This Town Read online

  Obama appears immune to the neediness that afflicts so many politicians. Any attempt to win his favor through praise was futile, or counterproductive. This air of above-it-all confidence was also evident among Obama’s top advisers. They were a cohesive and devoted group who often evinced the temperament of loners. Like Obama, they possessed a quiet sense that the prevailing social lubricants of politics—the sycophancy, the gossip, and the cloying salesmanship—were not just distasteful but pathetic.

  In a deeper sense, there was an implicit belief among the Obama people that Washingtonians constituted one of the most insincere collectives in the world. To them, members of The Club were like playactors performing weird pantomimes of the sort no one in, say, Chicago would engage in. The Obama people declared themselves consistently above the “insider Washington” game.

  But “insider Washington” is much larger than it used to be, to a point where it becomes inescapable. The elite dinner party salons of Georgetown used to include a revolving class of a few hundred power brokers, wealthy socialites, and current and former members of Congress, cabinets, and White House staffs, along with a smattering of ambassadors and big-shot journalists. Today’s insider Washington has become a sprawling “conversation” in which tens of thousands partake by tweet, blog, or whatever. Jail break in the peanut gallery. Standards of local “celebrity” have dropped through the floor. The birthdays of junior Hill staffers are generally given equal weight to the president’s in Mike Allen’s Playbook. In other words, Washington is a much bigger swirl of mashed potatoes than it ever used to be—and it has never seemed smaller.

  In the local literary tradition, such as it is, Washington is said to mimic high school. Meg Greenfield, the longtime editorial page editor of the Washington Post, loved and nurtured the notion, as did the New York Times columnist Russell Baker and a clique of others. The cliché is apt, to a point. There are plenty of bullies and nerds here. Familiar tableaus, like the floor of the Senate and the White House briefing room, are set up like classrooms. Congress goes out on “recess.” It also provides a useful frame for some inescapably high schoolish characters. “No one who has ever passed through American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent,” Joan Didion wrote in her book of political essays, Political Fictions. In a Rolling Stone profile of John McCain set during the 2000 presidential campaign, David Foster Wallace described the then maverick Republican as a “varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates.” McCain’s actual nickname in high school was “Punk.”

  Eager-to-please crossing-guard types are certainly drawn to Washington in large proportions. Lone wolves don’t do as well here as in, say, the market-gaming Wild West of Wall Street or misfit genius labs of Silicon Valley. “Loners may be able to sell themselves electorally at home,” Greenfield wrote in her civic memoir, Washington. “But they cannot win in Washington, no matter how bad or good they are. Winning here means winning people over—sometimes by argument, sometimes by craft, sometimes by obsequiousness and favors, sometimes by pressure and sometimes by a chest-thumping, ape-type show of strength that makes it seem prudent to get with the ape’s program.”

  But the high school comparison breaks down in the modern version of This Town. For one thing, Washington—like high school—used to be a transient culture. People would expect to graduate eventually or drop out. But almost no one leaves here anymore. Better to stay and monetize a Washington identity in the humming self-perpetuation machine, where people not nearly as good as Tim Russert or the Obama dynamos can make Washington “work for them.”

  Quaint is the notion of a citizen-politician humbly returning to his farm, store, or medical practice back home after his time in public office is complete. “One thing our founding fathers could not foresee was a nation governed by professional politicians who had a vested interest in getting reelected,” Ronald Reagan said in 1973. “They probably envisioned a fellow serving a couple of hitches and then looking forward to getting back to the farm.”

  Obama often told friends that, like Ronald Reagan, it was important for him to convey a message of a candidate who did not need the job of president. He wanted it known that he derived none of the psychic gratification that so many others seek in public life. When he was in the Senate, Obama once instructed a colleague to “shoot me” if he ever wound up staying in Washington after he left office.

  One friend of Obama’s says that the president despises the “derivative culture of D.C.,” meaning that people become defined by their proximity to other people and institutions. The presidency is a popular target for those seeking derivative status. People glom on to it in some way, emphasizing their own connection as if that makes them, too, a bit presidential. The Las Vegas wedding of Ed Henry, who covered the White House for CNN and later Fox News, featured a cake that was a seventy-pound replica of the White House.

  Over time, people achieve a psychic fusion to their public personas and their professional networks. The essence of self becomes lost, subsumed in a flurry of Playbook mentions and high-level name-drops. Self becomes fused with brands, and brands with other brands.

  • • •

  I first heard the term “Suck-up City” from a top Obama adviser during the 2008 campaign. He was describing the Beltway culture that Obama was running against—and then, after he won, that his White House vowed to change. “Suck-up City” holds multiple meanings, the most obvious being the sycophantic: you suck up to someone you want to please and, more to the point, when you want something from them. You could make the case that sucking up is the mother’s milk of politics itself, or politicking. It is also central to Obama’s disdain for the usual process. Back in the 2008 primary campaign, his New Hampshire political guy, Mike Cuzzi, set up a dinner for Obama in the town of Rye with a bunch of self-important local activists (a redundancy in New Hampshire, given the top-level attention lavished on them every four years). Obama stayed for hours, told stories, talked about the campaign, asked everyone about their lives, concerns, etc. They all had a splendid time, by every indication. But not a single one of them committed, recalled Reid Cherlin, an aide to Obama in New Hampshire. “What do I have to do,” Obama asked Cuzzi as they were leaving, “wash their cars?”

  Sucking up is as basic to Washington as humidity. There is a financial component. It has never been easier for “strategists” and “consultants” and “agents” of all stripes to affix themselves like barnacles to the local money barge, sucking in green nutrients.

  There is no better connected operator in Washington than Robert Barnett, the superlawyer/dealmaker who can legitimize a person’s earning power just by representing him or her. This service to his country includes a strenuous ability to promote his clients in the media and an equally strenuous ability to remind people of those deals in the interest of promoting himself. This makes him a “superlawyer.” The degree to which so many elite D.C. players stream to a single superlawyer cash redemption center is striking even by the parochial standards of the ant colony. Barnett has all the antique cuff-links he could ever collect and all the money he could ever need. But he still loves the thrill of being at all the big parties and dinners and funerals, and also reading his name in Mike Allen’s Playbook.

  Bob loves Playbook. He touts Mike hard and is always good about giving him a heads-up on deals set to be announced. Playbook, in turn, mentions Barnett all the time, even if it’s quoting some boilerplate praise from a lesser-known politician in the acknowledgments section of a book Barnett arranged.

  And it tickles Bob when Mike mentions his birthday and that of his wife, Rita Braver, and daughter, Meredith, and baby grandson, Teddy. Speaking of Teddy, it was Mike Allen who broke the news of his birth in Playbook in 2010. I ran into Barnett a few days later and he told me he had received
“probably four thousand e-mails” of congratulations after that Playbook mention; Bob was clearly over the moon with his new grandson.

  To Barnett, Allen—with his mentions, his birthday wishes—helps Washington keep its priorities straight and encourages a sense of community. “In a world in which we all tend to pay not enough attention to people around us and their real lives, that’s a real public service,” Barnett affirmed in reference to Allen and Playbook in an interview with the Washington Post. In a bylined piece for Politico that ran on the eve of the 2008 election, Allen even included the name “Washington Superlawyer Robert Barnett” on a short list of potential Obama appointments to the Supreme Court (Barnett led the list, ahead of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan).

  A native of Waukegan, Illinois, Barnett retains a sharp midwestern accent but is unabashed in his love of Washington. By attaching himself to the owners of the most rarefied job titles in town—presidents and first ladies on down—Barnett has created a boutique industry that he fully dominates.

  While public officials profiting after leaving office is an evergreen custom here, Barnett has operated in a market that barely existed thirty years ago. With the exception of a few outliers (Barnett got Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, a reported $2.4 million advance in 1985), the money was not here then, the electronic circus was not in place, and political operatives like Karl Rove did not possess the celebrity appeal that has allowed them to leverage their “brands” into big multiplatform media deals. The rise of cable news gave everyone a face.

  On the same night I encountered Andrea Mitchell at the Biden–Palin debate in St. Louis, I ran into Barnett. He had been hanging out in the media filing center—the kind of center-of-the-action place he loved. Enthusiastic as ever, Bob was always talking about his latest big deals and updating acquaintances on his roster of premium clients. One of his bigger parlays back then was the mega book, speaking, Fox News, Newsweek, and Wall Street Journal package he had negotiated for Rove after he left the White House. Rove had just been in Philadelphia for a “debate” with former Senator Max Cleland, the Democrat who lost an arm and two legs in Vietnam, and also his Senate seat in Georgia (in 2002) after his Republican opponent ran an ad featuring likenesses of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while attacking Cleland for not supporting President Bush’s Homeland Security bill. Cleland mostly blamed Rove for this. Debating Rove was like “going up against the devil himself,” he said. “It’s a source of income for me,” Cleland told me of the joint appearance, which was sponsored by an insurance trade group. Cleland, whose own book deal was also negotiated by Barnett, was paid $15,000 for his night’s work in Philadelphia; Rove made $40,000.

  Barnett is the prototype of a person who made Washington work for him. He has also been the recipient of some of the most sustained and positive press coverage in the city, often benefiting from the hyperbolic testimony of his clients (or their surrogates). Hillary Clinton is always game to pay public testimony to Barnett, who negotiated an $8 million advance for her memoir, Living History, and more than $10 million for her husband’s memoir, My Life—and even brokered a deal for Hillary to anthologize a bunch of kids’ letters to the first pets, Socks the cat and Buddy the dog. Hillary’s spokesman Philippe Reines once told the Baltimore Sun, “If God were writing the Bible again, he would surely call Bob Barnett.”

  While Bob is effective at his job, he has also made a lot of money for many of the top journalists at outlets where a lot of this good press appears. “To list Barnett as a signifier of Washington connectedness is like calling the sun a symbol of heat,” hyperbolized David Montgomery of the Washington Post in a 2010 profile. The piece appeared under the leadership of then editor Marcus Brauchli, for whom Barnett had negotiated a $3.4 million package on the way out the door of his previous job at the Wall Street Journal. There is no indication that Brauchli steered Montgomery to write in any particular direction. Still, it’s never rare for journalists—of which Barnett estimates he represents 375—to find themselves too close to the Barnett sun.

  Barnett is also a signifier of Washington’s special tolerance for conflict of interest, if not by the legal/ethical definition, then certainly by the “raises fundamental questions” definition. The term comes up a lot around Barnett, even from his clients and friends. It’s often said with some measure of a shrug (“Only in Washington”) and in fact admiration—as if to say, “Well, Bob’s the big game in town for this, so of course he’ll have a connection to both sides—and he has made me a lot of money, so it’s all good.” I’ve had many political figures and news colleagues over the years who have said they were, at the very least, uncomfortable that Barnett had been negotiating on their behalf with people (or counsel thereof) he also had represented. Also, when Barnett helps orchestrate, say, a book rollout for one of his well-known clients, is he playing favorites with the media hosts or outlets that he also represents?

  Barnett says he discloses every possible conflict to his clients beforehand in writing, and they are free to go elsewhere, or fire him. Most of them do not. “He is a walking conflict of interest,” says one longtime client, a well-known television journalist. The journalist also expressed great appreciation for Barnett, and added she has every intention of using him to negotiate her next deal.

  Barnett prides himself on discretion and humility. It has been pointed out in the press that his office at the D.C. law firm Williams and Connolly does not include a “Me Wall” that displays photos of him posing with President X or foreign leader Y. But what Barnett lacks in Me Walls, he will make up for in his conversational skill at the cocktail parties he frequents, telling you that “Hillary” (or George W. Bush, or whoever) just e-mailed. He loves going out, seeing people, being seen, working, working; he might be the hardest-working person in Showbiz for Ugly People. He enlists his famous clients to get him invited to exclusive dinners, like the annual Alfalfa Club banquet, that are packed with political-media elites. He prefers Nantucket to Martha’s Vineyard, he once told me, because the Vineyard is too sprawling and lacks a central square like the one Nantucket has. Plus, he loves shopping.

  To certain key members of Obama’s inner circle during the campaign, Barnett epitomized the Suck-up City operator who plays all sides, is tireless in his self-promotion, and is mercenary in his alliances. He was also a fierce supporter of Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the Democratic primaries, owing to his longtime friendship with the former first lady and her husband that predates the book deals he arranged for them.

  While Barnett takes great pride in his legal and deal-making ability, he craves standing as a principal. He hates being called an “agent,” with its hired-gun connotations. He fashions himself as an all-purpose friend, editor, fixer, confidant, and promoter. Barnett is bipartisan in his business, having represented the last three presidents, first ladies, and vice presidents of both parties. But he is an avowed Democrat who takes great pride in his work preparing the party’s nominees for their debates during general election campaigns. The only photos of Barnett with famous clients in his office are of him standing with candidates on a podium during the practice sessions.

  After Obama secured the Democratic nomination in June 2008, Barnett wanted badly to be part of the team that trained the nominee for his debates against McCain. He had an in with Obama in that he negotiated the then senator’s deal to write his bestselling 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.

  But some of Obama’s top aides were insistent that Barnett was precisely the kind of Washington insider their campaign should avoid. He also had a reputation for oversharing with the press, a constituency he was especially attentive to (and married to: his wife, Rita Braver, is a correspondent for CBS News). Hillary Clinton was also fully aware of this, and had often warned her aides not to tell Barnett too much because he talked too much in general.

  But Clinton deputized Barnett to be one of her liaisons to the Obama campaign after her exit from the race in June. He lob
bied the Obama people for some debate role through the summer. After one brief conversation at the campaign’s Chicago headquarters, Plouffe told colleagues he was struck by how obsequious Barnett was.

  Finally, the campaign gave Barnett a small position on the team that negotiated debate parameters with the McCain campaign and the debate organizers: the sizes of the lecterns, the temperature in the room, and whatnot. He traveled to the sites of the three presidential debates as well as the vice presidential debate in St. Louis between Joe Biden and his Republican counterpart, Sarah Palin. Barnett spent much of his evening in the media filing center and postdebate “spin room” at Washington University. The only person Barnett appeared to be spinning for was himself. He seemed very much in his political-media see-and-be-seen element. At one point he even chatted up Palin’s communications aide Nicolle Wallace—who was with her husband, Mark, also a top McCain–Palin official.

  Barnett ended up securing Palin’s business after the election, winning her well into eight figures in book, speaking, and TV deals. “Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has,” Barnett later said of his new friend from Alaska.

  Even better, while there was no bigger detractor of Barnett on the Obama campaign than Plouffe, the campaign manager, Plouffe’s aversion stopped when it came to his own livelihood: he hired Barnett to negotiate a reported seven-figure advance for his book about the 2008 campaign, The Audacity to Win. This was revealed a few weeks after the election, in Playbook: “Robert Barnett, who also represents the president-elect, the secretary of state-designate, the commerce secretary-designate, the soon-to-be health and human services secretary-designate, and the national economic adviser-designate, among others, will handle the project for Plouffe.”