This Town (27 page)
In his unique way,
Orszag had represented a one-nerd case study in run-amok Obama-mania during his time at the White House. For starters—and this is weird—he became an unlikely sex symbol from the moment the then president-elect announced his appointment in November 2008. Never mind that speculation raged instantly over whether Casanova with a Calculator was wearing the World’s Worst Toupee. Groupies announced themselves on a fan blog site, Orszagasm.com, devoted to the allegedly hunky brainiac who was “putting the OMG back in the OMB.”
Rahm Emanuel declared to the
New York Times
that Orszag has “
made nerdy sexy.” Gossip columns reported on Orszag’s dating life, while some Obama aides became worried that his profile might be getting a tad inflated and that he was getting a little big for his BlackBerry holsters (yes, plural).
And then things got complicated for Orszag. And not in the way that sustainable growth rates are complicated. Rather, in the way that it’s complicated when
a divorced father of two with a very important job gets very publicly engaged to a thirty-one-year-old financial correspondent for ABC News, Bianna Golodryga, just weeks after his ex-girlfriend gave birth to his daughter. Orszag had met Golodryga at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the same event at which President Obama had joked that the TLC network would be starting a new reality show called
Jon & Kate Plus Peter Orszag
.
But the real headlines were much worse. “White House Budget Director Ditched Pregnant Girlfriend for ABC News Gal,” screamed the
New York Post
headline. Suddenly the “Orszag love-child story” became a full-term tabloid “distraction.”
Inside Edition
started calling the Office of Management and Budget. MSNBC dubbed the story the “Budget Baby Mama Drama.” Orszag asked for privacy, to which friends of the ex-girlfriend/baby mama noted that he wasn’t exactly asking for privacy a few weeks earlier when Golodryga was showing off her engagement rock on
Good Morning America
.
As with any story of this nature in Washington, the Very Serious People who traffic in it are obliged to emphasize that such silliness is beneath them. Ken Baer, the OMB spokesman, told me that nearly every press inquiry he received on the matter was prefaced with the requisite faux sheepishness. “Everyone feels the need to say ‘I’m really sorry I have to ask you about this’ and ‘I’m only carrying out orders from my boss,’” Baer said. And, of course, the Very Serious Media were not writing the Orszag love-child story per se; they were “stepping back,” merely writing about the
phenomenon of the media frenzy
surrounding it.
As fun as the Budget Baby Mama Drama was to watch, Orszag himself appeared to be having little of it in the White House. Nor did many of his colleagues love dealing with him. Orszag managed to alienate a number of top White House and cabinet officials with his petty and turf-conscious tendencies. In 2009,
I wrote a profile for the
Times
about Ray LaHood, the former Republican congressman who went on to become President Obama’s secretary of transportation. In the story, LaHood problematically acknowledged that he did not think the White House “picked me because they thought I’d be that great a transportation person.” In fact, he said, he was no expert on transportation issues and would have been just as happy to be named secretary of agriculture.
This was exactly the kind of refreshing candor that reporters loved about Ray LaHood. It was not always refreshing to the White House.
LaHood went on to speculate that he got the job only because he had good relations with Republicans on the Hill and because he was tight with Rahm Emanuel, his former House colleague. To illustrate how his friendship with Emanuel was useful, LaHood told me about a $36 million light-rail train project he had been set to announce in Arizona, only to have Orszag say there might not be federal money available for it. LaHood then called Rahm, who quickly took care of the problem. When Orszag read this, he became enraged that LaHood would go around him and then talk about it in the press.
Orszag refused to accept LaHood’s multiple apology calls. Emanuel tried to convene a peacemaking summit in his office, which did not work. LaHood eventually sent Orszag a case of wine, which he accepted grudgingly.
Regardless, all’s well that ended well. Now comfortably tucked in at Citigroup, Orszag could afford all the wine he could ever drink, with plenty left over to support his families. He and Bianna would make a new baby of their own, Jake. Politico’s chief economic correspondent, Ben White, tweeted: “Let the record reflect that @biannagolodryga and @porszag have one of the cutest babies I’ve ever seen.”
Orszag remained a popular figure among reporters, to the surprise of no one, given his penchant for talking to them. (Reporters are suckers for the slightest of courtesies.) Personally, I think I’ve spoken only once to Orszag, although he recently friended me on Facebook. By the end of his tenure at the White House, Orszag was known around the building as the prime source of many of the leaks that kept dripping out of the place. One of the young wiseasses on the communications staff referred to him as “the leaky toupee with glasses.”
If Obama had one major peeve, it was leakage. This hardly made him unique among presidents, but it seemed a particular sore point with him. Obama, who took immense pride in the rarity of leaks on his 2008 campaign, was incredulous over how so many people in D.C. needed to authenticate their importance by sharing privileged information with reporters. It drove him nuts that some of these people worked in his White House.
In the late summer of 2011, the White House was shifting into reelection mode after a brutal few weeks in which congressional Republicans were abusing them in negotiations over the debt ceiling. A parallel “narrative” was taking hold—both in the media and among certain Obama insiders—that the administration was not deftly coordinating strategy with its fledgling reelection operation in Chicago. To better synchronize their strategies, the president initiated a semi-regular Saturday meeting in the Roosevelt Room that included about fifteen top aides from the White House, the Vice President’s office, the reelection campaign, and a network of outside consultants. At the first meeting, Obama voiced concern that the group was a bit large, but added that he trusted everyone and expected that everything discussed in these sessions would remain private. People who attended the meetings described them as dynamic and productive, a good forum for the president to hear views from people he did not speak to every day.
In about the fifth or sixth meeting, according to several people present, the president wrote down on a yellow legal pad a list of issues he believed that he had not been vocal enough about in his first term and hoped he could tackle if reelected. They included climate change, immigration, same-sex marriage, and the closing of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, among others. A few days later,
Game Change
coauthors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann learned of the president’s remarks and mentioned it to Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, who immediately told the president. Obama was furious—to a point that people who knew about the leak were dreading what he would say at the next Saturday meeting.
Obama addressed it immediately, in a tone more of disappointment than anger. “I trusted you guys,” he said slowly. He told everyone that he believed the meetings had been helpful, and that he hoped they could continue in some form. But if they did, Obama said, they would not include him, and he walked out.
After Obama’s departure, Biden told the group they had let the president down. The room fell silent. Eventually the remaining aides broke into an animated discussion about who would do such a thing and why the White House cooperates with books to begin with. Some lamented how impossible it had been to replicate the cohesive environment of their pre–White House endeavor in Chicago. Particularly vocal—and furious—was Robert Gibbs, Obama’s longtime spokesman and adviser, who left the White House in early 2011 and was now doing consulting and surrogate work for the reelection campaign. Gibbs, known for his combative style and often fiery defenses of his boss, launched into a profane diatribe about how the 2008 campaign never had any problem with leaks at all. That ended as soon as they won and the shop moved to Washington. Now leaks had become a regular occurrence, to a point where they were met with an almost shrugging resignation. But this was a particularly bitter pill since Obama had ostensibly told everyone at the beginning of these gatherings how much he trusted them. “Someone in here decided that they were bigger than the president,” Gibbs fumed. “Who the fuck would think that?”
When I later brought up the meeting with Gibbs, he confirmed my account and recalled the episode as an important marker for a group that had fought battles together over several years and was now confronting its own fractures as they approached their final campaign. This is of course a familiar evolution within successful political enterprises. Over time the idealism and focused drive of getting someone elected and surviving in the White House becomes diluted by the more selfish concerns of Washington nest-feathering: winning chits with the press, raising one’s own profile, and proving sufficiently important to maximize a post-government payoff. But the evolution seemed particularly jarring in this case. One high-level official on the reelection campaign said it felt like, at a certain point, people were thinking mostly about who would play them in the 2012 version of
Game Change
.
“Real life sort of became a political movie for a lot of us,” he said. As if, suddenly, people started talking amongst themselves in sound bites, imagining their discussions as dramatic renderings or photo ops. In a broader sense, 2008 had the feel of an organic network of true-belief. The dos and don’ts were well understood, the rights and wrongs did not require spelling out. The “no ego, no glory” document that everyone on the Obama transition staff was asked to sign seemed unnecessary at the time, late 2008. Eventually that message was lost, or was at least weakened as the Obama change brigades became sucked up into the tentacles of Suck-up City.
Insomuch as this evolution had a cinematic crescendo, Obama’s walk-out from the Roosevelt Room was it, followed by Biden’s scolding and the reckoning session afterward. “It was the kind of discussion where we wondered, ‘What happened to all of us?’” Gibbs told me. Even before he left the White House, Gibbs had asked that question many times, in various forums. He spoke often of being dispirited by all the small accommodations the Obama White House had been forced to make to the status quo that they had run against in 2008: the various exceptions to the no-lobbying rules; what he considered to be the excessive embrace of the Washington media echo-chamber; self-service winning out over public service, or at least loyalty to the president.
“I remember saying in that meeting, ‘Somehow we have all changed.’” Gibbs said. “Or maybe Washington just changed us.”
11
The Presidential Campaign: This Movie Again
In this election, the biggest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result.
B
ARACK
O
BAMA
,
Democratic National Convention, 2008
O
f all the quaint maxims of Obama ’08, the notion that the “same old players” would be sidelined in his fresh-scrubbed Washington was particularly rich. So was that pledge from the candidate that lobbyists “will not run my White House.” That little keepsake from ’08 popped up a lot whenever an exception made its way through the revolving door.
One of the most decorated lobbyists in town, Steve Ricchetti, became the latest exception when he joined Biden’s office as a senior adviser in early 2012. Ricchetti’s lobbying clients had included Fannie Mae, Eli Lilly, and the American Hospital Association, among others. Loopholes, loopholes. It seemed Ricchetti had deregistered as a lobbyist after Obama was elected, so it was all good, even though Ricchetti remained president of a lobbying firm.
“
Ricchetti has been through the revolving door more often than a bellhop at the Mayflower Hotel,” the
Washington Post
’s Dana Milbank wrote after Ricchetti was hired. Ricchetti supported Hillary in 2008, and Team Obama’s aides attacked her campaign at the time for using him as a “bundler” of campaign contributions (while righteously adhering to their self-imposed lobbying ban). Ricchetti’s appointment “shows just how flimsy Obama’s ethical reforms have been—and how absurd the official standards are for who is a ‘lobbyist’ in the influence industry,” Milbank wrote.
“We knew we were going to get hit for this,” one top Obama adviser in the White House told me a week after the Ricchetti announcement. “But Biden really wanted him and fought for him. And we didn’t think it would get much traction outside of the fake umbrage crowd anyway.” Maybe, too, the reelection campaign hiring Broderick Johnson—a former lobbyist for AT&T, BellSouth, and Microsoft, among other companies—would get them spanked. For a day or two, tops. This had become the essential Team Obama MO whenever the cynical realities of Washington collided with its shiny ideals from 2008. Acknowledge the exception, wait out the indignant blog posts and press releases, and move on. That lobbying ban was so four years ago anyway.
Obama’s recently promoted domestic policy adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, had also been a lobbyist: for the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group. To get her in, the president signed a waiver exempting Muñoz from his promise to “close the revolving door that lets lobbyists come into government freely.”
Over four years, Obama World had accumulated an impressive collection of Never Minds. It began with the then senator’s commitment in 2008 to not opt out of the public financing system for presidential campaigns. This would have limited the amount of money his campaign could spend. When it became clear that he could raise money at will—unlike John McCain, who remained in the system—Obama’s commitment vaporized.
In February 2012, Obama ditched his long opposition to directing his campaign donors to “super PACs,” which, the president had said, were a “
threat to our democracy.” But then he did a roundabout when Obama-friendly super PACs were getting outgunned by the other team.
Bloomberg News reported that Obama’s reelection campaign manager, Jim Messina, had met privately with a bunch of Democratic Wall Street titans and assured them the campaign would not demonize them (as Obama had spent the better part of the previous three years doing). While he was at it, Messina also begged them for cash to fund the campaign.
Obama’s super PAC reversal brought a few days of predictable indignation from the right over his hypocrisy and hand-wringing from the left over his impurity. Overall, it was another notch in the argument that “change” was more a marketing slogan to Obama than a genuine ideal. The prevailing reaction from The Club was to step back and shrug off the outrage from their grizzled “It is what it is” perch. “Every modern president in the fourth year of his presidency resorts to the cheap political stunts, broken promises and truth-fudging it takes to win reelection . . . ,” explained Jim VandeHei in Politico. “So much for the high road: Victory is more important than purity.”
After everyone got over their shock and outrage, This Town celebrated the flip-flop. It was not only foreseen but great for business. Democratic media consultants and ad people and other barnacles would reap tens of millions in fresh business from the presidentially blessed super PACs. Republicans would continue the arms race, “which in turn means more money for their strategists, pollsters and ad-makers; and the media make more money as all of this is funneled into TV and Web ads,” VandeHei wrote. “Incestuous, isn’t it?”
• • •
F
inally, the voting started. Thank goodness. Republicans had been playing front-runner roulette for too many months: first Michele Bachmann, then Herman Cain, then Newt. How many front-runners had to die?
Now it was time to get serious, for all of us in This Town to reacquaint with friends at the Des Moines Marriott or up at the Radisson in Manchester (the Granite State’s Paris). And, of course, in “spin rooms,” where everybody knows your name—or, if not, there’s someone holding a sign over your head telling people your name, if you’re important enough.
Hey, it’s Bay Buchanan!
You never know who you’ll run into in the spin room. Actually, Bay Buchanan is precisely the specimen you run into in the spin room. Like copies of
U.S. News
at the dentist’s. Bay Buchanan belongs in spin rooms.
Spin rooms are hideous. They are where campaign aides and candidate surrogates gather after candidate debates to ritually humor a crush of media types. Their currency includes the lobotomizing talking points about how Candidate X “really hit it out of the park tonight” or how Candidate Y “was the only one on that stage who looked presidential”—candid insights. The rooms endure, for some reason, as routine appendages to the eight thousand or so debates that are inflicted during every presidential campaign.
Buchanan, who is not hideous, lives in that “political People on TV” nether ooze in which you lose track of whether she is a pundit or an operative or a surrogate or some hybrid squid (in the same way that you lose track of a lawyer for the SEC who takes a position at a D.C. lobbying firm, or a Citigroup executive who takes a job at the SEC and is suddenly investigating his former and perhaps future colleagues). For all I can tell, Buchanan might have even entered the world in a spin room, after being conceived in the back of a satellite truck and gestated in a green room, to be hatched from a quivering egg incubated under warm TV lights into the welcoming obstetric hands of Wolf Blitzer.
It never changes. Presidents do, and elections come and go, and new technologies like Twitter come along and revolutionize. Paradigms shift, mistakes are made. It all moves along. And then here we all are again, making our way back to the spin room, with Bay B.
This particular spin room is about the size of a tennis court. It is housed in a convention center in North Charleston, South Carolina. January 19, 2012. The Republican primary race was sorta kinda threatening to get interesting again after default front-runner Mitt Romney—after winning big in the New Hampshire primary—suffered through a rough few days here in the political septic system of the Palmetto State. Newt Gingrich was getting a lot of attention. Key conservatives kept endorsing Newt and Rick Santorum, and Romney was being reduced to a well-coiffed mound of Jell-O every time someone asked him why he wasn’t releasing his tax returns.
So Bay B was here to defend Mittens. She has been a well-worn part of the cable schmear for years: a Republican “activist” and, probably her biggest claim to fame, sister of Pat Buchanan. She ran brother Pat’s three losing presidential campaigns and has achieved the mantle of “prominent conservative” over the years. Naturally she was a guest cohost of CNN’s
Crossfire
for a time—like seemingly half the people in the room.
“Well, here we all are again,” Buchanan said to me when I saw her in the spin room. Her greeting was a perfectly crystalline cliché to distill the unrelenting sameness of this exercise: lots of the same “people who are still kicking around.” She had endorsed Romney a few days before the New Hampshire primary, which moved the Romney campaign to actually put out a press release touting her support. This was no doubt why Mittens won big in the Granite State—the Bay Buchanan Bounce! Okay, that’s sarcasm; I do not mean to pick on Buchanan, who seems nice. Plus, you don’t screw with Bay B, especially not in her house, the spin room.
She conveyed a workmanlike sincerity when she said that “Mitt Romney had an outstanding debate tonight, he truly did.” The consensus, however, was that Romney did not have an outstanding debate tonight, he truly did not. His poll numbers cratered accordingly in South Carolina, where he was eventually crushed by Gingrich.
“There was cheering in our war room tonight,” Buchanan told me. “It was a decisive victory!”
As with many things in politics, spin rooms mimic the social hierarchy of a junior high cafeteria. The big-ticket spinners attract the crowds and the smaller tickets attract fewer reporters—or, worse, members of the foreign press.
With all due deference, Buchanan is a puny ticket. She has much to say about why Romney “hit it out of the park tonight.” But few are listening. And she was looking slightly lonely in the corner, especially compared with cool kids like Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor (spinning for Romney) and Santorum (spinning for self). Both Pawlenty and Santorum had multiple furry boom mikes in their faces at any given time, the ultimate spin-room status symbols.
If Buchanan had furry-boom-mike envy, she hid it. But as we spoke, she achieved a kind of spin-room rock bottom, suffering an indignity that triggered in me an emotion I never expected to feel on this great earth: genuine empathy for the likes of Bay Buchanan. Just as Bay started to get rolling—sharing with me how excited the Romney team was backstage during the debate—she was interrupted by a television reporter. From Iceland.
“Do you have a minute for Iceland?” the reporter asked her, at which point Buchanan drew a deep sigh and herniated a sense of physical deflation—literally closing her eyes, as if to contemplate the full degradation she was suffering in the middle of the cafeteria, with me bearing witness.
“This is what I’ve been reduced to,” Buchanan said before rallying herself to the pursuit of Romney voters in Reykjavík. “Iceland.”
• • •
L
ike Buchanan, spin rooms media-peaked in the nineties and are still here. They are evergreen habitats for the political class—like green rooms and war rooms and holding rooms. Spin-room dwellers typically hate the spaces, or at least make a show of it. They have from the beginning. “The spin thing is humiliating and degrading and the media insisted on it,” the late GOP knife fighter Lee Atwater told the veteran political reporter Roger Simon for his book
Road Show: In America Anyone Can Become President. It’s
One of the Risks We Take
. “And when you did it the media ridiculed you for it,” Atwater continued. “I was on the first spin patrol at the Reagan–Mondale debate [in 1984] and I’d be very happy to call it all off.”
Sweaty, crowded, and depressing, spin rooms have become completely outmoded at a time when most real-time campaign propaganda has moved online. Many of the machinations that used to occur in spin rooms are now transacted—via e-mail, or blog posts, or Twitter—within seconds of the candidates speaking on stage.
The North Charleston spin room was located just off the media “filing center,” where a few hundred journalists had just finished watching a beaut of a debate on cinema-size screens. We, the reporters, were arrayed along long tables like students taking standardized tests. It was all a familiar regimen but (like at a standardized test) not without its competitive tensions.
Did I miss something? Keep your eyes on your own laptops!
The debate punctuated the most eventful day of the Republican campaign so far. Lots of stuff was happening within a few hours: Marianne Gingrich, Newt’s second wife, had claimed in an interview with ABC News that her ex had asked her for an open marriage, a term that immediately started “trending” on Twitter, whatever that means. (Not since the seventies had open marriage trended like that.) Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, had quit the race and endorsed Gingrich; and Santorum learned he had won Iowa by a handful of votes, two and a half weeks after the state’s caucuses were held and Romney was declared the winner by a handful.
Then came the debate donnybrook in which CNN’s John King led off with an open-marriage pleasantry to Gingrich. Game on. Newty put on his best angry-teddy-bear face and smacked back at King with perfectly calibrated umbrage. He called the question “close to despicable,” one of the many instances during the campaign in which the former speaker went bashing on the political media, a cohort that heaped endless free attention on him and with whom he privately enjoyed many friendships. Gingrich had favored us with his illustrious companionship in a Myrtle Beach spin room a few days earlier, where he and wife number three, Callista, were surrounded by about two hundred of their despicable media friends. And Newt frankly could not have looked more at home.
Gingrich also declared in the North Charleston debate, “I think grandiose thoughts,” while Santorum contended that the former speaker’s thoughts were “not cogent” and Mitt Romney awesomely used the pejorative term “Romneycare” without irony to refer to his health-care plan.
The whole North Charleston spectacle was an object lesson in how digital play-by-play has replaced the postgame rush of the spin- room ecosystem. In the course of the ninety-minute debate, I learned on Twitter that the Gingrich campaign was releasing the former speaker’s tax returns at almost the very instant Romney was sputtering forth onstage about why he had not.