This Town (8 page)
Other than possibly the Tam Cam, Tammy is best known for the A-list brunch she throws on the day of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The event has become a massive spectacle that attracts swarms of Hollywood, Washington, and New York celebrities, in addition to plenty of media attention. Part of the game is to have big-ticket “sponsors” for the event and also to attach it to “good causes” that will attract attention and coat the sweaty affair in a virtuous glaze. Tammy wrote a letter to Susan Axelrod, whom she had never met. She knew David a little (but not well), in part because, as she likes to say, she “covered” the 2008 campaign with the Tam Cam for
Newsweek
and the
Washington Post
. She turned up a fair amount at political events, debates, conventions, and big scenes like that. Indeed, Tammy exists in a murky space between being a journalist, a businessperson, a philanthropist, a producer, a party host, and a full-service gatherer of friends of different persuasions unified by the fact that they in some way “matter.” Susan Axelrod not only mattered, but also was a good and compelling and committed soul whose daughter had suffered tragically. And it also didn’t hurt that her husband was the new president’s closest adviser. When Tammy finally got through, she told Susan that if she served as a cohost of that year’s brunch (with NBC’s Ann Curry), Tammy would devote the following year to helping her campaign to promote awareness about epilepsy.
In October 2009, Tammy helped organize a luminary gathering at a Georgetown mansion to watch David and Susan discuss their parental ordeal with Katie Couric on
60
Minutes
. Several top administration officials showed up at the watch party, including Vice President Biden and Rahm Emanuel. “There’s nothing worse than having your child cognizant enough to know what’s going on, and know what’s happening, and begging you to help,” Susan Axelrod said. The Couric interview was another tremendous boon to CURE. The following year, Tammy was honored with the annual Friend of CURE award at a party at the Newseum. David Axelrod says that Haddad has never asked for any favors relating to his official role, and Haddad says she has been careful not to do so.
Tammy would make herself many close friends in the Obama White House. She was pals with Goolsbee, a top economic adviser to the new president; and she cohosted a party for Michelle Obama’s chief of staff’s son, the “supertalented author” who had written a novel, and one for David Axelrod’s assistant, who was headed off to law school, and another for Rahm Emanuel’s longtime senior adviser, who had taken a new job at Bloomberg News, one of the many media companies that Tammy’s media company, Haddad Media, did work for. Haddad helped with video producing. She organized special events and did various odd jobs to create “buzz” for herself and for her clients and for her thousands of superstar friends. She brings boldface names together.
Along the way, Haddad acquired a coveted mantle of her own: someone who had “connections” to the Obama White House. She won access to key quadrants of Obama World, even as the administration was taking great pride in refusing access to traditional influence peddlers, like lobbyists. One top White House aide described Tammy to me as an “access peddler.” Her business has thrived.
Tammy is not a Washington social convener type in the tradition of Georgetown hostesses like Sally Quinn, Katharine Graham, and Pamela Harriman, all of whom were married or linked to wealthy and powerful men or institutions. Their social efforts might have carried some business impetus (Quinn and Graham on behalf of their newspaper, Harriman for her work as a political activist and eventual diplomat). But none of them were working on behalf of paying clients like Haddad often does. She was doing consulting work for media outlets such as Politico, Bloomberg,
National
Journal
,
Newsweek
, the
Washington Post
, Condé Nast, and HBO. Her work seemed to include video production, event planning, and some promotional components. She is also helpful in using her connections to gain journalistic access for her clients. When Politico
did a ten-week series of videotaped interviews with administration officials, Haddad arranged the bookings with high-level administration officials. In addition, Tammy signed on to be a consultant to
Newsweek
through her friend Jon Meacham, who was then the magazine’s top editor. She worked on special video projects, did Tam Cam interviews, and performed assorted odd jobs.
The struggling newsweekly had been trying for months to land an interview with the president. Haddad “worked her contacts”—her friends in the White House, the hottest of properties inside the Obama’s small circle. She helped deliver the
Newsweek
interview as well as one with the first lady.
On the website of “Haddad Media,” there is a photo of Tammy aboard
Air Force One
, towering over Meacham—“a poet-historian,” she called him—as he interviewed President Obama. She includes, on the website, a description of her experience riding on “the Bird,” as insiders (like Tammy) call the presidential jet. Obama mentioned that he’d heard she’d had a great party the previous weekend. Tammy was thrilled by such high-level acknowledgment, naturally, and also by the “Cadillac-quality leather toilet seat cover” in the bathroom, “as wide as any Sumo wrestler could want.”
She also gushed over how generally roomy the
Air Force One
bathrooms seemed. “I could have comfortably brought a friend in,” she said.
Comfortably! This is what makes us great.
Alas, Tammy did not take any video of the
Air Force One
visit or the Meacham interview for
Newsweek
. In other words, it was not immediately clear what Tammy was doing there. Only that she was there, and that it mattered, and how could This Town not be impressed?
3
Three Senators for Our Times
A man never stands taller than when he is down on all fours kissing somebody’s ass.
R
AHM
E
MANUEL
E
ntrusted with a Senate supermajority and endowed with all the magnetism of a dried snail, Harry Reid owned the beleaguered face of change in 2009.
But the opening scene, at least mine—because I was in the room!—played out a few years before, on Election Night of 2006, the night Democrats regained control of the House and Senate for the first time since 1994.
Reid, then the Senate minority leader, and Chuck Schumer, who had run the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee, were watching returns in a suite at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill. The Felix-and-Oscar pair—Reid a hush-voiced Mormon from Searchlight, Nevada, and Schumer a bombastic Jew from Brooklyn—was becoming more and more silly as the night wore on. At one point Schumer, whose chin was smeared with mustard in two distinct splotches, exploded off the couch. CNN was calling the close Missouri Senate race for Democrat Claire McCaskill.
“Yeah,” Schumer grunted out through his food, holding two fists over his head.
Reid, a man of thoroughgoing cynicism, is nonetheless capable of a boyish hullabaloo at times like this. So what did Harry Reid do to mark this key step in his ascent to Senate majority leader? He rose from the couch and he kissed the TV—tenderly, caressing the screen. And then he sat back down to receive from Schumer something between a pat on the head and a noogie.
Reid then started placing congratulatory calls to the Democrats who had won. None of the calls exceeded thirty seconds, and each was punctuated by a variant of “I love you.” Reid professed his love to Senator Kent Conrad, who was reelected in North Dakota (“Love you, man”), Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Hillary Clinton in New York, who told Reid she loved him back.
I was standing a few feet away from the couch, sanctioned that night by Reid and Schumer to be a “fly on the wall,” a journalistic practice that is both a cliché and a misnomer: no one notices an actual fly on the wall while everyone is fully mindful of the maggot reporter taking notes. But these moments can be revealing, especially in the midst of such punch-drunk victories. Reid must have detected my amusement at the “I love yous,” which he explained to me matter-of-factly. “They need to hear that,” he said.
“They” are political people. And Reid, their leader, a former Nevada gaming commissioner, parcels out love like casino chips. Whether it is real love or pseudo love doesn’t quite matter. Love is gold currency in the rolling transaction of politics, a game played by the nation’s most ambitious and insecure class. In his stooped and unassuming and easy-to-miss way, no one understands this better than Harry Reid.
A few months later, Reid showed up on the Senate floor to hear John Kerry announce that he would not run for president again in 2008. It was a difficult moment for Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee who was now shedding an ambition he appeared to have held since kindergarten. Just before the 2006 midterms, Kerry had acquired a nasty case of political cooties after attempting a laugh line about the war in Iraq—never a good idea—which many construed as a knock against U.S. soldiers. Now Kerry was making this heavy announcement to a near-empty chamber that included only Reid and Kerry’s fellow Massachusetts senator, Ted Kennedy. After Kerry finished, Reid, who was standing next to him, gave Kerry a hug and said a few words for the record.
“He is one of those people who meant so much to me,” Reid said of Kerry, belying the scorn he had expressed to others for the lanky Bay Stater over many years. Reid had observed privately to colleagues that Kerry had no friends. No matter: Reid was John Kerry’s friend today, publicly, and it felt nothing but sincere.
“
So I say to John Kerry,” Reid concluded, “I love you, John Kerry.”
Kerry nodded slowly and appeared to choke back tears.
• • •
B
espectacled and slight, Reid is frequently described in terms of something else (“He looks like a civics teacher”). It is similar to how, say, the size of hail is never described on its own merits, only in terms of other things—marble-size, golf-ball-size. Reid could also pass for an oddball taxidermist who keeps a closet full of stuffed pigeons, or maybe the harried proprietor of the pet store that has just been robbed for the third time this month (or, in his case, hit up by Ben Nelson of Nebraska for some provincial goodie in the stimulus bill). What Reid does not look like is the amateur boxer and habitual street-fighter he was in his youth—or, more to the point, one of the most potent, odd, and overlooked phenomena of This Town.
• • •
R
eid once invited me to his home in the desert smudge of Searchlight, Nevada, population 539—a town of twelve brothels and not a single church during his childhood of unspeakable poverty. It was just after he had become the minority leader of the Senate in 2005. This was not an invitation that Reid would typically extend a reporter on his own. But he had been catching heat for having made a series of inelegant comments—calling, among other things, President Bush a “loser” and a “liar,” Alan Greenspan a “political hack,” and Clarence Thomas “an embarrassment”—and his image guardians feared the remarks might “negatively impact his brand.”
Reid welcomed me into his kitchen with an overly self-conscious—or self-consciously self-conscious—string of solicitations.
“Hey, you want a drink or something? Water?”
No, thanks, I said.
“They said I’m supposed to offer you a drink, so that’s what I’m doing. If anyone asks, just tell them I offered you a drink.” In other words, this charming mannerly recipe that Reid was following came from someone else (“them”).
“I don’t go to dinner. I don’t do any of the social things,” Reid said later. By contrast, he said, Tom Daschle, the top Senate Democrat before him, went to dinner every night. “I have beady eyes,” Reid points out, and “lousy posture.” And he doesn’t “speak well.” He is always reciting the litany of reasons why he is so unfit for his big-deal Washington job. He is an anti-prototype of This Town, which makes him an unlikely king of the place. The needy actors can have their love, just as long as Harry Reid gets to be in charge. “There are people who could be majority leader who could probably be better than I am,” Reid told me years later in his office. “They’re smarter, they’re better-looking, they speak better. But they don’t have the job. I have the job.”
• • •
R
eid’s movie would be in black-and-white, and maybe slightly pink to account for his facial coloring. Known as “Pinky” growing up, Harry Mason Reid is slight and tiny-eyed and looks about his age (seventy-three) but could also pass for someone born in the 1800s. He sees all of “that Hollywood stuff” as a great market inefficiency of Washington. Like how Billy Beane, the protagonist of Michael Lewis’s
Moneyball
, strips away all the intangibles of evaluating baseball talent: emotional attachments to players, their “makeup,” and ephemeral notions such as “clutch hitting” and “baseball tradition.” The only thing that matters to Beane is creating better methodologies and blocking out the traditional metrics. To Reid, the obsession in Washington to the show-horse aspects of the game (getting credit, being “seen”) is misspent energy that brings clouded thinking. What matters is maximum efficiency and, ultimately, survival.
“I can get in and out of a fund-raiser in five minutes,” Reid boasted to me. He was once leaving the Capitol in the back of his chauffeured SUV when he spotted my
New York Times
colleague Carl Hulse, a longtime congressional reporter, walking through the parking lot and wearing a tuxedo. “Where are you going, Carl?” Reid asked through an open window. Carl said he was headed to the annual Congressional Dinner, a big to-do for Hill types being held that year at the Ritz-Carlton, where Reid lives when he is in Washington. Reid offered Carl a ride over. When they arrived, Carl told Reid it would have been convenient for him if he were going to the dinner. “Carl,” Reid assured him as he headed up to his condo, “I wouldn’t go to this thing if it were in my living room.”
In Tim Russert’s final months, Reid’s spokesman at the time, Jim Manley, dragged the majority leader to the sixtieth-anniversary party for
Meet the Press
. It was held at the Newseum, and partygoers who appeared as guests of
Meet the Press
were delineated by special blue ribbons on their lapels—a kind of varsity letter. Reid hurried in, not bothering with his ribbon. He walked to the front of the long receiving line, congratulated Tim, and was, by Manley’s guess, in and out in eight minutes.
Reid loves being alone, either with his thoughts or with his wife, Landra, to whom he has been married fifty-three years. He also has a great eye for political loners and bringing them into his fold. He recognized immediately that Barack Obama was an outlier when he came to the Senate in 2005. Obama was a charming and persuasive “natural” of a performer but unreachable in basic ways and not well suited to the chamber. It was Reid who in 2006 encouraged Obama to run for president. This came as a shock to Obama at the time and to the Hillary Clinton camp when this conversation was revealed. Reid, who had repeatedly stated his neutrality in the 2008 presidential race, believed that Obama would never have the patience to hang around the Senate long enough to achieve the impact he craved. It also appealed to Reid, on a level somewhere between mischievous and Darwinian, to watch the two celebrity members of his caucus, Obama and Clinton, kill each other.
As Obama’s presidency unfolded, Reid appealed to a side of him that was fiercely pragmatic and transactional. “Harry has the toughest job in Washington,” Obama said of Reid. “He just grinds it out.” Obama, whose favorite movie is
The Godfather
and who has something of a Mob fetish, has always been drawn to loyal fixer types like Reid who quietly take care of business.
He once drew a favorable parallel between his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, and the consigliere role played by Robert Duvall in
The Godfather
.
As Democrats had gained a supermajority of sixty votes in the Senate, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, spoke of “putting points on the board”—an early mantra of the new White House that meant doing what was necessary to pass bills. This suited Reid, who became Obama’s key legislative partner, wrenching the administration’s prime accomplishments through a scared Senate: a $787 billion economic stimulus bill in early 2009 and the health-care bill a year later.
Reid and Emanuel became close allies. (As an aside, Emanuel is an observant Jew, and Reid loves Jews. Reid’s wife, Landra, was Jewish before she met “Hank,” as she calls him, and they became Mormons. A mezuzah still hangs in the doorway of the Reid home in Searchlight.) Reid and Emanuel spoke often by phone, usually for a bare minimum of seconds, just long enough to transact.
Both could be crass, especially Rahm. Shortly after Obama took office, he and Emanuel were meeting with Nancy Pelosi, when the chief of staff started cracking his knuckles. When Obama turned and expressed annoyance with the habit, Emanuel held the offending knuckle up to Obama’s left ear and snapped off a few special cracks for his presidential benefit.
Both Emanuel and Reid could be vindictive, especially Reid. Back when Nevada’s other senator was the exuberant Democrat Richard Bryan, a running joke had it that Bryan woke up every morning wondering how many hands he could shake, while Reid woke up wondering how many enemies he needed to screw.
Reid rarely wastes his powers of persuasion on policy arguments or charm offensives. “He goes straight to ‘What do you want?’” said Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican who supported the stimulus bill. Again, despite the pugilistic tendencies of Reid and Emanuel, their philosophy of managing Democratic lawmakers usually came down to accommodation.
Harry Reid understands his customers’ needs: which senators need to be home, if possible, to put their kids to bed, or whose father is ill, or who might need special praise for their forgettable floor speeches. If they are going to Vegas, Reid will help them get dinner reservations or show tickets. He is adept at recognizing people who might feel overlooked. For instance, Susanna Quinn, Jack Quinn’s wife, can sometimes feel like an appendage to her lobbyist husband—like when a cartoon rendering of Susanna with Jack on the wall of the Palm identified her merely as “Mrs. Quinn” (the restaurant later added her full name). “Susanna is really a charmer,” Reid said in a special toast to her at a fund-raiser the Quinns hosted for the senator at their home. “I know I tell everyone that I love them but I REALLY love Susanna,” Reid continued. “Jack has been such a good friend to me, but Susanna makes all of us feel so good about ourselves.” This made Susanna feel good about herself.
It turns out that Susanna Quinn’s grandfather, a Democratic senator from Oklahoma, used to sit at the desk on the floor that now belongs to Reid. Susanna’s then eight-year-old daughter Jocelyn wrote a letter to Reid, and Reid in turn sent her a signed copy of a book he wrote about Searchlight and a kid’s book written by Ted Kennedy in the voice of his dog, Splash. (Reid signed that one too.)
Reid caters with supreme efficiency, no wasted motion. To keep phone calls streamlined, Reid often skips saying good-bye. The other party might keep talking to a dead line for several seconds without realizing it.
I first met Reid in 2005, not long after he had become the Democratic leader. When Jim Manley walked me into his office and introduced me, Reid barely looked up and said to Manley, “Is this the sleazeball you told me about?” He had me at “sleazeball.”
Reid randomly called my desk a few years later to wish me a “happy Jewish holiday.” I don’t remember what Jewish holiday it was, or if I even knew it was a Jewish holiday. Reid then bragged to me that he was a “hero” to the then nine Jews in the Senate because he had adjourned the chamber in time for them to get home for whatever Jewish holiday it was. He reeled off the names of all the Senate Jews: Lieberman, Schumer, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, etc. He concluded with Ron Wyden of Oregon, and when I expressed surprise that Wyden was Jewish—and mock surprise they even had Jews in Oregon—Reid deadpanned, “Yes, there are two of them in Oregon, and we have one of them.” And he hung up without saying good-bye, or shalom.