This Town (17 page)

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A
s guests filed into the Correspondents’ Association dinner the following night, a would-be terrorist was attempting to blow up Times Square. The dinner and pre-parties went on as planned. It lent the festivities a “while Rome burns” feel—or, in this case, while an explosive-laden Nissan Pathfinder burns in the middle of America’s busiest crossroads. The car was discovered by a street vendor at around 6:30 p.m., just as the Washington nobility was peacocking down the red carpets of the Hilton with the Biebers and Kardashians and Peter Orszags of the galaxy. C-SPAN covered the arrivals live and the cable news networks blanketed the dinner with an occasional break-in to update viewers on the off-message Nissan. MSNBC didn’t bother to mention the near bombing until almost eleven p.m., after Jay Leno—the dinner’s featured “entertainment”—was done imploding at the Washington Hilton.

By then, many of the network’s top executives and personalities had repaired to a massive MSNBC after-bash for sushi, hot dogs, and the privilege of watching Morgan Freeman dance to Kool & the Gang under a massive poster of Ed Schultz. But the marquee after-dinner happening was put on as expected by Bloomberg and
Vanity Fair
at the French ambassador’s residence in Kalorama. It offers one of Washington’s truly hypnagogic environments. OMG! “Hey, isn’t that . . . ?” Someone from
Glee
,
Melrose Place
, Colin Powell! Goofy stuff happens, things you remember: some actress running up to David Axelrod and saying, “Um, why can’t you just turn off the oil? From the leak?” And Axelrod has no idea who she was and turns to his assistant, Eric Lesser, and asks “Who the hell was that?” and Lesser doesn’t know either.

Some years earlier, before the Bloomberg and
Vanity Fair
parties were merged like Exxon and Mobil, my
New York Times
colleague Mark Mazzetti rushed up to the bad-girl actress Shannen Doherty, late of
Beverly Hills, 90210
, and somewhat ironically proclaimed himself a “big fan.” She asked him what he did. And when Mark told her he was a reporter, she replied simply, “Oh, I love current events.”

There is a peculiar genius to that, the elementary school terminology of “current events.” Hollywood also loves “current events.” And they love meeting the people they see on Sunday morning television “not quite denying” things and “not ruling out” things and “not closing the door” on things. It proves our friends from Hollywood are also smart and serious and cause-oriented. It is partly why they have descended to the level of This Town for the weekend—to walk among the Gods of Current Events.

Orange and purple sorbet–toned lights illuminated the trees over the French ambassador’s back patio in a neighborhood of mansions and wrought-iron fences overlooking Rock Creek Park. Low-flying helicopters circled overhead and a light mist machine completed the aura of the bubble world. News of the Times Square situation seeped in, mostly via Twitter. Mayor Bloomberg resisted his namesake party to jet back to New York. Otherwise, Times Square interfered not at all with anyone’s good time.

Guests were milling around, sipping flutes of champagne, serially affirming each other. That US Airways pilot, Sully, was a particular hot spot. He’s the one who landed the plane in the Hudson River the year before. He accepted serial thanks for his service. There are always a lot of drunken losers at these things stumbling up to anyone in a uniform and saying “Thank you for your service.” Many military guys I’ve spoken to find this hilarious. And if the salute comes from a woman, they will sometimes receive it as an opener for getting “patriotic” with them.

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T
he next morning
Meet the Press
made its first broadcast ever from a new high-definition studio at the network’s Washington bureau. The innovation had been in the works for some time and was promoted as an old-media institution adapting to the state-of-the-art norms of modern broadcasting. NBC’s top executives—NBC News head Steve Capus and CEO Jeff Zucker—traveled to the Nebraska Avenue studio for a special brunch reception following the show. David Gregory, who had been moderating
Meet the Press
for seventeen months, cast a more telegenic and HD-ready figure than did Tim Russert. Unlike Russert, Gregory did not come up as a political operative but went directly into TV. It’s all he wanted to do.

Gregory was a familiar Washington trademark who covered the Bush White House for NBC and gained a reputation for asking combative questions in televised briefings. He did an excellent Bush impersonation on the press bus. Colleagues and Bush officials at times accused him of showboating in the briefing room, a polished and more urbane version of ABC’s Sam Donaldson, who made his name in the 1980s shouting questions at President Reagan. President Bush, who called Gregory “Stretch”—that seemed to be W’s unclever default nickname for tall people—ridiculed Gregory once for asking a question in French of Jacques Chirac, then president of France, at a joint press conference. “
The guy memorizes four words and he plays like he’s intercontinental,” Bush quipped.

In late 2008, the Intercontinental Man prevailed in a beauty contest to succeed Mr. Buffalo. It was an intense competition that was in evidence even at Tim’s memorial service at the Kennedy Center. MC Tom Brokaw welcomed friends of Tim’s, family members, and the largest contingent in the hall, “those who think they should be his successor on
Meet the Press
.” Gregory was in solid standing within The Club. His tendency to project prima donna airs was leavened (some) by a playful and self-deprecating sense of humor. He once participated in a skit with Karl Rove at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner. He was a regular on the city’s dinner-and-cocktail circuit and a participant in a Torah study group with other well-known D.C. political and media figures. He tweeted about giving his young daughter five dollars after she lost her first tooth.

Gregory had struggled in trying to fill Russert’s chair on
Meet the Press
. He acknowledged as much in a short speech at the unveiling for the new HD set. “This has not been an easy transition,” Gregory said, choking up while invoking the legacy of Tim and raising a glass of orange juice, or maybe it was a screwdriver. “A new era of NBC News,” Capus called it.

It was a new era all around. While the
Meet the Press
ceremony wrapped up, a maiden Sunday brunch tradition was kicking off at the $24 million Georgetown home of Politico’s founding publisher, Robert Allbritton, an emerging goofball of a media magnate who was clearly moving up in the pecking order. As testament to Allbritton, his brunch generated much heat, especially in Politico. The
New Republic
credited Allbritton with “reshaping the way we follow politics.” When I was writing about Mike Allen earlier that year, Allbritton told me that he viewed his stewardship of Politico
in terms of a vital community service.

“I don’t have to be doing this,” said Allbritton, the heir to a Washington banking and media fortune. “I can go find myself a coconut drink and go hang out in the islands for the rest of my life if I want to. But a lot of this now is about contributing something back.”

Something back: in this case, a crepe station; Maine lobster poached in court bouillon and served warm in a white Chinese spoon napped with a grapefruit beurre blanc; citrus salmon toasts; baby prime-beef burgers drizzled with truffle oil; and mini eggs Benedict, among other goodies (hat tip: Playbook). Paparazzi gathered outside the gated mansion, along with a few gawkers, someone shouting questions at Alan Greenspan, and a would-be party crasher intent on seeing the Jonas Brothers and trying to pass herself off as
PBS NewsHour
correspondent Gwen Ifill (who is black, unlike the would-be party crasher).

“I can’t imagine anyplace I’d rather be,” said Jack Quinn, the Democratic superlobbyist who started it all with a party five days earlier. Reports on the brunch were stellar, of course, a lavish gathering of the same Tammys and Mikeys and Axes you see on TV, read about in Playbook, and run into again and again on a special week like this.

Gregory stopped by the brunch after
Meet the Press
, one of six Sunday shows that Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano would appear on that morning. Meanwhile, the president headed to the Gulf Coast to inspect the oily residue there.

7

The Roach Motel of Power

Summer 2010

A
leftover from the French ambassador’s house, well after midnight, maybe around two. There, in the grand entrance, Morgan Freeman was giving a foot massage to his date, Katie Couric. I will leave that snapshot as is, except to observe that both seemed to be having a lovely time at the party, especially Freeman. He moved graciously through the grand rooms, solicitous of the perky anchor on his arm. He was “Driving Miss Katie.”

Freeman fielded kudos for his work, particularly in
The Shawshank
Redemption
. That was the paramount prison film in which Freeman’s character, Red Redding, grew dependent upon the self-sustaining regimen behind bars. Red muses on the odd seductions of the sealed-off culture. Inmates arrive as outsiders, become accepted, and before they knew it, they are, as Red says, “institutionalized.”

Washington’s cushy institution is ideologically diverse. They take their constitutionals together in the courtyard: members of Congress and D.C. journos in awkward jogging outfits walking laps around the mall, led by Mika and Joe, in a continuous walk-and-talk. (From Playbook: “LIVE FROM THE NATIONAL MALL at 8 a.m. on MSNBC—The ‘Morning Joe’ Bipartisan Health Challenge, a 3K challenge to promote healthy living,” hosted live by Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist, with the Capitol dome behind them. “Participants include friends of the show Valerie Jarrett; Sens. Gillibrand, Collins and Thune; Reps. Shadegg, Ryan, Cantor and McCarthy . . .”)

Chatting away a few feet from Freeman and Couric was a thoroughly institutionalized Washington character, Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut.
He is the five-term senator whose father held the same job years before.
He worked as a Senate page at sixteen and was elected to the Senate at thirty-six after three terms in the House. He was first elected to Congress in 1974 as part of a Watergate-era groundswell of new liberal members who were hailed as a “breath of fresh air.” By 2010, many of Dodd’s constituents viewed him as the exemplar of why Washington was again in need of fumigation.

It did not matter that, legislatively speaking, Dodd was in the midst of a sweet last hurrah. He played key roles in the health-care overhaul that Obama signed a few months earlier and a major banking bill later in the year. Nor did it matter that colleagues of both parties loved Chris Dodd, an inimitable fellow of the chamber who looks and sounds like a senatorial cartoon. He has a silvery helmet of hair, stentorian voice, and backslapping manner, as if delivered straight from preschool to cloakroom.

Electorally speaking, this was a bad time to be such an archetype. Dodd exemplified the rule that the more Washington-fortified a politician was in 2010, the less popular he was outside. Dodd’s poll numbers back home were deep in the cesspool. He drew scorn for receiving a special rate on a mortgage from a firm, Countrywide, that he would later try to assist as chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs after the collapse of the housing market. He was perceived as someone who had been in Washington too long, who had grown too cozy with Wall Street, and whose self-indulgence was evidenced by his quixotic campaign for president in 2008. Dodd raised a good portion of his money for that race from the banking and financial services sector. His fund-raisers touted him as either the next president or, failing that, still the powerful chairman of the banking committee. Dodd moved with his family to Iowa for several weeks before the state’s caucuses as the banking crisis was worsening into what would become a full meltdown. He won a pittance of the vote in Iowa and dropped out that night.

Dodd was coming off a dreadful year in which he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, his sister died, and, a few weeks later, so did his closest friend in the Senate, Ted Kennedy. He had recently announced that he would not be seeking a sixth term, citing that he was in “the worst political shape of my life.” He was, on the other hand, excited by the prospect of doing something different. I interviewed him around this time. When he spoke of his next chapter, eating a chilled lobster salad in the Senate dining room, Dodd’s eyes widened. Or maybe it was wistfulness for something he knew he could not escape, an awareness that any life “outside” for him was not feasible.

Regardless, Dodd was bandying options and seeming to enjoy the fantasies. Maybe he could just rip the whole thing up and sever the umbilical bond of his fully gestated Washington career. No looking back. His name had come up as the next president of the University of Connecticut. He mused about possibly rejoining the Peace Corps, repeating a youthful tour in the Dominican Republic. Perhaps, Dodd said, he might try joining a start-up company in Silicon Valley or a nonprofit. He was excited about getting off “the same old treadmill,” he told me.

When I saw Dodd squeezing arms at the French ambassador’s house and taking thanks for his service, I asked him if we would see him again the following year at the Correspondents’ Association dinner parties. He was obliged to flash a practiced smirk—good-bye to all this, this compulsory Washington schmoozing that had sucked up so much of his six decades on the planet. “Doubtful,” he said, laughing.

This was a slight hedge compared with what Dodd promised when I asked him if he would ever consider becoming a lobbyist. “That I can take off the table right now,” said Dodd, one of many published occasions in which he reiterated his “no lobbying” vow.

No surprise how this story ends. A few months after Dodd finished up his service in the U.S. Senate, he was named head of the Motion Picture Association of America, a $1.2 million position in which he would lead Hollywood’s foremost lobbying group. Former Democratic senator Bob Kerrey, who nearly took the MPAA job himself before Dodd did, described Dodd’s new job as “just being an overpaid lobbyist.” Still, he was tempted to take the gig himself, he told me—“Damn right I was,” said Kerrey, who had been president of the New School in New York. He does not particularly like Washington, Kerrey says, one reason he did not take the job. Nor does he care about issues important to the MPAA, like piracy. “I don’t give a fuck about piracy,” Kerrey told me. “But for that money, I have to admit, I started getting a little interested in piracy.”

When I last talked to Kerrey, in January 2012, he was thinking about running for his old Senate seat in Nebraska. Ben Nelson, the Democratic incumbent, was retiring, and Kerrey was getting pressure from top Democrats to get back in. He might do it, he said, though he didn’t sound excited. “The problem is, the second your hand comes off the Bible, you become an asshole.” Nonetheless, Kerrey wound up running, and lost.

Dodd, for what it’s worth, is no asshole. No one who engaged in a doughnut-throwing fight with former congressman Harold Ford Sr. could be that bad. It was also fun watching Dodd stump for president in 2007 and seeing the joy on Dodd’s face even as it belied the obvious fate in store for his doomed-from-the-start campaign. “
Tip O’Neill once came down here and asked for a grit,” Mr. Dodd said, belly-laughing his way through a diner in South Carolina. “That was Tip’s way of connecting with the local folks: by asking for a grit.” Later, Dodd talked about how he had recently been speaking at a firehouse in Pahrump, Nevada. He looked out a window, and there it was: a billboard advertising the Brothel Art Museum. “You wouldn’t see this kind of thing in Fairfield County,” Dodd noted.

So Dodd lied about never lobbying. Or maybe his thinking just “evolved.” He made this no-lobbying promise, Dodd explained, “before this opportunity was on the radar screen.” Also, he pointed out, the MPAA job involved more than lobbying.

Indeed, Dodd was involved in far more than just lobbying: just a few months into his new job, Dodd hosted a big dinner and cocktail reception the night before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

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R
elationships are to Washington what computer chips are to Silicon Valley (or casino chips are to Vegas). Unlike computer chips, relationships are not grounded in exact science. But that does not stop people from trying, or paying a lot, to create and nurture them. Corporations have figured out that despite the exorbitant costs of hiring lobbyists, the ability to shape or tweak or kill even the tiniest legislative loophole can be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Harry Reid tells a favorite story about his friendship with the late Forrest Mars, the billionaire candy magnate who kept a home in Nevada and struck up a friendship with Reid. Reid liked Mars because he was an odd character, and he likes odd characters. He never gave Reid any money, but Reid kept visiting him because he liked talking to Mars. Finally, Mars wrote Reid a check for $1,000. “I’m doing this because I like you, not because I think it will do me any good,” Mars told Reid. “I learned a long time ago, if you give your money to lobbyists, they will do a lot more good for you.” His reasoning is that the lobbyists, rather than individual donors, are far more likely to get meaningful access to the elected official.

Lobbyists were present in the Capitol even before the Capitol was in Washington. When the first session of Congress gathered in New York in 1789, business representatives showed up bent on thwarting a tariff bill. The American tradition of lobbying the government dates back four centuries to the Virginia colony, according to the former
Washington Post
managing editor Bob Kaiser in his book on the modern lobbying culture,
So Much Damn Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government
. But until recently these “lobbyists”—supposedly named for the area of the buildings in which they congregated—did not constitute the critical mass they do now. In the sixties, businesses often avoided and even ignored the city altogether, believing it was not relevant or was counterproductive to their fortunes.

Now, nearly every major corporation, trade association, and union either employs their own lobbyist or army of lobbyists, or pays handsome retainers—often in the neighborhood of $50,000 a month, regardless of what work they actually do—to a lobbying practice. Corporations will routinely pay large sums to D.C.-based trade associations and also hire their own lobbying teams to hedge their bets in case the trade association is not effective.

Lobbying is a thriving example of Washington’s middleman economy in which a third party (the lobbyist) facilitates a relationship or some illusion thereof between a client and a government official. Even those who do not formally register to lobby the government can market lucrative services via a “strategic communications” or “strategic public affairs” practice (everyone here has a “practice” now, as if they’re doctors performing surgery). One way or another, almost every engine of new wealth in the region has derived from the federal government, or at least the desire to be close to it.

Calculations vary on how many former members of Congress have joined the influence-peddling set. By the middle of 2011, at least 160 former lawmakers were working as lobbyists in Washington, according to First Street, a website that tracks lobbying trends in D.C., in April 2013. The Center for Responsive Politics listed 412 former members who are influence peddling, 305 of whom are registered as federal lobbyists. Hundreds more were reaping huge, often six- and seven-figure salaries as consultants or “senior advisers,” those being among the noms de choice for avoiding the scarlet L.

In addition, tens of thousands of Hill and administration staff people move seamlessly into lobbying jobs. In a memoir by disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the felon wrote that the best way for lobbyists to influence people on the Hill is to casually suggest they join their firm after they complete their public service. “Now, the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to them, that was it, we owned them,” said Abramoff, who spent forty-three months in the federal slammer after being convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges. “And what does that mean?” Abramoff continued. “Every request from our office, every request of our clients, everything that we want, they’re gonna do. And not only that, they’re gonna think of things we can’t think of to do.”

Lobbyists can offer, in other words, an implicit preemptive payoff to powerful government officials. It happens not only on the Hill but in the boastfully antilobbyist, anti-revolving-door Obama White House. Scores of administration officials had by 2010 left the administration for K Street jobs without anyone so much as pointing out that they were defying a central tenet of the Obama political enterprise. If it was noted at all, the news was treated as a natural turn within the revolving door. After five legislative affairs staffers left the White House in the first part of 2011—three of whom went to K Street—Politico
reporter Amie Parnes presented the trend as a natural by-product of administration staffers working hard for a period of time and then getting rewarded. “There are good jobs waiting at the end of the tunnel,” Parnes quoted Stephen Hess, an oft-cited “governance studies” expert at the Brookings Institution. Parnes made no mention of Obama’s public antipathy to K Street and his vow to slow the city’s revolving door. Still, the work can be a grind, Parnes wrote sympathetically, with the plum lobbying gigs awaiting them as just rewards. “There’s a payoff,” Hess concluded, using the word “payoff” with no apparent wryness.

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A
s Dodd was finishing up his financial regulatory bill in the summer of 2010, I spoke about him with outgoing senator Robert Bennett, a Republican of Utah who had been defeated in his reelection bid by a Tea Party favorite, Mike Lee. Bennett said he was surprised by how personally the voters of Connecticut had felt betrayed by Dodd. “They seemed to think Chris was actually corrupt,” Bennett said, adding that this was not fair and that he certainly did not believe this about Dodd. He said the people of Utah were more pleasant to him when they tossed him aside than the cranky voters of Connecticut were to poor Dodd.

Bennett and another retiring senator, Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, announced on the same day they would be joining Arent Fox, a major downtown law firm that includes a large lobbying component. Both Bennett and Dorgan had served on the Senate Committee on Appropriations, which gave them vast knowledge of how Congress allocates cash. It also made them coveted recruits for K Street.