant honoree called the phenomenon).

Tammy also worked to raise money and awareness for epilepsy research, even though she had no personal connection to the disease. But her new friends David and Susan Axelrod did, and they welcomed her help, as any parents would. Clearly, David Axelrod’s elevated status in Washington was helpful to their cause, and no one was more helpful than Tammy. She became a tireless promoter and fund-raiser for CURE (Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy), which raised $1.6 million from private sources in 2009, according to financial statements—three times as much as it had raised the previous year, before David was in the White House.
None of these donors have been disclosed, nor are they required to be. But donating generously to CURE could at least carry an appearance of trying to curry favor with the new White House. Tammy learned about the Axelrod family saga after reading a cover story about it in
Parade
and then seeing Susan Axelrod interviewed on the next day’s
Today
show. Tammy was moved by the story and also saw great possibility in Susan.