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  In the book, Plouffe denigrated Republicans as “a party led by people who foment anger and controversy to make a name for themselves and to make a buck.” Plouffe made more than that. Barnett set him up at the Washington Speakers Bureau, a popular outfit in the thriving local pontificate-for-pay sector. Plouffe earned $1.5 million in 2010, according to White House disclosure statements, which included a portion of his book advance, proceeds from his management consulting work for Boeing and General Electric, and close to $500,000 for paid speaking gigs around the world, including $100,000 from MTN Nigeria, an African telecommunications firm.

  No one in Obama World would ever deny Barnett’s effectiveness when it came to getting “public-to-private” deals for them after work on campaigns or in the White House was finished. Typically there was not even a second choice. Barnett was once described as “the doorman to the revolving door”; he has been known to quote that line in speeches, in a self-deprecating way, of course.

  “You make a certain deal with a devil when you reach a certain level of visibility,” one longtime Obama confidant and aide told me. “Everyone here knows what Bob is about. But the reality is, if you don’t hire him, you’re probably leaving money on the table, and ninety-five percent of people here aren’t willing to do that.”

  Still, Barnett’s client relationships at the highest levels of Obama World could create conflicts in the day-to-day of the White House. Early in the Obama presidency, national security speechwriter Ben Rhodes received a call from an aide to Nelson Mandela asking if the president would write a foreword to Mandela’s autobiography. Rhodes, an idealistic former novelist, entered politics after seeing the plane strikes on the Twin Towers. He took the Mandela request to the president, who readily agreed to do it. Soon after, Barnett became involved in his role as the president’s lawyer on book matters. He expressed the view that the White House should have taken into account the unique issues that arise when a president contributes to a published work—something he dealt with during Bill Clinton’s presidency. E-mails were exchanged, and eventually Rhodes became annoyed, pointing out that something so cut-and-dried as the president’s writing a short foreword for one of his heroes should not be this complicated. Ben, whose brother, David Rhodes, would become president of CBS News, told colleagues that he later wrote an indignant e-mail to a number of Obama associates, including Barnett. He acknowledged it was probably a mistake to send it, but in any case, the issue played out with lawyers, and Obama eventually wrote the foreword for Mandela’s book.

  When I asked Ben Rhodes about the episode, he confirmed that it had occurred, but declined further comment, citing the fact that Barnett represented his brother.

  • • •

  Obama’s victory in November 2008 opened a love spigot. Before his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park, many of his campaign aides and top supporters walked in a procession past the press pen to hear the president-elect’s speech. I watched many of the Obama people sharing prolonged hugs with reporters, reinforcing the notion (advanced by the Clinton and McCain campaigns, among others) that the media had fallen into the thrall of Obama—a thrall immortalized by Chris Matthews, who declared on the air that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” upon hearing Obama speak. Media reporter Howard Kurtz, then of the Washington Post, initiated an “Obama Adulation Watch” that noted postelection comparisons of Obama to Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Several reporters would wind up joining the administration in high-profile communications jobs. This often happens, especially in Democratic administrations, but not to the degree it did in the Obama presidency, which became a full-employment service for former journalists; a reported nineteen would join the administration through its first term.

  It is also common for hot new administrations to be widely celebrated, flattered, and generally paid great attention. Particular darlings are alumni of winning Democratic campaigns who move into plum White House jobs. Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, top aides to Jimmy Carter, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine shortly after Carter was elected. In 1992 the New Republic initiated a “Clinton Suck-Up Watch.”

  But the extreme hype that attended the Obama invasion went well beyond even the historic impact of his election. It bordered, at times, on out-and-out panting. “As Barack Obama stacks his staff with studs whose looks are as outstanding as their credentials, it’s clear that the nation’s 44th president won’t be the only man on the hill who can rock a suit—bespoke or bathing,” the New York Daily News reported just before the inauguration. The story was accompanied by a photo spread on “Hotties of the Obama Cabinet.”

  Opulent welcoming parties surged through the city as the rest of the country spiraled into a financial crisis. On a Thursday night in early December 2008, Gibbs and his wife were feted at a Capitol Hill tavern by many of the same people who were there to pay tribute to Russert (and Gibbs) that day in June. The invitation urged guests to “honor Robert and Mary Catherine Gibbs with drinks, laughs, some humiliating deference, respect and sucking up.” That month alone, incoming Obama people were “honored” at fourteen such galas.

  But the Obama followers were determined to resist being sucked up by the seductions of Suck-up City. They offered themselves as incorruptible canaries that would fly above the filthy flattery mines of D.C. In a system that had degenerated into a big and unctuous game, they would refuse to play. They would stay humble and focused on their work.

  The week before his inauguration, the president-elect was invited to a dinner party at the Chevy Chase, Maryland, home of the conservative columnist George F. Will. The dinner, ostensibly, would welcome the new president back to town and acquaint him with some of the media’s top conservatives: the columnists David Brooks of the New York Times, Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, among others. The dinner was originally planned for during the campaign. Axelrod had pushed for it but Plouffe nixed the idea. Plouffe believed that to attend such an insider Washington salon would be a waste of time, while Axelrod argued that it could be a useful olive branch, consistent with the president-elect’s promise to unite the country. Plouffe prevailed at the time, and the invitation was tabled until after the campaign. Obama ate portobello mushroom salad and lamb chops and declared the two-and-a-half-hour confab “fun” upon departure.

  Later that week, Obama met with the editorial board of the Washington Post, a constituency he had proudly blown off during the campaign. After the meeting, Obama worked the Post’s fifth-floor newsroom to a flurry of cell phone cameras. “I want to talk about the Redskins and the Nationals,” Obama declared, playing the new neighbor eager to fit in.

  As discrete events, Obama’s visits to Will’s home and the Post meant little. They signaled a natural shifting of the constituencies that presidents speak to when they are outside Washington (running for president) to when they are in Washington (being president). Politics often boils down to an exercise of knowing your priorities and constituencies, neither of which are static. “It’s sort of an accepted rite of passage that a presidential candidate can talk bad about Washington without anyone in Washington accusing him of being a hypocrite afterwards,” said Marlin Fitzwater, the press secretary to Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Sooner or later, the key constituencies of Washington “all know that he will come to them,” said Fitzwater, listing these constituencies as lobbyists, lawmakers, and the ephemerally dreaded “special interests.”

  Even so, Obama and his entourage held themselves out as an unusually pure brigade. Their furious assault on lobbyists during the campaign and their vow to keep them out of the White House upon arrival made for heated disagreements. A debate broke out between Obama aides over whether to make exceptions to their no-lobbying rule, especially in the case of people who worked on behalf of do-gooder causes (like, say, cancer research). Axelrod, a hard-liner, argued that Americans did not distinguish between “good lobbyists” and “bad lobby
ists” and there was a greater principle at stake. “It’s not who we are,” or “It’s not in our DNA,” was a common refrain among the hard-liners, which also included Plouffe and Gibbs. A less rigid position within the White House held that these guidelines were arbitrary. By signing an executive order to keep lobbyists out of the administration, Obama would be constricting his hiring pool or tempting embarrassment if he made exceptions—as he did when a former Raytheon lobbyist, Bill Lynn, was granted a waiver to serve as deputy secretary of defense.

  One of the stubborn truths of Obama-era Washington is that everyone is now, in effect, a special interest, a free agent, performing any number of services, in any number of settings. It goes well beyond the technical classification of “registered lobbyists.” Self-pimping has become the prevailing social and business imperative. “The firstnamelastname-dot-com syndrome” is how a Republican media consultant, Kevin Madden, described the phenomenon. Or, as the Onion once described it, it’s like being “the CEO of the company called ‘Me.’”

  What’s more, as everyone was their own “special interest,” or brand, it was impossible to know who was carrying what water for whom. It was certainly not as easy as going down a list of “registered lobbyists” and excluding them from White House employment or dealings. Lobbying was just one segment on the revolving door. Cozy areas of overlap abounded—perhaps even “deeply troubling” ones. For instance, Michael Froman, chief of staff to Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, was a managing director at Citigroup while serving on Obama’s transition team. Another Rubin protégé, then New York Fed president Tim Geithner, helped engineer a taxpayer bailout of Citigroup a few weeks after Obama’s election. Froman later received a $2.2 million bonus from Citigroup after being hired by the administration. (He ultimately gave it to charity.)

  Still: “Resist the gold rush,” went the mantra inside the new White House. The rising unemployment numbers and collapsing banks should make it easy to remain humble. Or not. Washington was fat and the love was abundant for the refreshed White House, home to what the new social secretary Desirée Rogers called “the best brand on earth: the Obama brand” in the Wall Street Journal. “Our possibilities are endless.”

  The new administration made dozens of White House staffers available to the New York Times Magazine for a shiny photo essay on “Obama’s People.” It placed the staffers very much on-limits as extensions of the Obama brand. Rogers and Valerie Jarrett, a top presidential adviser and a close first family confidante, posed for a glamorous cover shoot in an exclusive “White House Insiders” edition of the thick-paged Capitol File magazine. It was a terrific play for Brand Valerie and Brand Desirée. But top aides to Obama were appalled that staffers would partake of such an ostentatious display, especially in such a frighteningly bad economy. (Jarrett told me later, “If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t have done that.”)

  In a broader sense, the spectacle triggered suspicion that certain “White House insiders” were enjoying their newfound celebrity a bit too much and that Team Obama would be just the latest enterprise to campaign against Washington, only to quickly succumb to postelection charms. “Everyone here has been warm and welcoming and inclusive,” Jarrett told Capitol File. “There hasn’t been a person I’ve met who hasn’t said ‘Welcome to Washington,’ and you get the feeling they actually mean it.”

  Whether they did mean it or not, Washington sucked up every crumb of “insight” on the Obama brand. The appetite was insatiable, evidenced by the items the new-media faucet kept spewing forth.

  Within the first weeks of the new presidency, Politico “broke” the story that the president’s aides sang “Happy Birthday” to the assistant press secretary, Nick Shapiro!

  And surprised him with a chocolate cake!

  And also that deputy White House press secretary Jen Psaki “was in her pajamas” when her boyfriend made dinner for her and proposed marriage!

  The Washington Examiner reported that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was spotted “getting money at the SunTrust Bank in the Safeway on the corner [of] 17th St. and Corcoran St. NW”!

  Reggie Love, Obama’s personal aide, was declared the winner of the Huffington Post’s “Who’s the White House’s hottest employee?” contest (not to be confused with the “Hottest Obama Hottie” contest that ran on Gawker.com in January, in which Mr. Emanuel triumphed)!

  The Wall Street Journal scooped the nugget that the White House Office of Management and Budget chief, Peter Orszag, enjoys Diet Coke!

  In other news, the country still faced two wars and an economic crisis.

  “It started as sort of a joke to treat official Washington as a celebrity culture,” said Ana Marie Cox, who helped create the genre online by starting the website Wonkette in 2004. “Now it seems that a lot of the irony has been lost and the joke has turned real.”

  White House officials were quite eager to share with me how ambivalent they all were about their quasi-celebrity. Some acknowledged a tension between living up to the administration’s stated goal of being “transparent” and “open” while also following the Obama staff ethic of being understated, cool, and modest. “We have a culture here that abhors all of that,” Dan Pfeiffer said. When I told Pfeiffer I was contemplating a story for the Times about “all of that,” he suggested it might “get bumped off the front page by a story about the first lady’s hair.” He was referring to a front-page article in the Times the previous week about how the new president’s hair was going gray.

  • • •

  Arianna Huffington hosted the signature D.C. party on the eve of Obama’s inauguration. It was held at the Newseum, a place cherished by Tim Russert, whose idea it was to inscribe the first forty-five words of the First Amendment on the building’s façade overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall.

  The rise and reinvention of Huffington, impresario of the fast-growing website, the Huffington Post, had been a source of great annoyance to Russert. In 1994, when Huffington’s former husband, Michael Huffington, was a Republican senatorial candidate from California and Arianna was an outspoken conservative who was orchestrating his campaign, Russert’s wife, Maureen Orth, wrote a withering profile of Arianna that characterized the Greek-born spouse as a despotic boss, a New Age flake, and the “Sir Edmund Hillary of Social Climbers.” Resentment between the parties simmered for years and boiled anew when Huffington started her website and initiated something called Russert Watch. The feature ridiculed Meet the Press as a hothouse of conventional wisdom, reflexive partisanship, and Beltway gamesmanship. Huffington told me later that media criticism had always been a big part of the website’s mission, and she started Russert Watch to chronicle how the host’s “kid-gloves-handling of the D.C. establishment allowed the conventional wisdom to survive unchallenged.” It had nothing to do with any personal history with Russert or Orth, she said.

  Regardless, Russert, who despite his top-of-the-class station could be quite thin-skinned—and quite Irish in holding grudges—complained bitterly about Huffington’s Russert Watch. Arianna was conspicuously lukewarm (or silent) about Russert during the canonization that followed his death. She did not attend the funeral. Luke Russert says he will always refuse to shake Arianna’s hand.

  Huffington’s resurrection into a new-media queen was completed three years later when AOL paid $315 million for the right to merge with the Huffington Post. The arrangement put her in charge of the whole moussaka. When the then CEO of NBC Universal, Jeff Zucker, later revealed that the network had itself pursued an acquisition of Huff-Po, it also no doubt set Russert spinning in his you-know-what. On the morning the AOL news broke, Sally Quinn, who in recent years has become fascinated with religion and now runs the “On Faith” website on WashingtonPost.com, forwarded the announcement to her old pal Orth, a devout Catholic.

  “How could God let this happen?” Sally asked.

  “It must be part of God’s di
vine plan,” Tim’s widow said.

  Huffington’s red carpet on Inauguration eve was dense with Demi Moores, Ashton Kutchers, Stings, David Axelrods, and Valerie Jarretts. Arianna addressed the reveling mob from a fourth-floor balcony. She wore a black gown with a long tail and looked every bit a re-reinvented queen of a changing universe. (Disclosure: my sister Lori works for Arianna at the Huffington Post, so this could get slightly awkward.)

  In the mad dash to get in with the hot young White House, Arianna, at fifty-eight, appeared to be a frontrunner. The White House press shop paid close and solicitous attention. Obama himself was dropping Arianna’s name—only her first name necessary—into interviews with the New York Times. He volunteered that Arianna disapproved of his redecoration of the Oval Office. Valerie Jarrett called Huffington an “icon” and a “phenomenon” at a party Tammy Haddad threw for Huffington to celebrate her new book on the American underclass, Third World America. (And who knew there would be valet parking in Third World America? Or specially embroidered Third World America pillows!)

  Outside the Newseum, the magnificent Tammy—Tim called her “the Tamster” and now so did I—was trolling the sidewalk. She was surveying the long, snaking queue of people waiting to get into the bash and kept pulling worthies out of line, declaring her D.C. Chosens in real time. Okay, I admit I was one of them. I felt like a jackass, walking ahead of everyone. But it was really cold, and Arianna had also promised “live tweeting stations” at her party, so yay for her, yay for me, and yay for the Tamster.

  You gotta love the Tamster. Actually you don’t, and some don’t, though not in any deep or greatly malicious way, at least in most cases. Tammy is a contradiction in that she is also one of those people of whom it is often wondered: What exactly does she do? But she also gets points for transparency (in whatever it is she does). Or at least ubiquity. She eschews the high-minded pretense that this is anything but a festival of vanities and gossip and a variation on the Miss America Pageant that she herself has judged and still sits on the board of. She has blasted a place for herself in the city: impossible to miss, if not resist—six feet and not shy about invading your personal space and telling you about how she knows everyone (and how wonderful YOU are too) and putting you on camera. Her signature accoutrement is a little video camera she carries around, called the “Tam Cam.” With it, she walks up to people she knows—and who, by extension, matter—and initiates quick little ambush interviews, which she will often put online. The interviews are generally quick and painless, if somewhat intrusive, “like a light enema,” in the words of one friend/victim.