This Town (12 page)

In that era, a former campaign official or White House staffer—a 1960s version of, say, Republican TV pundit Mary Matalin—might have hung around and accepted a political appointment if her candidate won. But she never would have joined a mega-industry inside The Club. “
Those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process,” Joan Didion wrote in
Political Fictions
.

Perhaps more than anything, Watergate—and
All the President’s Men
—made journalists a celebrated class in This Town unlike in any other. The triumphs of Woodward and Bernstein and the killer persona of Ben Bradlee defined a sector of Washington at its romantic best, even while the city, during Watergate, exhibited her disgraceful worst. Bradlee partook fully of that. “We became folk heroes,” he said, while knowing that the postgame high of Watergate would never last. After the
Post
won the Pulitzer in 1973 for its Watergate reporting, Bradlee wrote a letter in anticipation of that day when “
this wild self-congratulatory ski-jump” would end and they would all “hit solid ground again.” It would happen soon enough, with a meteor crash in 1981, when the
Post
was forced to give back a Pulitzer Prize won by a young
Post
reporter who fabricated a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict. Yet the celebrity aura of the news business in This Town never really abated.

The cable news boom of the 1990s—the Clinton years—accelerated this exponentially. It created a high-profile blur of People on TV whose brands overtook their professional identities. They were not journalists or strategists of pols per se, but citizens of the green room. Former political operatives sought print outlets, not so much because they wanted to write, but because it would help get them on TV. After leaving Tip O’Neill’s office, for example, Chris Matthews got himself a column for the
San Francisco Examiner
. He was even named the
Examiner
’s Washington bureau chief, though he was the only one in Washington for the
Examiner
and it had no footprint beyond being the Bay Area’s sleepy afternoon newspaper. But the affiliation and title helped Matthews get on TV. He begged himself onto political shout fests like
The McLaughlin Group
.
Hardball
had its debut in 1997, on CNBC, and was catapulted by the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. In his book about the media’s conduct during the Monica saga, Bill Kovach, the founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, anointed Matthews as part of a “new class of chatterers who emerged in this scandal . . . a group of loosely credentialed, self-interested performers whose primary job is remaining on TV.”

Now the likes of Matthews are full-throttle personalities commanding five figures a pop on the speaking circuit, big book advances, and—in Matthews’s case, at least for a while—a $5 million-a-year contract at MSNBC. Fame and celebrity feed on themselves, to a point where people outgrow their first public identities—say, in Mary Matalin’s case, as a Republican strategist. A few years back, Matalin signed a deal as a celebrity voice to present the safety instructions before takeoff on Independence Air. She is brand-oriented.

Washington’s exportable sex appeal has continued to grow even as the modern political game has grown so repellent to so many Americans. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when this started, but it seemed to again coincide with the arrival of Bill Clinton. As big money is an inherently sexy lure, Clinton’s hiring of a Wall Street mega-titan, Robert Rubin, to be his Treasury secretary created an aura of wealth creation in the city that hadn’t existed under George H. W. Bush (who presided over a bad economy) and Ronald Reagan (under whom the lobbying culture certainly thrived, but nowhere near to the degree it does now). The Clinton years also brought a new generation of staffers to routinely parlay their “service” positions into lucrative financial services jobs. Few of them had MBAs or banking experience, but the mystique of having served at high levels of politics—particularly in the White House—had become instantly bankable. Rahm Emanuel, for instance, resigned his job in the Clinton White House in 1998 to join the investment banking firm of Wasserstein Perella. Emanuel was not a “numbers guy,” he admitted, but more of a “relationship banker.” Relationship banking paid well.
By the time he left to run for Congress in 2002, Emanuel had amassed more than $18 million in two and a half years and was then free to return to his life of “public service.”

Clinton also represented a killer hybrid of pop culture cachet. He was telegenic, young, and willing to discuss his underwear on MTV—and, of course, had a titillating penchant for Big Trouble in his personal life. All this lent Clinton a box-office allure. Hollywood types started showing up at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which had previously been a musty spring affair and the highlight of the local social calendar by default.
The dinner has sold out every table since 1993 at a price, in recent years, of about $2,500 per, and the spectacle has festered into a glitzy cold sore of pre-parties, after-parties, and live television coverage from the red carpet.

•   •   •

B
ill Clinton’s winning presidential campaign of 1992 also spawned the Rise of the Celebrity Operative. While there have always been famous or infamous political aides (Ted Sorensen for JFK, Lee Atwater for Reagan and Bush 41), the Clinton campaign ushered in a fascination with “entourage” characters such as James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, among others, who themselves became stand-alone brands. Carville, for instance, was a journeyman political gym rat who had never advised a winning national campaign until Clinton’s in 1992 and has not played a major role in advising a domestic one since. Yet with his direct and homespun drawl, urchinlike appearance, and bipartisan romance to a well-known Republican pundit—Matalin—Carville has become a marquee imprint whose five-figure speaking fees, TV pundit deals, and book projects have made him and Matalin exceedingly wealthy.

The Carville–Matalin merger was not so much a joining of two warring tribes as it was the sanctification within the political class. Carville quotes Walter Shapiro, the veteran political reporter for
Time
and other publications, who marveled that anyone would treat the Carville–Matalin union as some kind of exotic mixed marriage. “
If either of them had been in love with a tree surgeon from Idaho,” Shapiro said, “that really would have been something.” His larger point is that Political Washington is an inbred company town where party differences are easily subsumed by membership in The Club. Policy argument can often devolve into the trivial slap fights of televised debate: everyone playing a role, putting on a show, and then introducing a plot twist—in this case, “Hey, these people yelling at each other on TV are actually a couple and they’re getting married.”

The joint venture of Matalin–Carville—“Brand Mataville”—itself became a potent commercial force. The couple wrote a book about their relationship,
All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President
, which enjoyed a solid run on the bestseller list and expanded the Mataville imprint beyond the ghetto of political junkies. One of the notable aspects of the book’s success was that it was marketed less as a political book or feel-good tale of political tolerance as it was a showbiz merger. While Carville and Matalin both packed solid middle-American appeal—Carville as a liberal bayou populist, Matalin as a smart-aunt conservative—neither was positioned in the marketplace as “average Americans.” These were political pros whose status as celebrity operatives was unquestioned and solidified by their joining forces. Casual observers of politics not inclined to buy books by celebrity operatives could instantly wonder,
How do these people stand each other?
as if mixed-political marriages did not exist in every suburban neighborhood in America. Still, the fact that these were celebrity partisans who promoted their views on behalf of presidential clients, and argued them on television, made the marriage appear man-bites-doggish. It infused Mataville with a crossover appeal.

They endorsed products, like Maker’s Mark, the Kentucky-made bourbon, which paid them to make a series of videos on behalf of the distillery. Carville is an old friend of Maker’s Mark magnate Bill Samuels, who first met Carville in the 1980s when the latter ran the winning gubernatorial campaign of Kentucky Democrat Wallace G. Wilkinson. Samuels thought James and Mary would make perfect spokespeople for a marketing campaign they were doing that urged everyone to resist mainstream political parties in favor of a single, unifying platform: bourbon. It was known within Maker’s Mark as its “Cocktail Party” promotion.

James and Mary decamped to a glorious old home in New Orleans in 2008, right as the death of Tim Russert had left them both devastated. But certainly the capital of Mataville remained Washington, D.C. One veteran Washington media consultant remembers attending a wedding party for Carville and Matalin at the White House in November of 1993. The guests included dozens of establishment Democrats and Republicans, and the party occurred on the same night that Al Gore and Ross Perot were debating the North American Free Trade Agreement on CNN’s
Larry King Live
. She recalls watching the debate and then the postgame commentary from pundits of both parties—many of whom had attended the White House reception earlier. There was broad agreement in support of Gore, whose position on NAFTA was consistent with the Clinton administration’s and that of most Republicans in Congress. Perot, the third-party insurgent who opposed NAFTA, was portrayed as a yahoo and a crank. Which might have been true, by the way; but the consultant, a Democrat, was struck by the juxtaposition of the White House bash attended by elites of both parties, followed by the debate and the piling on against the irritant nonmember of The Club by these same bipartisan elites. “You had a sense [that] the members of the establishment, who had literally been at the same party at the White House earlier, were now closing ranks against the party-crasher,” she said. “Perot had this contempt for Washington and had this belief that changing the place went far beyond partisan politics. And in retrospect that night proved him to be absolutely correct.”

•   •   •

T
heodore H. White discovered the mass appeal of behind-the-scenes political drama with his “Making of the President” series, beginning in 1961. The debut book—about the previous year’s Kennedy–Nixon showdown—treated the backroom operatives and image makers as marquee players and stayed on the bestseller list for a year. But the Clinton years ushered in a latter-day fascination with the modern political ensemble in popular culture.
The War Room
, a documentary about the rapid-response operation of the Clinton campaign headquarters in Little Rock, became a cult classic and helped solidify Carville and Stephanopoulos as sellable media imprints.
Primary Colors
, the anonymously written political bestseller by (it was later revealed) journalist Joe Klein, was based on the Clinton experience. Late in the Clinton years, the hit NBC show
The West Wing
romanticized the fast-paced, high-stakes action of the modern White House.

These successes also complemented the exhaustive reach of political television coverage. Members of Congress say their body changed dramatically when C-SPAN began live coverage of their proceedings in 1979 (with a speech by an upstart Democrat from Tennessee, Al Gore). Same with the White House press corps after Clinton press secretary Michael McCurry began allowing live coverage of the daily media briefing in 1995. The environment fostered a play-to-the-cameras feel in so many environments that were previously more businesslike, anonymous, and, God forbid, kind of boring.

These true-to-life fictional tableaus coincided with a sustained growth in the political news media. Its master form—and fattest market—was debate, the hotter and more partisan the better. Suddenly it appeared anyone without facial warts could call themselves a “strategist” and get on TV. Or start an e-mail newsletter, website, or, later, blog, Facebook page, or Twitter following—in other words, become Famous for Washington.

Never before has the so-called permanent establishment of Washington included so many people in the media. They are, by and large, a cohort that is predominantly white and male and much younger than in the bygone days of pay-your-dues-on-the-city-desk-for-ten-years veterans for whom the elite political jobs were once reserved. They are aggressive, technology-savvy, and preoccupied by the quick bottom lines (Who’s winning? Who’s losing? Who gaffed?). Such shorthand is necessitated by their short deadlines, nervous editors, limited space, constrained reader attention spans, intense competition, and the fact that they are writing for wannabe (or actual) insiders like themselves.

Today’s Washington media has also never been more obsessed with another topic that has long obsessed the Washington media: the Washington media.

•   •   •

I
n 2002, ABC launched something called the Note, a widely read tip sheet of morning and overnight political news that catered to what it called “the Gang of 500.” Coined by the Note’s founder, the ABC News political director at the time, Mark Halperin, “the Gang of 500” was a simultaneously self-deprecating and self-congratulatory term that described the expanding world of Washington political operatives, journalists, lobbyists, and self-styled insiders. The Note, which was disseminated on the Internet and via e-mail, took a horse-racy approach to covering politics and presented the day’s events in a lively and knowing way. It turned marginally known political reporters and mid-level campaign operatives into familiar names within the Gang. It was, arguably, the first online forum that leveraged “Famous for Washington” as a business model.

The late 2000s brought an explosion of Washington’s celebrity culture and the expanded entourage. Obama was a historic candidate who defeated another one, Hillary Clinton, in the most captivating primary campaign of recent memory. The 2008 race was also the most exhaustively followed, and the first campaign that took place fully in the infinite hyperspace of New Media. New entities such as Politico
and the Huffington Post devoted full-on coverage, and TV viewers tuned in in record numbers to emerging cable colossi such as Fox News. The Gang of 500 of the mid-decade had grown into a vast and self-sustaining industry. A marker of this has been the rise of Politico, the caffeinated trade site founded in 2007 by two
Washington Post
alumni.