This Town (19 page)

All you know is, once you’ve experienced being on the inside, you don’t want to lose that feeling, he added.

Getting “inside,” to that place, into The Club, is a consuming pursuit in D.C. The divide between haves and have-nots is not so much economic here; House congressional aides hardly live large, but they’re not have-nots either. Rather, the divide is between people who are “inside” and not—a highly subjective and fast-changing judgment.

As a twenty-two-year-old flack for Bilbray, Bardella sent Stephanopoulos a fan note. He wrote about how much he had enjoyed
All Too Human
and how much he had admired Stephanopoulos. No downside to writing a note like that, right? And wouldn’t you know it: Stephanopoulos wrote back and invited Kurt to drop by next time he was in the neighborhood of ABC’s Washington bureau near Dupont Circle.

Bardella made a point of being in that neighborhood soon after. He sought career advice, which is always an effective networking Vaseline. Kurt had been thinking about taking a job in the Senate office of Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine. He asked George what he thought, a query that also carried an unspoken message that Kurt was being
sought after
, that he was “in play.” George offered the advice that, given Snowe’s exotic position as one of the last moderate Republicans on the Hill, she would be an object of press attention—and thus a visible place for a press aide to land. Stephanopoulos signed a copy of
All Too Human
for Kurt, inscribing it, “Good luck with your political education.”

Months later, Bardella was surprised to receive a call from his new friend at ABC. Stephanopoulos was working. He wanted to know if a certain immigration bill was going to pass the Republican conference in the House. Bardella believed the House measure would pass the GOP conference, which he told Stephanopoulos—and which, a few hours later, Stephanopoulos passed on to viewers of
World News Tonight
. He cited “congressional sources.” Kurt was a “congressional source”! He described the experience as his “first time playing with live ammunition.”

A few months later, in December 2007, Kurt jumped to the office of Senator Snowe. He spoke of being around the “much higher caliber of people” in the Senate.

But Bardella lasted less than a year with Snowe. He found the Senate boring, plodding—too gentlemanly, not his thing. He returned to the lower-chart primates in Bilbray’s office and identified his next big game: Darrell Issa.

Issa was a savvy and ambitious member who did not need the job or the money. He was already the wealthiest man in Congress, thanks to his magnificently successful car alarm company. Kurt liked that. He also admired Issa’s confidence. While Congress lacked no shortage of members who believed they were the smartest guy in the room, Issa might have had a legitimate claim, at least to the top tier. He had sixteen patents under his name from his manufacturing heyday. Like Kurt, Issa was not shy about inflicting all he knew. Or, in Issa’s case, showing it (the patents are framed on a wall of his office).

Bardella would camp out in Issa’s office, which was next door to Bilbray’s in the Cannon House Office Building. He befriended Issa’s staff and pestered them until they hired him to be Issa’s press secretary.

•   •   •

W
hat Issa needed in Congress was to make a name for himself, to be more famous in The Club. This mattered to him, and was an obsession with Kurt. “I am completely focused on making Darrell a household name,” Bardella told me in the summer of 2010. “If, say, Chuck Todd is talking about something that happened that day, I want him to think of what Darrell might think.”

I was struck that Bardella and Issa were focused on the approval of the Washington insider types—the ones who were anathema to the populist Tea Party uprising that would sweep Republicans (and Issa) into the majority. Before long, Issa was getting noticed inside The Club. He was living in green rooms. He owed much of this to Kurt, who was getting noticed himself—too much. Kurt had a dangerous (for a staffer) knack for getting his name in print, and an even more dangerous knack (for a staffer) for craving more.

“There is an expression here on Capitol Hill,” Issa told me. “‘Don’t ever get between a member and a camera.’” That can be particularly harrowing in the case of Issa, who had purchased a T-shirt for Bardella that said: “It’s all about me.”

Kurt’s self-promotional bent violated a basic Capitol Hill rule that aides should stay in the background—and, ideally, out of the press.

Yet Bardella’s public imprint kept growing. It brought smirks. He was particularly eager to show off how plugged in he was at all times, an ever-churning operator. Kurt volunteered his testimony to an October 2009 Politico
story that explored whether excessive BlackBerry use could be a drag on a staffer’s dating life.

And when Bardella stopped using his BlackBerry during a vacation, it was a newsworthy event in Politico. “
I haven’t sent a press release, statement or ICYMI in about six days,” Bardella was quoted as saying, adding that his boss had e-mailed him during his BlackBerry silence, wondering if he was still alive.

Politico
was gold for the likes of Kurt Bardella. It provided an accelerated chronicle of his amped-up life and a willing outlet to “place” stories helpful to Issa. Politico
was also generous in bestowing fame (of a sort) on the traditionally innocuous staffer.

The workaholic regimen of the politically spellbound was a recurring theme in Politico. These are the aspiring Ari Golds or Josh Lymans whose stressed countenances have been copied and exaggerated as a D.C. pose. They are direct, often crude, and fully steeped in the cutting, sardonic, and somewhat snarky tones characteristic of many of the essential-to-the-operation twentysomethings around town. Politico
wrote a trend piece about this (“Bring on the Snark”) in which Kurt declared that Washington “is a city that has been built on false premises and false pretenses.” Availing oneself of a sarcastic or sardonic tone can come across as more authentic, he added.

Kurt was always happy to volunteer his example as someone who was working extremely hard, day and night. “
It is only 11:30 a.m. but Kurt Bardella is on his third Red Bull, and he’s got a fourth on deck,” Politico
wrote of Bardella in a profile that accompanied his being named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” in 2009.

“
I don’t ever stop,” Bardella was quoted on January 15, 2010, in another Politico
treatment, this one posing the question “Could my job be killing me?” The story was pegged to the sudden death of then Minority Leader John Boehner’s chief of staff. But it was also about Kurt, like everything.

“
It rubbed a lot of folks the wrong way that he would use that opportunity to remind everyone how hard he works,” one Republican communications aide told
Washingtonian
in a profile of Bardella that came a year later, when he had become really notorious.

Kurt couldn’t help himself. He had found love. Politics and Issa, sure, but also the whole thrall of the political-media experience circa 2010. There was little slog to it, as there is in so much of political office: the policy debates, the town meetings, the committee hearings, the constituent visits. Screw that. Press is immediate gratification. It’s where most politicians truly live, the realm of how others see and judge them, the hour-to-hour score sheet of their massively external definition. “Nothing is more powerful than shaping public perception on public policy,” Bardella asserted in a 2007 profile in
The Hill
. As such, the press and communications lieutenants on the Hill, as opposed to the policy advisers or legislative aides, are often the staffers who become closest to the principals.

As the 2010 midterms approached, it was looking more and more like the GOP would reclaim the majority for the first time since 2006, the year Kurt first arrived in Washington. These were fast and expectant times for Republicans on the Hill, and Kurt himself was feeling every bit ascendant in This Town. He would send talking points over to “Newt” (at his personal e-mail!) in case a particular topic came up on the former speaker’s appearance on
Fox News Sunday
—and Newt was writing back, thanking him. He could be seen backslapping his way through the Capitol Hill Club, preferred hangout of Hill Republicans. Kurt also did a lot of public interacting with the sexy somebodies in the media. He kept a huge whiteboard behind his cubicle that listed in boldface all the media names he was warding off at that particular crowded moment (Jessica Yellin at CNN, David Gregory at
Meet the Press
, “Greta” at Fox). They all wanted time with “Darrell”; Kurt would do his best to make it happen (“Greta has always been fair”), no guarantees. But first he has a call on the other line, and two hundred e-mails from bookers to deal with, and the boss calling him on the cell—
Good God, does it ever stop??!!

As he graduated from starstruck to name-dropper, Kurt had no desire to hide in plain sight.

• He posted Facebook updates about how he was in a meeting with “Darrell and Chairman Bernanke.”
  
• “At the Senate barber with the Boss and Ralph Nader.”
  
• “At CNN with the Boss who is about to go on Sit Room with Wolf at 5:28 p.m.”
  

Bardella was always diligent about sending out Playbook-inspired birthday messages. He would reel off the “We’ve never met before but” notes and the fan mail that fortified his fattening collection of contacts around town. That’s how I first encountered Bardella.

Kurt sent me fan e-mail in the spring of 2010 after I had written the story about Mike Allen for the
New York Times Magazine
. This was very nice of him. In his e-mail, Bardella said the Allen story captured the crazy acceleration of the modern D.C. news cycle.

Politics now operates in “cycles”—news cycles, election cycles—and it is one of those words that came into vogue in recent years. There’s now even a political show on MSNBC called
The Cycle
(which, as the
Washington Post
’s Karen Tumulty pointed out, was obviously not named by a woman). “Cycle” connoted the perfectly circular existence of today’s exercise—perpetual motion, winding up in the same place.

“The Cycle” was a full-toned topic for Bardella, as it was very much the Washington carnival he inhabited and excelled in. Politics was his ticket to the inside. And it gave him a competitive charge like his favorite sport, basketball, did; he played with the abandon of his favorite player, Kobe Bryant, whose initials he was proud to share.

In his e-mail to me, Bardella suggested that the article on Allen could be the basis of a book or a movie about how Washington works today. Bardella saw the world before him as a bracing struggle between man and news cycle—a cubicle drama that Mike Allen narrated for This Town every morning. Kurt spun in the middle of it all. He would be eager to demonstrate for me how it worked.

When Kurt e-mailed me to introduce himself and pay the compliment, I had only the shallowest associations with Darrell Issa. I knew him as one of those super-rich California business types who had tried and failed to spend his way into statewide office. (California has had quite a few of these over the years.)

Issa had run unsuccessfully for the state’s GOP Senate nomination in 1998 despite spending $9 million of his own money. Issa was first elected to something in 2000—Congress, from a conservative district near San Diego. He was known as a smart, capable, and hard-driving member who rubbed quite a few colleagues the wrong way with his excessive bent for self-promotion, even by congressional standards. He ran twice for leadership posts, losing both times. He wanted to replace California governor Gray Davis in the state’s recall campaign of 2003. Issa helped fund that election, to the gratitude of state Republicans, who thanked him very much by rallying to the eventual winner, Arnold Schwarzenegger. But Issa’s profile rose considerably in the first two years of the Obama administration. Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had not run for reelection in 2008. This opened the ranking Republican slot to Issa, making him a key figure in a panel charged with the broad watchdog mandate over the White House.

Every Congress produces a paramount pest, adept at drawing attention to nuisance issues (and his nuisance self) while making trouble for the other party when it controls the White House. Democrat Henry Waxman of California played that role during the Bush years, while Republican Dan Burton of Indiana tormented Bill Clinton during his scandal-stinking presidency.

Next came Issa, who was drawing much notice by shouting forth on matters both high-profile (the Obama administration’s response to the BP oil spill) and obscure (a possible conflict involving a member of the National Labor Relations Board). He was a tireless publicity seeker with the smile of a game-show host and a Bluetooth affixed to his ear. His ink-black congressional hair was brilliantly in place. The boom in cable and online media had created a bottomless need for the spew of news releases Bardella kept issuing, day and night, on Issa’s behalf. He was perfectly in tune with the second-to-second pressures that media people were under. “The appetite for the stuff we throw up there is immediate and constant,” Bardella told me in the summer of 2010. Even if a few reporters correctly questioned whether many of Bardella’s releases and pitches were significant, there were always media outlets happy to grab them. It was partly laziness that made them do that, Bardella said. But mostly pressure and demand. They needed to be first with the little snowflakes that Issa/Bardella was blowing at them nonstop. It gave them the modern news-cycle version of a scoop, and kept their editors happy.

•   •   •

I
first considered writing about Issa in the summer of 2010. He was showing up a lot in the press, the stories always saying that Issa could become an even bigger nuisance to Obama if House Republicans won the majority in November.

If that came to pass, as was appearing likely, Issa would gain the right to call investigations and issue subpoenas and do whatever he wanted to distract, embarrass, and essentially mess with the Obama undertaking. Issa called himself a Reagan Republican, but his true compass in 2010 seemed to be whatever most got under the administration’s skin and himself on television.