Mark Leibovich - This Town

ALSO BY MARK LEIBOVICH

The New Imperialists: How Five Restless Kids Grew Up to Virtually Rule Your World

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Copyright 2013 by Mark Leibovich

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leibovich, Mark.

This town : two parties and a funeralplus plenty of valet

parking!in Americas gilded capital / Mark Leibovich.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-61108-1

1. Political cultureWashington (D.C.) 2. PoliticiansUnited States. 3. United StatesPolitics and government. I. Title.

JK1726.L45 2013 2013009796

306.209753dc23

GLOBE TURNER / GETTY IMAGES

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To my family

Contents

Prologue

June 2008

T im Russert is dead. But the room was alive.

You cant work it too hard at a memorial service, obviously. Its the kind of thing people notice. But the big-ticket Washington departure rite can be such a great networking opportunity. You can almost feel the ardor behind the solemn faces: lucky stampedes of power mourners, about two thousand of them, wearing out the red-carpeted aisles of the Kennedy Center.

Before the service, people keep rushing down the left-hand aisle to get to Robert Gibbs, the journeyman campaign spokesman who struck gold with the right patron, Barack Obama, soon to be the first African-American nominee of a major party. If Obama gets elected, Gibbs is in line to be the White House press secretary. Gibbs is the son of librarians, two of the 10 percent of white Alabamans who will support Obama in November. Bobby, as he was known back home, hated to read as a child and grew up to be a talker, now an increasingly hot one.

He keeps getting approached in airports and on the street for his autograph. He is a destination for a populace trained to view human interaction through the prism of How can this person be helpful to me? Gibbs has become potentially whoppingly helpful. People seek out and congratulate him for his success and that of his candidate, especially at tribal gatherings like this, a grand send-off for the host of Meet the Press.

Next to Gibbs presides another beneficial destination: David Axelrod, a Democratic media consultant and kibitzing walrus of a mensch who orchestrated Obamas run to the 2008 Democratic nomination. Known as Axe, Axelrod is a sentimental RFK Democrat whose swoon over Obama is unrivaled even by Gibbss. (Gibbs once called Axe the guy who walks in front of Obama with rose petals.) Noting the big run on Gibbs and Axelrod, a columnist for Politico told me they were the new it guys at the service, and of course they were, in part for devising a communications strategy predicated on indifference to this very onrushing club of D.C.s Leading Thinkers.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are mobbed as well; they can barely get to their seats: assaulted with kudos for the success of Morning Joe, their dawn roundtable on MSNBC and a popular artery in the bloodstream of the Leading Thinkers. People keep pressing business cards into the cohosts palms, eager to get themselves booked, or their clients booked, or their books mentioned, just once, by Joe or Mika. A new low, even for Washington tackiness, Mika will lament of the funereal hustle. But its important to be part of the conversation, anyone would understand. You seize your moment when it comes.

Bill and Hillary Clinton walk stiffly down the left aisle. Heads lurch and the collective effects are unmistakable: that exotic D.C. tingle falls over the room, the kind that comes with proximity to Superpowers. Bill and Hill. They are given wide berth. It had been a tough stretch. Hillary has just conceded the Democratic nomination. It ended an epic primary saga in which Bill had disgraced himself, making unpresidential and maybe racially loaded remarks about Obama. Neither Clinton is in a particularly good place with Washington at the moment, or with the media, or with the Democratic Partyor, for that matter, maybe with each other.

Bills top postWhite House aide, Doug Band, is keeping a list on his BlackBerry of all the people who screwed over the Clintons in the campaign and who are now, as they say, dead to us. Some of them dead are here at the Kennedy Center. There is a running joke inside Clinton World about all the bad things happening to the Clinton crossers. Ted Kennedy, who pivotally endorsed Obama in January, is now dying from a brain tumor. (After Kennedys endorsement, which came months before the tumor was discovered, his colleague Lindsey Graham asked Kennedy if he could inherit his Senate hideaway office. Why? Because the Clintons are gonna kill you, Graham joked.) John Edwards, who also endorsed Obama, was busted for cheating on his dying wife; his disgrace is now in full spiral. The state of Iowa, whose Democratic voters slapped a humiliating third-place finish on Hillary in Januarys caucuses, was devastated by biblical floods in the spring.

Now, true to her stoic and gritty precedent, Hillary is keeping her smile affixed like hardened gum and sending out powerful Stay away from this vehicle vibes. Ignoring the vibes, an eager producer for MSNBCs Countdown beelines toward her, introduces herself to the Almighty, and prepares to launch a Hail Mary ask about whether the senator might possibly want to come on Countdown that night.

It is a pleasure to meet you, Clinton responds to the eager producer, while the smile stays tight and she keeps right on walking. Hillary has a memorial service to attend: the memorial service of a man she and her husband plainly despised and who they believed (rightly) despised them back.

But the Clintons are pros at death and sickness. They show up. They play their assigned roles. They send nice notes and lend comfort to the bereaved in that warm and open-faced Clinton way. They are here with empathetic eyes to pay respects, like heads of Mafia families do when a rival godfather falls. Washington memorial services have that quality when the various personality cults convene: Bill and Hillary walking a few feet away from Newt and Callista Gingrich and right past David Shuster, the MSNBC host who has just been suspended by the network for saying the Clinton campaign pimped out Chelsea by having her call superdelegates. (Shuster has been barely heard from since. To reiterate: Dont mess with the Clintons!) Bill and Hill, who appear not to have reserved seats, find two several rows back next to Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, and Condoleezza Rice, the current one.