This Town (6 page)

To certain key members of Obama’s inner circle during the campaign, Barnett epitomized the Suck-up City operator who plays all sides, is tireless in his self-promotion, and is mercenary in his alliances. He was also a fierce supporter of Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the Democratic primaries, owing to his longtime friendship with the former first lady and her husband that predates the book deals he arranged for them.

While Barnett takes great pride in his legal and deal-making ability, he craves standing as a principal. He hates being called an “agent,” with its hired-gun connotations. He fashions himself as an all-purpose friend, editor, fixer, confidant, and promoter.
Barnett is bipartisan in his business, having represented the last three presidents, first ladies, and vice presidents of both parties. But he is an avowed Democrat who takes great pride in his work preparing the party’s nominees for their debates during general election campaigns. The only photos of Barnett with famous clients in his office are of him standing with candidates on a podium during the practice sessions.

After Obama secured the Democratic nomination in June 2008, Barnett wanted badly to be part of the team that trained the nominee for his debates against McCain. He had an in with Obama in that he negotiated the then senator’s deal to write his bestselling 2006 book,
The Audacity of Hope
.

But some of Obama’s top aides were insistent that Barnett was precisely the kind of Washington insider their campaign should avoid. He also had a reputation for oversharing with the press, a constituency he was especially attentive to (and married to: his wife, Rita Braver, is a correspondent for CBS News). Hillary Clinton was also fully aware of this, and had often warned her aides not to tell Barnett too much because he talked too much in general.

But Clinton deputized Barnett to be one of her liaisons to the Obama campaign after her exit from the race in June. He lobbied the Obama people for some debate role through the summer. After one brief conversation at the campaign’s Chicago headquarters, Plouffe told colleagues he was struck by how obsequious Barnett was.

Finally, the campaign gave Barnett a small position on the team that negotiated debate parameters with the McCain campaign and the debate organizers: the sizes of the lecterns, the temperature in the room, and whatnot. He traveled to the sites of the three presidential debates as well as the vice presidential debate in St. Louis between Joe Biden and his Republican counterpart, Sarah Palin. Barnett spent much of his evening in the media filing center and postdebate “spin room” at Washington University. The only person Barnett appeared to be spinning for was himself. He seemed very much in his political-media see-and-be-seen element. At one point he even chatted up Palin’s communications aide Nicolle Wallace—who was with her husband, Mark, also a top McCain–Palin official.

Barnett ended up securing Palin’s business after the election, winning her well into eight figures in book, speaking, and TV deals. “Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has,” Barnett later said of his new friend from Alaska.

Even better, while there was no bigger detractor of Barnett on the Obama campaign than Plouffe, the campaign manager, Plouffe’s aversion stopped when it came to his own livelihood: he hired Barnett to negotiate a reported seven-figure advance for his book about the 2008 campaign,
The Audacity to Win
. This was revealed a few weeks after the election, in Playbook: “
Robert Barnett, who also represents the president-elect, the secretary of state-designate, the commerce secretary-designate, the soon-to-be health and human services secretary-designate, and the national economic adviser-designate, among others, will handle the project for Plouffe.”

In the book, Plouffe denigrated Republicans as “a party led by people who foment anger and controversy to make a name for themselves and to make a buck.” Plouffe made more than that. Barnett set him up at the Washington Speakers Bureau, a popular outfit in the thriving local pontificate-for-pay sector. Plouffe earned $1.5 million in 2010, according to White House disclosure statements, which included a portion of his book advance, proceeds from his management consulting work for Boeing and General Electric, and close to $500,000 for paid speaking gigs around the world, including $100,000 from MTN Nigeria, an African telecommunications firm.

No one in Obama World would ever deny Barnett’s effectiveness when it came to getting “public-to-private” deals for them after work on campaigns or in the White House was finished. Typically there was not even a second choice. Barnett was once described as “the doorman to the revolving door”; he has been known to quote that line in speeches, in a self-deprecating way, of course.

“You make a certain deal with a devil when you reach a certain level of visibility,” one longtime Obama confidant and aide told me. “Everyone here knows what Bob is about. But the reality is, if you don’t hire him, you’re probably leaving money on the table, and ninety-five percent of people here aren’t willing to do that.”

Still, Barnett’s client relationships at the highest levels of Obama World could create conflicts in the day-to-day of the White House. Early in the Obama presidency, national security speechwriter Ben Rhodes received a call from an aide to Nelson Mandela asking if the president would write a foreword to Mandela’s autobiography. Rhodes, an idealistic former novelist, entered politics after seeing the plane strikes on the Twin Towers. He took the Mandela request to the president, who readily agreed to do it. Soon after, Barnett became involved in his role as the president’s lawyer on book matters. He expressed the view that the White House should have taken into account the unique issues that arise when a president contributes to a published work—something he dealt with during Bill Clinton’s presidency. E-mails were exchanged, and eventually Rhodes became annoyed, pointing out that something so cut-and-dried as the president’s writing a short foreword for one of his heroes should not be this complicated. Ben, whose brother, David Rhodes, would become president of CBS News, told colleagues that he later wrote an indignant e-mail to a number of Obama associates, including Barnett. He acknowledged it was probably a mistake to send it, but in any case, the issue played out with lawyers, and Obama eventually wrote the foreword for Mandela’s book.

When I asked Ben Rhodes about the episode, he confirmed that it had occurred, but declined further comment, citing the fact that Barnett represented his brother.

•   •   •

O
bama’s victory in November 2008 opened a love spigot. Before his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park, many of his campaign aides and top supporters walked in a procession past the press pen to hear the president-elect’s speech. I watched many of the Obama people sharing prolonged hugs with reporters, reinforcing the notion (advanced by the Clinton and McCain campaigns, among others) that the media had fallen into the thrall of Obama—a thrall immortalized by Chris Matthews, who declared on the air that he “
felt this thrill going up my leg” upon hearing Obama speak. Media reporter Howard Kurtz, then of the
Washington Post
, initiated an “Obama Adulation Watch” that noted postelection comparisons of Obama to Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Several reporters would wind up joining the administration in high-profile communications jobs. This often happens, especially in Democratic administrations, but not to the degree it did in the Obama presidency, which became a full-employment service for former journalists;
a reported nineteen would join the administration through its first term.

It is also common for hot new administrations to be widely celebrated, flattered, and generally paid great attention. Particular darlings are alumni of winning Democratic campaigns who move into plum White House jobs. Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, top aides to Jimmy Carter, appeared on the cover of
Rolling Stone
magazine shortly after Carter was elected. In 1992 the
New Republic
initiated a “Clinton Suck-Up Watch.”

But the extreme hype that attended the Obama invasion went well beyond even the historic impact of his election. It bordered, at times, on out-and-out panting. “
As Barack Obama stacks his staff with studs whose looks are as outstanding as their credentials, it’s clear that the nation’s 44th president won’t be the only man on the hill who can rock a suit—bespoke or bathing,” the New York
Daily News
reported just before the inauguration. The story was accompanied by a photo spread on “Hotties of the Obama Cabinet.”

Opulent welcoming parties surged through the city as the rest of the country spiraled into a financial crisis. On a Thursday night in early December 2008, Gibbs and his wife were feted at a Capitol Hill tavern by many of the same people who were there to pay tribute to Russert (and Gibbs) that day in June. The invitation urged guests to “
honor Robert and Mary Catherine Gibbs with drinks, laughs, some humiliating deference, respect and sucking up.” That month alone, incoming Obama people were “honored” at fourteen such galas.

But the Obama followers were determined to resist being sucked up by the seductions of Suck-up City. They offered themselves as incorruptible canaries that would fly above the filthy flattery mines of D.C. In a system that had degenerated into a big and unctuous game, they would refuse to play. They would stay humble and focused on their work.

The week before his inauguration, the president-elect was invited to a dinner party at the Chevy Chase, Maryland, home of the conservative columnist George F. Will. The dinner, ostensibly, would welcome the new president back to town and acquaint him with some of the media’s top conservatives: the columnists David Brooks of the
New York Times
, Peggy Noonan of the
Wall Street Journal
, and William Kristol of the
Weekly Standard
, among others. The dinner was originally planned for during the campaign. Axelrod had pushed for it but Plouffe nixed the idea. Plouffe believed that to attend such an insider Washington salon would be a waste of time, while Axelrod argued that it could be a useful olive branch, consistent with the president-elect’s promise to unite the country. Plouffe prevailed at the time, and the invitation was tabled until after the campaign.
Obama ate portobello mushroom salad and lamb chops and declared the two-and-a-half-hour confab “fun” upon departure.

Later that week, Obama met with the editorial board of the
Washington Post
, a constituency he had proudly blown off during the campaign. After the meeting, Obama worked the
Post
’s fifth-floor newsroom to a flurry of cell phone cameras. “I want to talk about the Redskins and the Nationals,” Obama declared, playing the new neighbor eager to fit in.

As discrete events, Obama’s visits to Will’s home and the
Post
meant little. They signaled a natural shifting of the constituencies that presidents speak to when they are outside Washington (running for president) to when they are in Washington (being president). Politics often boils down to an exercise of knowing your priorities and constituencies, neither of which are static. “It’s sort of an accepted rite of passage that a presidential candidate can talk bad about Washington without anyone in Washington accusing him of being a hypocrite afterwards,” said Marlin Fitzwater, the press secretary to Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Sooner or later, the key constituencies of Washington “all know that he will come to them,” said Fitzwater, listing these constituencies as lobbyists, lawmakers, and the ephemerally dreaded “special interests.”

Even so, Obama and his entourage held themselves out as an unusually pure brigade. Their furious assault on lobbyists during the campaign and their vow to keep them out of the White House upon arrival made for heated disagreements. A debate broke out between Obama aides over whether to make exceptions to their no-lobbying rule, especially in the case of people who worked on behalf of do-gooder causes (like, say, cancer research). Axelrod, a hard-liner, argued that Americans did not distinguish between “good lobbyists” and “bad lobbyists” and there was a greater principle at stake. “It’s not who we are,” or “It’s not in our DNA,” was a common refrain among the hard-liners, which also included Plouffe and Gibbs. A less rigid position within the White House held that these guidelines were arbitrary. By signing an executive order to keep lobbyists out of the administration, Obama would be constricting his hiring pool or tempting embarrassment if he made exceptions—as he did when a former Raytheon lobbyist, Bill Lynn, was granted a waiver to serve as deputy secretary of defense.

One of the stubborn truths of Obama-era Washington is that everyone is now, in effect, a special interest, a free agent, performing any number of services, in any number of settings. It goes well beyond the technical classification of “registered lobbyists.” Self-pimping has become the prevailing social and business imperative. “The firstnamelastname-dot-com syndrome” is how a Republican media consultant, Kevin Madden, described the phenomenon. Or, as the
Onion
once described it, it’s like being “the CEO of the company called ‘Me.’”

What’s more, as everyone was their own “special interest,” or brand, it was impossible to know who was carrying what water for whom. It was certainly not as easy as going down a list of “registered lobbyists” and excluding them from White House employment or dealings. Lobbying was just one segment on the revolving door. Cozy areas of overlap abounded—perhaps even “deeply troubling” ones. For instance, Michael Froman, chief of staff to Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, was a managing director at Citigroup while serving on Obama’s transition team. Another Rubin protégé, then New York Fed president Tim Geithner, helped engineer a taxpayer bailout of Citigroup a few weeks after Obama’s election. Froman later received a $2.2 million bonus from Citigroup after being hired by the administration. (He ultimately gave it to charity.)

Still: “Resist the gold rush,” went the mantra inside the new White House. The rising unemployment numbers and collapsing banks should make it easy to remain humble. Or not. Washington was fat and the love was abundant for the refreshed White House, home to what the new social secretary Desirée Rogers called “
the best brand on earth: the Obama brand” in the
Wall Street Journal
. “Our possibilities are endless.”