This Town (18 page)
Technically, former senators are forbidden from lobbying their old colleagues by a two-year “cooling-off period,” so Bennett and Dorgan joined Arent Fox as “senior policy advisers” in the government relations department. There is little practical difference between what a former officeholder who lobbies does and what a former officeholder who “senior advises” does. For instance, someone like Dorgan could correctly say he has not formally registered to lobby even though he also owns the title of co-chair of the firm’s government relations practice. In other words, he essentially oversees a staff of lobbyists. He talks all the time to his former lawmaking colleagues, and he can also use his specialized knowledge and access to call on old colleagues, friends, and fund-raisers to advance his clients’ interests in bending a law or provision to their favor. He knows not only whom to call but also the phone number and who hired the staffer and precisely what to say to make things “happen.”
While in the Senate, Dorgan was often quick to get all contemptuously righteous about people on the Hill cashing in their public service. When Jack Abramoff testified before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Dorgan beat him up over the “cesspool of greed” that surrounded Abramoff’s lobbying practice. In his subsequent memoir, Abramoff wrote of Dorgan, “I guess it wasn’t a cesspool when he had his hand out to take over $75,000 in campaign contributions from our team and clients.” (The
Washington Post
reported in 2005 that Dorgan said he would return $67,000 in donations from Indian tribes that Abramoff represented.)
When asked if his career change could be classified as “cashing in,” Robert Bennett replied, “Is there anything in the Constitution that forbids me from earning a living?”
Representative David Obey, the cantankerous liberal appropriator from Wisconsin, retired in 2010 and—to the shock of many—
joined the lobbying shop run by former colleague Richard Gephardt, the former Democratic majority leader whose willingness to reverse long-held positions in the service of paying clients was egregious even by D.C.’s standards of hired-gun opportunism. Examples abound in the case of Gephardt, a Teamster’s son who represented a working-class district in eastern Missouri for twenty-eight years and was known as one of Congress’s great champions of organized labor. But that was when he was in Congress and twice ran for president, in 1988 and 2004, with the substantial backing of labor. He would don a union windbreaker and blow out Teamsters’ halls. “I’m fighting for
yoouuu
,” he would boom over raucous crowds, and he was always convincing. His dad drove a milk truck, even.
Gephardt was praised by AFL-CIO head John Sweeney as “a real friend of working people and a powerful voice for working families on issue after issue.” But after leaving Congress in 2005, Gephardt became a powerful force for Dick Gephardt on issue after issue. He joined the Washington offices of DLA Piper as a “senior counsel” before starting his own lobbying shop in 2007. By 2010, Gephardt Government Affairs was listing his annual billings at $6.59 million, up from a pittance of $625,000 in 2007. In addition to having a top-drawer roster of corporate clients that included Goldman Sachs ($200,000 in 2010), the Boeing Company ($440,000), and Visa Inc. ($200,000), Gephardt became a “labor consultant” for Spirit AeroSystems, where he oversaw a tough antiunion campaign; also while in Congress, he supported a House resolution condemning the Armenian genocide of 1915, only to oppose the resolution as
a lobbyist who was being paid about $70,000 a month by the Turkish government, according to the
Washington Post
. Genocide goes down a little easier at those rates.
• • •
S
ome Einstein in the White House decided to christen these sticky months of July and August 2010 in Washington the “Recovery Summer.” It was a sweet turn of branding indeed, given the still-sputtering economy. The phrase was meant to highlight the “surge in Recovery Act infrastructure projects” and all of the “jobs they’ll create well into the fall and through the end of the year,” according to the White House website. As it turned out, the economy wasn’t recovering much at all, though the D.C. economy, which was humming right along, had nothing to recover from. And the sector of lame-duck lawmakers was recovering quite nicely from the collective dings and indignities they had suffered as Washington officeholders circa 2010.
Evan Bayh, for instance, was in dire need of a Recovery Summer. He was worn down and burned out. In announcing his retirement from the Senate earlier in 2010, the Indiana Democrat was extravagant in his grief over what Washington had become. Like Dodd and Bennett, Bayh was a senator’s son: daddy Birch Bayh served from 1963 to 1981. Evan was savaged in the most personal ways during the debate over health care. His wife, Susan, sat on numerous corporate boards, making more than $1 million a year since leaving as first lady of Indiana, from numerous corporate interests. (The Fort Wayne
Journal Gazette
described
Susan Bayh as a “professional board member,” having been a director of fourteen corporations since 1994, eight since 2006.)
Evan’s insistence that his wife’s deep financial stake in the industry would have no bearing on his role in overhauling it was met with open derision. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald called Bayh the “
perfectly representative face for the rotted Washington establishment,” while Matt Yglesias, writing for ThinkProgress, said Bayh was “
acting to entrench the culture of narcissism and hypocrisy that’s killing the United States Congress.”
On the way out,
Evan Bayh wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the
New York Times
cataloguing his many frustrations with politics and how the overall spirit of Washington was “certainly better in my father’s time.” He complained about the “unyielding ideology” of the Senate. He took the critique several steps further when he declared, “I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” a remark that predictably rankled many of his former colleagues. Bayh also elicited eye rolls from senators who wondered where this man had been for the last twelve years—or eye rolls because they could predict precisely what was coming next.
But Bayh didn’t stop there, soothing his deep despair over institutional conditions in Washington with dreams of “giving back” on the outside. He talked about joining a foundation. He waxed nostalgic for a previous chapter of his life in which he taught business students at the University of Indiana. He yearned to once again feel that tangible end-of-the-day satisfaction in his work. He fantasized lavishly to the
Washington Post
’s Ezra Klein about coming home to his wife after a long day of work and saying, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.”
Bayh’s valedictory lament and corollary yearnings might have been the most memorable statements he made in an otherwise ordinary two terms in the Senate. And if he had followed through on trying to fix the ills he had described on his way out (“the corrosive system of campaign financing,” “the strident partisanship”), Bayh’s post-Senate life could have made a greater impact than his time in office did. He might have made a tiny dent in how politicians in Washington are perceived by the general public, which he characterized this way: “
They look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen.”
He then showed just the shameless opportunism that would repel any used-car buyer (“Make Crazy Evan an offer!”).
After decrying “strident partisanship” and “unyielding ideology,” Bayh joined Fox News as a commentator. The man who called upon members of Congress and their constituents to engage in “a new spirit of devotion to the national welfare beyond party or self-interest” signed on as a highly paid “senior adviser” to a large private equity firm (Apollo Global Management) and to a massive law and lobbying firm (McGuireWoods). Bayh, who was a finalist to be Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008, vacuumed up as many sweet gigs as he could fit into his Club-issued trick-or-treat bag. He would eventually join the most potent business lobby in Washington, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—arguably the most fervent opponent of the Obama administration’s agenda. Bayh and Andrew Card, the former White House chief of staff under George W. Bush, embarked on a summer “road show” on behalf of the chamber’s interest in stopping certain regulations on business. Think
Thelma & Louise
without the headscarves. Or think, as Steve Benen wrote in the
Washington Monthly
, a former senator who is “
practically a caricature of what a sell-out looks like.”
• • •
T
rent Lott never saw the use in hiding his intentions: the whole “I will never lobby” meme. Why bother? He was the leader of the Senate, after all, and he had earned his reward.
Two thousand ten was a year for formers to dream, and dream big. News of the latest former deals kept breaking, tantalizing: like when
congressman-turned-lobbyist Billy Tauzin became the Alex Rodriguez of the revolving door, setting a new benchmark for formers by making $11.6 million in 2010 to run the chief lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America).
So why not Trent? He grew up mud poor and did his time.
Actually, Lott was a little shifty when he abruptly quit the Senate, not long after his Republican colleagues made him their whip. Everyone speculated that Lott was bolting because of a new law about to go into effect that would forbid lawmakers from lobbying their former colleagues for two years after they left office. Lott announced his resignation on November 26, 2007, just a few weeks before the new law would be enacted. By the old rules, Lott had to wait only one year out of office to lobby.
In the news conference in which Lott announced his resignation, he said the new law had no bearing whatsoever on his move. He officially left his office on December 18, 2007—and, three weeks later, announced that he and his former colleague, Democrat John Breaux of Louisiana, would start their own lobbying firm with offices just down the street from the White House.
Their company would bring in $11 million in lobbying revenue in 2009, up 34 percent from 2008; it was acquired the following year by the behemoth lobbying shop, Patton Boggs, run by Tommy Boggs, son of the late House majority leader Hale Boggs.
Even at his Senate apex, or scandal low point, you could have carved “future lobbyist” into Lott’s pillowy hair. “I lived on a fixed income for thirty-nine years,” Lott told me, referring to the top tax-bracket salaries he earned over four decades in the House and Senate. He had big staffs and many perks and two homes (until Katrina wrecked the one in Mississippi). But he was never rich, he boasted, a self-testament to his up-from-nothing triumph.
Now he is, fresh millions pouring in every year. “How much is Trent clearing?” one former Republican House colleague asked me out of the blue when I mentioned Lott’s name to him. It’s something of a parlor game for many Hill alumni, trying to guess what the other formers are making. “About three or four million, maybe, for Lott?” the congressman-turned-lobbyist, a Republican, speculated. “That’s what a former leader can command.” The former congressman sheepishly rates a little more than a million a year himself, he said.
Naturally, Lott says he hates Washington. Why does he stay? The former senator/lobbyist squinted, assessing my sanity. Two reasons: “One, Washington is where all the problems are,” he said. He can still make a difference and continue to be involved with the proverbial issues he was “passionate about.”
“Washington is where the money is,” Trent Lott said. “That’s generally what keeps people here.”
The dynamic fairly glared with the outgoing Senate and House classes of 2010. Big numbers of them were announcing their retirements, saying they were worn down by the city and the gridlock and the bushels of resentment they were getting from the voters and shouting demagogues on cable and talk radio. One after another, lawmakers would grieve over the state of things and gallantly announce that they were stepping away, washing their hands of all the affectation and hypocrisy and invective and blame. It had all become so personal. All those Tea Partyers, they rued, or the “professional left,” as Robert Gibbs dismissed impatient liberal activists. The haters were all being so unfair and indiscriminate in lumping all of Washington together as a cache of smooth-talking sellouts.
And then, with light-headed speed, so many of the departing officeholders would settle into the retainer class. Even if they really hated Washington—in their bones, not just their sound bites—they can’t leave, because they are institutionalized, and the reality of it shines upon them soon enough: that maybe it’s not so bad in Washington after all. In fact, maybe it’s the greatest city in the world.
8
How It Works
W
ho the hell is Kurt Bardella?”
That was my first thought—and first sentence—about the ankle-biting young flack for Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California. I had mentioned to a colleague possibly writing a story about Issa. The colleague warned that doing so would mean dealing with Bardella, whom he called the most self-inflated press aide on Capitol Hill, maybe even more so than most actual members of Congress.
Bardella was also, the colleague added, probably the Hill’s most effective press secretary. As proof: the unrivaled volume of press heaped on Issa before the November 2010 midterms.
I first met Bardella in May 2010, when he was really starting to make a name for himself, along with his boss. If Republicans won the majority in November, Issa was in line to become chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform committee. Good for Darrell and, by the first law of Washington career gravity, good for Kurt: nothing elevates a staff person faster than being stapled to a rising boss. If you’re an aide lucky to be so positioned, it is vital to earn status as a “super-staffer.” Super-staffers are an advantaged subspecies of aides adept at getting noticed, either because the boss pays special attention to them or because they are believed powerful or because they have achieved good recognition outside the office. Kurt was thriving in all super-staffer categories.
The first surprise to meeting Bardella is his appearance. His Italian name, terse e-mails, and blustery phone comportment suggest a big, aggressive presence. In fact, he is a rail-thin Asian-American who looks much younger than his twenty-seven years—closer to a teenager. His pin-striped suit and matching hanky in breast pocket conjure a kid dressing up like a grown-up.
Bardella is not the classic guy you can root for. He activates your radar and not in a good way. He laughs too much and too loud. He hangs out in cigar bars. You suspect you are being worked.
I liked him instantly.
By that I mean Kurt gave me a headache but I admired that he flouted the norms of being a smooth Washington operator: that even the most rabid striving must be cloaked in a sense of ease.
Kurt never pulled this off or even tried. He was not shy about sharing—on his Facebook page—his ultimate ambition: to become the White House press secretary. He was not reticent in acknowledging a danger of his brash style: “I’m never that far away from blowing myself up completely,” he told me once. “It’s all part and parcel to my inferiority complex. I struggle with things. But generally I’m pretty good at channeling this in a way that serves Darrell Issa.”
Kurt evinced a frantic vulnerability and desperation to do well by his boss. It might make him more honest than people in Washington typically are. Or maybe “transparent” is a better word than “honest,” since Kurt in fact lies a lot, certainly to me. So maybe that’s all a bit of a contradiction, or a whopper of one, but one that can exist in This Town. Whatever, Kurt had begun to see himself as a truth-teller/whistle-blower, a particularly dangerous breed in Washington.
Something about Kurt cried out for mothering, or fathering, which I suspected might be true regardless of whether three of his fathers (one birth, one adopted, one step-) had not abandoned or alienated him on the way up. There was also a certain terror to Bardella. He said the displacement of his youth, lack of a college degree, and entry into the political workforce at a very young age (eighteen) engendered in him a profound fear that he had no business running with these bulls. It did not help, either, that Bardella had been fired from two different grown-up jobs while most of his high school peers were still in college: at nineteen, he was terminated from a job as a district rep for a California state senator (“I was just too young and immature and rubbed people the wrong way”); at twenty-one, he was sacked from the office of a San Diego city councilman (the chief of staff was easily threatened, he said, especially by him). So he was a jittery wreck, working long into the night. He needed to please Issa, or else.
“Darrell cares about me,” Kurt says. “He fills a certain void.”
Kurt stuck out among Hill deputies, but there was also something quintessentially D.C. about him. The city was his big proving ground. Capitol Hill, a self-contained village within a village, was a place for kids trying to stick at the grown-up table. That was perfect for a guy like Kurt. Like a lot of people in the city, he says he was an adult in spirit well before he became one in age.
He used to wear a coat and tie in high school and he carried a cell phone at age fifteen; this was the late 1990s, before most people were walking around with cell phones at all, let alone teenagers. Once Kurt’s phone rang in the middle of class; instead of being embarrassed, Kurt picked it up. It could be important, maybe even the mayor. “Just take it outside,” his teacher told him.
Bardella seemed very much to be measuring up and making a nice little brand for himself in Washington. He turned up quite a bit in Politico
and Playbook. He loved his boss and the boss loved him back, to a point that others in the office could resent Kurt at times. But it was the right kind of resentment, the kind he would never draw if he weren’t getting traction.
Another vivid Bardella trait was that he believed he was a total fraud. It hardly made him unique here: the impostor syndrome is the psychological common cold of D.C. (disproportionate numbers of residents lie about reading the
Economist
). But Kurt had a particularly dreadful case. He comes to it honestly in that he really was unwanted, at least by his birth parents, who abandoned him in his cradle at the front door of a church in Seoul, South Korea. He was placed in an orphanage, where the shunned baby hated to be set down in his crib. He craved human contact and made constant noise, as if he was fighting to talk well before he knew how.
The unnamed Korean baby was adopted at three months by a childless young couple in Rochester, New York. His new mom, Diane Bardella, was pursuing a degree in literature at the University of Rochester while her husband, Alfred Bardella, worked as a security guard. They named the baby “Kurt” and divorced when the little chatterbox was three.
Kurt lived with his mother and spent every other weekend with his father. He was enrolled in a Catholic school and often strayed off message with the nuns, questioning the all-knowing powers of God, among other disruptions. He was bullied and teased because he “looked Chinese.” The bullies called him “chink,” whatever that meant, he had no idea. Kurt was also named “Mr. Personality” of his kindergarten class, although Kurt suspects he was a sympathy choice.
Diane Bardella remarried; her new husband was Jim Nesser, an aspiring psychologist. They had two natural sons. Kurt would taunt his new brothers by telling them, “You were had, I was chosen.” When Kurt was ten, his stepfather was accepted into a Ph.D. program in San Diego and the family moved west, separating Kurt from his adoptive father, Alfred Bardella.
After graduating from high school in 2001, Bardella took a summer internship with a Republican state legislator, who eventually offered him a full-time job. He jumped at the chance, envisioning a political life as presented in the speedy chess game of NBC’s
The West
Wing
, which obsessed him. The lure was enough for Kurt to blow off a planned enrollment at the University of California at Davis. Instead, Bardella spent two years answering phones and attending community outreach events for his boss. He eventually left to take a job as an assignment editor for the CBS affiliate, kicking off a brief ping-pong between local TV and politics. He jumped back into politics in 2005 to work for the San Diego mayoral campaign of Republican businessman Steve Francis. Francis lost, but Kurt’s late-night hours—especially compared with the relative sleepwalk of his nine-to-five colleagues—caught the notice of Steve Danon, a public relations and political consultant who had worked for Francis. Danon noted the insecurity behind Bardella’s drive, the eagerness to defy his lack of college training and prove he was adequate, or better. In Danon’s estimation, Bardella had super-staffer potential.
Bardella’s Washington stars first aligned in 2005 when the San Diego‒area congressman, Republican Randy “Duke” Cunningham—best known in D.C. for flipping off his constituents, referring to gays as “homos” on the House floor, and suggesting the Democratic leadership “be lined up and shot”—got hit with a sack full of white-collar criminal goodies (bribery, conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, tax evasions). The Duke headed off to jail and Kurt headed back into politics.
Danon’s firm was hired by Brian Bilbray, one of fourteen Republican candidates in a special election to fill Cunningham’s seat. Bilbray, who had served in Congress from 1995 to 2001 before leaving to become a lobbyist, will never be confused with a titan of the House. But he managed to eke by in the special election.
Bilbray’s win in 2006 was Kurt’s own passport to Washington, which might have well been a lottery ticket. Danon, who would become Bilbray’s chief of staff, hired Bardella to run the press operation in D.C. There are idealists among the fresh waves of young people who come here: civic-minded kids who come to the nation’s capital to make the axiomatic “difference.” But this was not Kurt, the whole “make a difference” deal. When I first met him, he admitted to me that he was not much of a true believer in any particular direction, at least politically. The Republicans simply found him first back when he was a teenager. But he was not so much an R or a D as he was an O—“an opportunist,” he told me. It’s crass to actually come out and speak like this, but Kurt couldn’t help himself. What Kurt believed in most deeply was the Hollywood version of Washington, the city at its most titillating and televised. Kurt was of the generation of neo-political junkies whose passions were ignited not by an inspirational candidate or officeholder like Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan but by operatives on TV, fictional (Josh Lyman) or real (James Carville). They were the players in a thrilling screen game. He wanted in.
“When I first came here,” Kurt told me, “I was standing on the street corner with my suitcase, thinking, ‘There’s no way I belong here. This is crazy. I’m going to get eaten alive.’”
But most important, he was here. He had made it, to the real-life set of Washington, D.C, compensating for his abject unfitness by working conspicuously hard and being effective and solicitous in the service of the right people.
• • •
W
hen Kurt first got to town, he immediately noticed the people on the inside, or the people who seemed to have that air of
being someone
. “You can tell that there were certain people that everyone kind of gravitated to,” Bardella said. “They walked in, and people just knew who they were. I remember thinking, I wonder what it would be like to be one of those people. The cool kids.”
One cool kid was Kevin Madden, a handsome-devil press secretary for John Boehner, the Republican leader of the House. Every Monday when the House was in session, Madden presided over a meeting of Republican press secretaries on the Hill. Bardella, then working for Bilbray, always made a point of showing up early. He sat near the front of the room, nodded a lot, and asked questions. He was eager to learn and improve, and was conspicuous in a room that otherwise had the ambience of a bored college class. More important, Bardella was eager to
show
he was eager to learn and improve—which is itself a wonderful impression to convey.
Madden, whose resemblance to Mitt Romney’s sons disguises his Yonkers-cut edges, was amused by Kurt’s obsequiousness. He also appreciated Kurt’s hyper-earnest efforts. He, too, had been an impatient, eager-to-show press aide not long before, working the low press rungs of the Bush–Cheney reelect in 2004. He recognized what Kurt was doing; it wasn’t hard to miss. And more power to the kid. Few of the House press secretaries ever made themselves known in these meetings, if they even stayed awake or showed up. Bardella would stay after class. He would introduce himself to featured speakers and approach Madden, asking (sheepishly) whether he could steal five minutes from Kevin’s busy schedule.
He would then urge Madden to tell him if there was something he could do to improve,
anything
at all
, because he wanted to learn and get better. He was also dangling himself before Madden in a bald effort to win his ownership as a mentor. This could bring them closer and maybe turn Kevin into an advocate for Kurt, someone who would look out for him.
• • •
A
s a teen political addict, Bardella read the memoir of the celebrated Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos,
All Too Human: A Political Education
. He enjoyed the book thoroughly and followed Stephanopoulos’s career after he left the White House and joined ABC, first as a political commentator, then as the host of
This Week
and eventually
Good Morning America
. What struck Bardella was Stephanopoulos’s description of being an altar boy in the Greek Orthodox sanctuary of his childhood in Cleveland. Being an altar boy, Stephanopoulos wrote, exposed him to the inner workings of the church in ways he had never experienced. It excited him to be within the sanctum, a privileged club, which he compared with the similar thrill he would feel as a political operative who penetrated the “inner” ring where decisions are made. This resonated with Kurt, who had been an altar boy in his Catholic church in Rochester.
“There is that place to get in Washington that everybody is striving for,” Kurt told me in one of our first conversations. We were eating sushi near his Capitol office. As he made his points, Kurt tended to bob his head up and down, as if his words were being set to music. When reaching his sentence crescendos, Kurt’s head went from a bob to more of a sway. “Once you get to that place, that inside place, you kind of just know it,” he says. “It’s exciting. I felt it when I was an altar boy. And there are times when you feel it here. But you’re never sure if that feeling is going to last, or if other people are seeing you as someone on the inside. It puts you on edge, constantly.”
