This Town (28 page)

Meantime, the Romney campaign started in on a “grandiose Newt” offensive, ridiculing Gingrich with a flurry of Twitter messages (#grandiosenewt) citing examples of same. As the debate progressed, the Romney campaign issued a killer press release titled “I Think Grandiose Thoughts” with bullet-point examples of Newt declaring things like “I think I am a transformational figure” and “I am essentially a revolutionary.”

For good measure, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom tweeted, “Is it me, or does Newt look like Pericles without the golden breast plate?”

And the
New Yorker
’s Ryan Lizza wondered (also via Twitter), “Why did Santorum start talking like Tow Mater from
Cars
?”

It would be hard to top that in a spin room. But the charge was on nonetheless within minutes of the debate’s end. Reporters kept showing up by the swarm. “Like bees to honey,” observed Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican lawyer, election-rules guru, and familiar Club member. He is here touting Romney, and, to be honest, his original metaphor featured flies instead of bees, and something less palatable than honey.

But this was not an entirely joyless and dutiful rush into the diseased kidneys. On some levels the operation was imbued with a familiar energy, the kind that attends practiced calisthenics (if inexplicable ones), like those first-day-of-holiday-shopping-blitz scenes that for some reason continue to receive gee-whiz coverage on TV news, as spin rooms do.

Probably the best way to answer the question “Why spin rooms?” is with the question “Why turkey on Thanksgiving?” It’s tradition. The family convenes, and the crazy uncle gets a little crazier every year, and the offensive cousin gets drunk (again)—and there’s Joe Klein (whom Newt name checked in a debate), and former congressman J. C. Watts, and former senator Bob Smith, and Frank Luntz, and other People on TV.
Hey, that guy on CNN—or is he on Fox News now? Is he still alive? And what did Howard Fineman do to his hair, anyway? It’s gone from blackish to silvery
.

Really, Fineman’s hair had become a BIG topic of discussion in our political-media fantasia since he stopped dyeing it in 2008. Stephen Colbert joked to him that watching the graying process on TV week by week was like “watching an army slowly march across an open field.” For a time there was a whole website devoted to Howard’s luminescent locks. He even attended a dinner where he met President Obama, who immediately addressed the matter. “The gray’s looking good,” the president said. Nothing about politics, journalism, or any of Howard’s many talents. It was all so objectifying!

Regardless, Howard had new life at the Huffington Post, a youthful bounce in his step—if not his hair—that he’d lost at
Newsweek
. “Arianna,” Fineman declared to me of his new boss, “is the Katharine Graham of online journalism.” I knew this already, because Howard mentions it every time I run into him, which I inevitably do at a place like this.

•   •   •

A
s with many spin rooms, the one in North Charleston evokes the familiar circus time warp: people who’ve been around the business forever, who never go away and can’t be killed. Newty is the paradigmatic example. But there were so many other familiar ghosts in this particular machine.

Oh my God, John Sununu. He served as governor of New Hampshire and chief of staff to President George H. W. Bush before hitting the pinnacle of his career, if not the pinnacle of all human achievement. This occurred in late 1991, when Sununu was named conservative cohost of
Crossfire
after the previous conservative cohost, Pat Buchanan, quit to run for president. Sununu came under fire while in the White House for, among other things, his prodigious use of military jets and government cars. He made the trip to South Carolina to spin for Mitt (maybe even flew commercial, who knows?) but he is not here to spin for the institution of the spin room itself. “I have no idea why we’re here,” Sununu says, too candidly for a spin room.

Wait, that
is
former Senator Bob Smith, the Republican from New Hampshire. He actually ran for president himself in 1999, you might recall (or might not). Same comb-over as you remember. He is working for Newt and eager to explain to me why spin rooms can indeed be worth one’s time, even now.

“There’s always the chance,” Smith says, “that some poor bastard like me will put his foot in his mouth.”

Next to Smith is Bob Livingston, the former Republican congressman from Louisiana who was in line to succeed Speaker Gingrich in 1998 until his ascent was thwarted by marital infidelity issues. He’s here to vouch for Newt on the day the open-marriage story broke.

The irony of this seems lost on most of the bloggers, tweeters, and video embeds who are clustered around Livingston. By the looks of most of them, they were in junior high school during Livingston’s late-nineties unpleasantness.

Like many pols whose public careers end badly, Livingston went on to become a rich lobbyist—another reason he is a curious choice to stand by Newt tonight. “I came here because I believe in the guy,” Livingston says, and he is promptly asked by a reporter whether Gingrich’s “affair issues” are going to dog him for the rest of the campaign. Livingston replies curiously.

“Bill Clinton is one of the most charismatic officials in American society today,” Livingston says. “He’s still very productive. He’s got a lot of problems of that nature that if you guys wanted to talk about, you could talk about.”

Bill Clinton? The question was about Gingrich. Here was another time-warp instant: back to when the Republican spin machine was essentially turning every question into a discussion of the forty-second president’s “problems of that nature.” Long live the nineties and the Clintons and the Livingstons. This was an audacious bit of spin, even for a spin room.

And especially rich given the popularity that Clinton enjoyed through that ordeal, and still does. Livingston was offering a sermon to familiarity, survival, and refusing to go away—ever so apt for a place like this.

•   •   •

B
ack in D.C., one of the major society events that winter was the bar mitzvah of Aaron Brooks, son of the
New York Times
op-ed columnist David Brooks, at the Adas Israel synagogue in Cleveland Park. The temple was packed with media
macher
s from across various spectrums (spiritual, ideological, dietary). Aaron was poised and precocious and described his travels on the campaign trail with Dad. Power kvelling ensued from gathered friends. That boy could be the Jewish Luke Russert!

Later, during the evening reception, celebrants were dancing the hora, the Jewish version of the traditional circle dance, which, in one sense, is a sanctified expression of what happens in Washington media every day. Amid the festivity, Andrew Ferguson, a conservative columnist for the
Weekly Standard
, approached Jeffrey Goldberg, the columnist for the Bloomberg View who writes
Goldblog
for the
Atlantic
. Ferguson, somewhat abashed—perhaps because of the setting, perhaps because he is naturally abashed—wanted to give Goldberg a “heads-up” that he would be attacking him in an upcoming column. It seems that Goldberg had, in his own column, recently called out Newt Gingrich for racial dog whistling—using coded language to appeal to white racists—in the Republican primary campaign. Ferguson, like many conservatives, believed that nonconservatives were simply hallucinating when they heard such dog whistles.

As “Hava Nagila” blared over the speakers, Goldberg processed the “heads-up,” pausing to note to Ferguson that
PBS NewsHour
host Jim Lehrer was, to the collective surprise of just about every Jew in the synagogue, just then dancing counterclockwise in front of them. At which point Goldberg felt compelled to share with Ferguson his disbelief over his taste and timing. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this during the hora!” Goldberg said.

Goldberg, I should note, is a friend, a mensch, and something of a mayoral figure among Washington-area tribesmen. If in fifty years, for some reason, Jews decide to build their own airport in Bethesda, it will be named for Jeffrey Goldberg.

Fidel Castro apparently considers himself a friend of Jeff’s as well. He had an intermediary call Jeff out of the blue a few months earlier to arrange an interview with Castro. And Jeff would soon score a
forty-five-minute sit-down in the Oval Office with President Obama on the deadly serious subject of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Israel. After the interview, on the way out, Jeff reached into his bag for a gift for the commander in chief.

“I know this is cheesy . . . ,” Goldberg said sheepishly. “What,” the president interrupted, “you have a book?” Apparently a lot of journalists who interview the president give him copies of their books. And, yes, Jeff had a book. But not just any book. He handed Obama a copy of
New American Haggadah
, a revised version of the Passover service that included commentary by Goldberg (and was edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, the novelist and brother of the
New Republic
’s editor, Franklin Foer). Obama thumbed through the Haggadah, which Jeff wanted him to consider using for the White House seder.

“Does this mean we can’t use the Maxwell House Haggadah anymore?” asked the president, showing scary familiarity with a quirky Jewish tradition: the coffee company has famously printed Haggadahs for decades. As for a disproportionate number of residents of Boca Raton, Florida, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, Maxwell House has been the Haggadah of choice for Obama, who initiated the first-ever White House seder when he came into office in 2009. The president accepted Jeff’s offering with a smile. But in the runup to the 2012 election, and eager to convince mainstream Jewish voters of his traditional pro-Semitic values, Obama opted to remain loyal to Maxwell House.

•   •   •

T
he first months of 2012 brought sleepy bustle to the nation’s self-satisfied capital. Winter took another year off. Snow was as sparse on the ground as legislation was on the Hill. TV inquisitor Mike Wallace died at ninety-three, a not unsurprising but still momentous development that allowed everyone to trot out their “Such-and-such is happening in heaven” clichés, though Wallace was Jewish and did not believe in heaven. (NBC’s Ann Curry spoke for all of us—yes, she did—when she imagined that “tough questions are being asked in Heaven today.”)

In memoriam, members of The Club engaged in a Me Party of grief showmanship via Twitter. They shared stories about how Wallace touched
them
. “Mike Wallace once cursed me out over an unflattering story,” Howie Kurtz tweeted. “I introduced Mike Wallace at an event a few years ago by saying he was so sharp it takes him ½ an hour 2 watch
60 Minutes
,” former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer added. Kevin Madden, a Romney media aide, revealed in his own tweet that “I was fortunate enough to work w/ Mike Wallace & his team on a 60 Minutes profile of Gov. Romney during the ’08 race.” If he could read that, Mike Wallace would hate the “work with” construction that flacks like to use, implying collaboration. Wallace might even be spinning in his grave if he wasn’t too busy in his afterlife asking tough questions.

As typically happens in election years, the real action was popping outside of town. The once orderly GOP had fractured into a schizophrenic mess in which its voters seemed to alternate between terrifying realizations: that they were on the verge of nominating Thurston Howell III (Romney) and should therefore consider alternatives, except that the alternatives (Santorum, Gingrich) were both destined to lose between thirty-five and forty states if placed before general-election voters. In the resulting picture, momentum kept flipping back and forth. The Club was puzzled by such a befuddling narrative. Whenever Romney would win a big primary (New Hampshire, Florida, Michigan) and seemed set to break into the clear, he would go on to lose big to Gingrich (in South Carolina) or Santorum (in Colorado, Alabama, and Mississippi).

Mittens could not go two days without reinforcing the notion that he lived in a rarefied quarter-billionaire’s terrarium. His attempts to demonstrate a common touch proved inevitably butterfingered. He told a crowd in Michigan that his wife, Ann, drove “a couple of Cadillacs.” He noted elsewhere that he knew the owners of NASCAR and NFL teams, and had previously challenged Rick Perry to a $10,000 wager during one of the Republican debates. This Town, especially those in the press, were aghast. What awful mistakes! Everyone marveled—between courses at The Palm—at how out of touch Mittens was. He just kept stutter-stepping along, unable to “close the sale” and act according to the wise men’s conceit of his inevitability.

Alexander Burns, writing in Politico, said the campaign overall “has been more like a game of Marco Polo, as a hapless gang of Republican candidates and a damaged, frantic incumbent try to connect with a historically fickle and frustrated electorate.”

Ah, the frustrated electorate—also known as the stupid voters. Don’t get us started. The primaries had moved into the heart of what much of the “permanents” of Washington think of as Deliverance Country: Mississippi and Alabama. Majorities of Republicans in these Deep South touchstones were too happy to play to regional type, telling pollsters that (among other things) they believed President Obama was a Muslim. Romney wound up losing badly to Santorum in both states, with many voters saying they would never support a Mormon candidate anyway, no matter how many times he (Romney) patronized them by dropping “y’alls” into his speeches or boasting that he ate cheesy grits and loved to watch college football “matches.”

In terms of being a pure zeitgeist benchmark,
Burns’s story in Politico
was one of the election cycle’s seminal. It showed how voters often contradict themselves—and reality—when they express their views. They were angry at Obama for the rising price of gas even though there was really nothing he could do about it (experts of both parties agreed, Burns pointed out). They said they hated bailouts but also supported—after the fact—the government’s propping up of the auto industry. Burns posited that voters believed in a “litany of contradictory, irrational or simply silly opinions.” They were fickle.