This Town (16 page)

“No, sir, Mr. President.”

“One of the preachers said to the other, ‘Times have really changed, haven’t they? I never had sex with my wife before we were married, did you?’

“And the other Episcopal priest said, ‘I don’t know, what is your wife’s maiden name?’”

Barbour doesn’t even try to play the “I’m an outsider, I’m not a politician” game. He is just the perfect specimen of a fat-cat Republican that liberal Hollywood screenwriters would concoct to conjure the perfect specimen of a fat-cat Republican (southern, cigar-smoking, rich, fat; actor John Goodman would play him as he did a similar caricature on
The West Wing
).

Columnist Michael Kinsley noted how so many veteran reporters were longing for Haley to run for president. Why? Barbour, Kinsley wrote, “plays on the social insecurity among journalists.” He “doesn’t literally wink as he spins, but he manages to send the message: This is all a big game—a big wonderful game—and you have the privilege of playing it with me.”

In his love of the game and popularity in This Town, Barbour reminds me of another former party chairman, Democrat Terry McAuliffe—a Haley “drinking buddy,” not shockingly. They are good-time guys and “Washington fixtures” even though Barbour set off to seek the Mississippi governor’s mansion in 2003 and McAuliffe wants to shed the “Washington fixture” label and become the next governor of Virginia. He ran and lost in 2009 and will run again in 2013. Haley and Terry also met in that most Washington of love incubators, the green room. They argued on TV in the 1990s, did the Right versus Left thing, and were soon doing business together. In late 1999, Barbour and Democratic lobbyist Tommy Boggs were planning to open a downtown restaurant called the Caucus Room, which the
Washington Post
described as a “red-meat emporium” that “will serve up power, influence, loopholes, money and all the other ingredients that make American Democracy great.” Seeking investors, Barbour called McAuliffe and asked for $100,000, which he sent over immediately. A while later, Barbour called back, said they were oversubscribed, and sent McAuliffe back a check for $50,000. “So I figure I made fifty in the deal,” said McAuliffe, who never saw a penny more.

It was around this time that Bill Clinton asked the Macker what ambassadorship he wanted for all the service he’d performed on his behalf. McAuliffe had just put together a fund-raiser at Washington’s MCI Center that sucked in more than $26 million for the DNC. (“The biggest event in the history of mankind,” McAuliffe told me. “As you know.”) He told Clinton that he wanted to be the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, or Britain. But McAuliffe figured his appointment was no sure thing, given that it required Senate confirmation and that Republicans, who held a majority at the time, had little incentive to help a president they had just impeached. McAuliffe enlisted his friend Barbour and asked him to lobby his friend and fellow Mississippian Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader, on his behalf.

The next day, Barbour called back and said the conversation went well. When I asked Barbour about the transaction, he seemed mildly annoyed at the suggestion that Republicans in the late 1990s would punish a buddy of Bill Clinton’s, or, alternatively, that McAuliffe would receive any special treatment because he was Haley Barbour’s friend. McAuliffe, he said, was qualified and effective and would represent the nation with distinction. “It would be awful if just because he was effective for the other side, we punished him,” Barbour said. “We need more of those guys, who understand that this is not personal, just because we disagree. This business should not be vengeful.”

But it would be wrong to assume that Barbour and Lott were acting out of pure nonpartisan motives. McAuliffe later learned from Lott, his occasional hunting buddy, that when Barbour called him about the appointment, his first thought was how convenient it would be to get the best political fund-raiser in the Democratic Party out of the country in time for the 2000 elections. “Tell the son of a bitch I’ll walk him to the airplane,” Lott told Barbour, according to McAuliffe.

As it turned out, the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles was in serious financial trouble, and McAuliffe wound up taking it over at the urging (begging) of the nominee-to-be, Al Gore. After the election, McAuliffe became chairman of the DNC during George W. Bush’s first term.

Even after Barbour became governor of Mississippi he retained strong links to the capital. “Washington has been very nice to me,” he said. “I have a lot of Democratic friends. I have a lot of liberal friends. I even have friends in the news media.”

In Barbour’s absence, McAuliffe stepped in as a featured toaster at the Bartiromo book bash. As Washington book parties went, it was a . . . Washington book party.

•   •   •

C
hairman Greenspan was there with Andrea, Betsy Fischer was with her new boyfriend, Politico’s Jonathan Martin, along with a bunch of other People on TV and lobbyists and random Hollywood types, like the seventy-two-year-old film producer Jerry Weintraub, whom Ed Rogers introduced as “legendary” and who volunteered that his secret to longevity was that “I still make love.”

Politico’s Patrick Gavin was videotaping everybody for a brief video clip of the action that would run the next day. He is precisely the kind of “entrepreneurial” journalist who would have, in another age, honed his craft by writing several stories a week on things like city council meetings in places like Ames, Iowa. If he worked hard and carpet-bombed midsize papers like the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the
Dallas Morning News
with clips, maybe they would hire him someday. And maybe, if he was really lucky, he would get to Washington to cover something big-time for the
Inquirer
or the
Morning News
, or cover something on Capitol Hill for a place like
Roll Call.
Now the Patrick Gavins can come straight to D.C. and, in short order, get a job that includes the privilege of videotaping other journalists at parties. Gavin belongs to a Washington speakers’ bureau (“Leading Authorities”), which theoretically could land him speaking gigs across the country to supplement his Politico
salary. (In reality, demand for Gavin’s speaking services has been limited or nonexistent.) “Gavin explains how Washington works in untraditional ways,” touts the Leading Authorities website. He “focuses more on the players—especially those behind-the-scenes people you do not normally hear about—than the issues. Gavin also appears frequently as a television commentator on nearly all major networks.” And of course—being a notable Washingtonian—Gavin merits his own caricature drawing at the Palm on Nineteenth.

In the corner sipping wine stood the once eminent financial reporter Jeffrey Birnbaum. Birnbaum’s coverage of the burgeoning lobbying sector for the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Washington Post
, and his classic book,
Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists, and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform
(written with Alan Murray), made Birnbaum the best-known lobbying journalist in Washington. That is, until Birnbaum left journalism to join Barbour, Griffith & Rogers to head the firm’s public relations division. People move within The Club all the time, especially in these lucrative Washington days in which the so-called revolving door has been so lavishly greased. Journalists become People on TV or go into public relations or lobbying; politicians and staffers become lobbyists or consultants or commentators; lobbyists (like Haley) run for office or go back into the government to “refresh their credentials,” or earning power, before taking their rightful place back in the retainer class.

But Birnbaum joining a lobbying firm was an extraordinary passage, akin to Bob Woodward joining a White House staff. Lobbyists joke about the big-game “purists” whom they can lure to their side. They speak of the naive but powerful suckers who have left money on the table by staying in their lower-paying journalism or elected or government staff jobs. Back in his lobbying heyday, Haley received large retainers from firms just to keep him from working for the other side. He told one friend that his main goal was to get paid by as many people as possible for doing as little work as possible. He had amassed an eight-figure fortune by the time he set out to run for governor. After deciding not to run for president, Barbour returned to BGR and undertook a healthy regimen of paid speeches.

K Street people often boast of the purists on the Hill, in the White House, and increasingly in the journalism ranks whom they have corrupted or deflowered. Or “co-opted,” as the former Senate-majority-leader-turned-lobbyist Trent Lott vowed to do with the incoming group of Tea Party–propelled House members a few months later. Rogers hailed Birnbaum to me as “one of the highest-ranking people ever to switch teams.”

Implied here was not only that Birnbaum was a big catch but that people “switch teams” here as a matter of routine, which they do. Even so, the overriding message of the Correspondents’ Association dinner weekend is that everyone, ultimately, is playing for the same team.

•   •   •

W
orking the Maria Bartiromo bash, the Macker was his usual red-faced and excitable self. He delivered a frenzied elevator speech to me about the electric car company he was starting, GreenTech Automotive, a company he promised would “reinvent the automobile.” Left unsaid was that he also hoped it would reinvent Terry McAuliffe as he approached another run for governor of Virginia. GreenTech could be a vehicle for him to escape his pigeonhole as a political money man and carnival barker and reposition himself as a more serious “Democratic businessman fighting for Democratic Causes and Creating Jobs,” as his website says. It hardly mattered that a lot of these jobs would be in Mississippi, not Virginia, because Terry was able to secure a package of tax and price incentives from Haley in order to build a 400,000-square-foot facility in the northern Mississippi town of Horn Lake. GreenTech’s story is a monument to the power of a politically connected company. The company raised more than $100 million in capital, much of it deriving from McAuliffe’s network of political connections. Its board includes a former governor of Louisiana and a former IRS commissioner. Bill Clinton showed up at the grand opening of GreenTech’s plant in Mississippi.

Around the time of the party, I visited McAuliffe at his office in the northern Virginia town of Tyson’s Corner. The office was vast and mostly uninhabited and adorned with monuments to the Macker’s friendship with Bill Clinton: lots of photos of Terry and Bill playing golf, and even some Clinton-era relics tucked away in the side offices—including Hillary’s actual brother, Hugh Rodham, holed up behind a desk. (“Look, a Real-life Clinton
Family Member
, everybody. He
walks
! He
talks
!”) I imagined Terry walking into Hugh’s office periodically and just gazing at the Real-life Clinton, like a kid fixating on a panda at the National Zoo. Hugh Rodham has some role in the financing of the operation, by the way.

McAuliffe was now determined to refashion himself as a Washington outsider type. This was laughable for anyone who knew him but a smart political strategy in this day and age. “I am an entrepreneur, baby,” he said to me. “Don’t forget that, I’m an entrepreneur.” Okay, he’s an entrepreneur, not a “Washington insider,” albeit one whose wedding party included Richard Gephardt; who has been a regular at ABC’s Sam Donaldson’s annual holiday party; who runs into his neighbor Dick Cheney at his daughter’s (and Cheney’s granddaughter’s) soccer games; and who initially put up the money for Bill and Hillary Clinton’s postpresidential home in Chappaqua, New York.

As Terry worked the room at the Bartiromo book party, he popped into a back room for a minute to take a call from U.S. commerce secretary Gary Locke (or “MR. SECRETARY!” as he boomed into the phone). It concerned a trade mission to Hong Kong they would soon be taking together. After finishing his phone call, McAuliffe came back to where I was standing and, wouldn’t you know it, the conversation moved to the off-message topic of how unpleasant it is for Terry to receive his prostate exam. “I once said to the doctor, ‘Doc, I may be the chairman of the Democratic Party,’” he shared, “‘but I still hate having a finger stuck up my ass.’”

And with that, it was time for hors d’oeuvres.

And brief remarks about the Money Honey. McAuliffe exalted Bartiromo as “the greatest economist, the greatest woman ever to be involved in dictating how world economic policy is done.” Andrea Mitchell went on likewise about her colleague Maria. But first she paid tribute to the fun-loving trio of McAuliffe, Barbour, and Rogers, singling Barbour out for special citation for his efforts in the gulf. “Haley Barbour is really a hero to a lot of people,” declared Mitchell, who has known Barbour since he worked in the Reagan White House, which she covered for NBC.

Soon after, everyone raised a glass—to the Money Honey, to the Macker, to Barbour, to the whole team.

The pub crawl continued up on the roof at the
New Yorker
party: sushi bar, butterscotch milkshakes, and bottomless drinks served on napkins imprinted with politically oriented
New Yorker
cartoons. On one, a sinner is pleading to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates: “Wait, those weren’t lies,” the sinner says. “That was spin!”

Afterward, my wife and I were riding down on an elevator with Ed Henry, then the White House reporter for CNN, and his future wife, Shirley. Ed is a very genuine and earnest person. I know this because when he was hired to do the same job at Fox, he was asked in an interview with
Adweek
to describe his on-air style. Ed replied that Roger Ailes and others at his new network were drawn to him by his “sincerity.” And not just any kind of sincerity! “
One of the reasons they wanted to hire me,” Henry explained, “was I have a sincerity that you can’t make up.”

Another man on our elevator introduced himself to Ed as an aide to the French ambassador. As soon as the words “French ambassador” escaped the guy’s mouth, Henry genuflected—an obvious play to gain access to the Bloomberg/
Vanity Fair
after-party to be held at the French ambassador’s mansion the following evening. Ed and the French guy’s conversation continued in the lobby. At the end of it, the French guy took down Ed’s information and Ed kept thanking him, sincerely.