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There’s a new “insiders” book in DC. Since it might figure in this morning’s talk show fest we have a review from the Washington Post.
Mark Leibovich toyed with several titles for his new book on self-interest, self-importance and self-perpetuation in the nation’s capital. “Suck-Up City” was one. “The Club” was another. Finally, he settled on “This Town,” a nod, he explains, to the “faux disgust” with which people here refer to their natural habitat.
It’s not bad, but the longer I roamed around “This Town,” the more I thought Leibovich should have borrowed Newsweek’s memorable post-Sept. 11, 2001, cover line: “Why They Hate Us.” His tour through Washington only feeds the worst suspicions anyone can have about the place — a land driven by insecurity, hypocrisy and cable hits, where friendships are transactional, blind-copying is rampant and acts of public service appear largely accidental.
Only two things keep you turning pages between gulps of Pepto: First, in Leibovich’s hands, this state of affairs is not just depressing, it’s also kind of funny. Second, you want to know whether the author thinks anyone in Washington — anyone at all? — is worthy of redemption.
Leibovich, chief national correspondent for the New York Times Magazine and a former reporter at The Washington Post (where we overlapped briefly but never met), is a master of the political profile, with his subjects revealing themselves in the most unflattering light. That talent becomes something of a crutch in “This Town,” which offers more a collection of profiles and scenes than a rich narrative. Still, his characters reveal essential archetypes of Washington power.
First, there is longtime NBC news reporter Andrea Mitchell — a conflict of interest in human form. …
… Here’s how some Leading Thinkers came out: In “This Town,” we’re told that Chris Matthews and Matt Lauer have joked that David Gregory would rub out a few colleagues to advance his career. That Bill and Hillary Clinton are convinced that Tim Russert disliked them, and that they’re not wrong.That Harry Reid has “observed privately to colleagues” that John Kerry has no friends.That West Wing types suspected Valerie Jarrett had “earpiece envy” after David Axelrod got Secret Service protection, and so arranged the same for herself. And that when a national security official suggested that Obama shouldn’t skip the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner on the weekend of the Osama bin Laden raid because the media might get suspicious, Hillary Clinton looked up and issued her verdict: “[Expletive] the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.” …
… But it’s not trying to be a book for the ages — it’s a book for the moment, and it captures it well.
That moment begins with stories of frantic networking at Russert’s memorial service at the KennedyCenter in June 2008, and ends with Leibovich’s musings on Inauguration Day 2013. Other than the calendar, there is no clear arc to the tale, and by the 2012 campaign, “This Town” has lost some steam. If there is an underlying theme, one that Leibovich returns to between parties, it is Team Obama’s transformation from an above-it-all, apolitical wonkfest, at least in self-perception, into just another administration, where conflicts of interest are rife, lobbyists proliferate and outgoing staffers quickly sell out (although no one in Washington sells out anymore; they monetize their government service).
Leibovich recalls Obama’s attacks on lobbyists during the 2008 campaign, including the promise to keep them out of the White House. “It’s not who we are,” top aides intoned.
But it is who they became. In a near-parody of Washington’s revolving door, administration honchos joined up with some of the biggest corporate villains of recent years. Leibovich highlights the “unholy triplet”: Pentagon spokesman (and George W. Bush holdover) Geoff Morrell became BP’s head of U.S. communications , Treasury counselor Jake Siewert started spinning for Goldman Sachs, and OMB director Peter Orszag cashed in at Citigroup. (Morrell’s deal was negotiated by Barnett. Obviously.) And whenever lobbyists joined the administration, the White House would just “acknowledge the exception, wait out the indignant blog posts and press releases, and move on,” Leibovich writes. “That lobbying ban was so four years ago anyway.”
John Fund deals some Valerie Jarrett dish from the book. This is important, because Valerie is running the country for President Bystander.
Valerie Jarrett, the White House senior adviser who mentored both the president and first lady at the start of their careers in Chicago, usually stays out of the news. In Washington, that is taken as a sign she is far more influential than she or the White House lets on.
So when Jarrett does briefly become the news it’s significant, because it may provide a window into how the Obama White House really works.
This week there were several sightings of Jarrett in the media. She popped up as the chief defender of the White House’s sudden decision to delay enforcement of a key Obamacare mandate requiring employers to offer health insurance or face stiff fines. “As we implement this law, we have and will continue to make changes as needed,” Jarrett wrote in a post on the White House blog. In other words, continue to keep in touch with my office as we figure out how to manage this train wreck.
Another pair of Jarrett sightings came from Mark Leibovich’s new book This Town, a takedown of insular, status-conscious Washington. The New York Times writer reports that Jarrett was resented by several top Obama aides for getting her own full-time Secret Service detail of six agents. She apparently felt threatened by the fact that fellow Obama adviser David Axelrod had been given protection after a gunman who opened fire at people at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was found to be carrying personal data on Axelrod. “While a high-profile White House official — especially an African-American woman, such as Jarrett — could legitimately be considered a more likely target than most, several West Wing officials I spoke to were dubious there had been any special threats against her,” Leibovich writes. “They suspected, rather, that Jarrett asked the president to authorize a detail out of ‘earpiece envy.’ ‘The person Valerie felt threatened by was Axe,’ quipped one top aide.”
Jarrett goes to extraordinary lengths to manage her image in the few articles that do mention her. Liebovich writes that “a top Obama aide forwarded me a set of confidential talking points that were circulated through the West Wing when Becker was reporting her story. The memo, written by deputy press secretary Jamie Smith, was titled ‘The Magic of Valerie.’ It included an unrelenting 33 talking points” that praised her intelligence, empathy, life experience, and work ethic. “My personal favorite ‘Magic of Valerie’ bullet point is the one where we learn that ‘Valerie is someone who other people inside the building know they can trust (need examples.)’”
Truth be told, Valerie Jarrett is indeed trusted by President Obama and Michelle Obama, who have complete confidence in her loyalty and ability to get things done. As for the rest of the White House, the seething tension about her behind-the-scenes power and self-aggrandizement continues to build. Witness the number of leaks that are starting to flow out of the White House challenging the myth of her “magic.”
And more from WaPo’s Reliable Source.
… But the most scathing assessments from Leibovich (a New York Times reporter and former Washington Post colleague of ours) are of people who are famous only within the intimate confines of D.C.’s media-political complex — folks whose names probably won’t ring a bell for even the most devoted “Morning Joe” groupies outside the Beltway. (**See also: “This Town,” review of Mark Leibovich book)
Ken Duberstein: Ronald Reagan’s last White House chief of staff and “a vintage Washington character in his own right. . . riding the D.C. carousel for years, his Rolodex flipping with billable connections,” though it’s often said of him “it isn’t clear what he does,” Leibovich asserts — not an unusual condition among Washington “formers.” Leibovich writes that Duberstein “talks constantly on the phone to his close friend Colin Powell, and even more constantly to everyone else about what ‘Colin was just telling me,’ and loves to read his name in print. Finally: “The standard line on Duberstein is that he spent six and a half months as Reagan’s chief of staff and twenty-four years (and counting) dining out on it.” …
… But the cruelest part of all? The 386 pages of “This Town” features no index. For Beltway players horrified by the idea they might be mocked — or even worse, left out — the only way to find out is to read it.
There actually is some serious news, what with Egypt, obamacare delay, and the like. Rich Lowry writes in Politico about the administration’s decision to delay the employer mandate of the “affordable” care act until after next year’s election. So, now the white house decides what parts of the law should be followed as President Bystander becomes President Pick-and-Choose.
… Explaining the decision, Obama apparatchik Valerie Jarret issued a stalwart communiqué from Central Command that should take an honored place in the annals of blatant, unembarrassed hackery.
Her message: All is well. Nothing to see here. Yes, maybe we’ve delayed implementation of the (hilariously euphemistic) “employer responsibility payments” (aka fines), but don’t worry: it’s “full steam ahead” with the health-care exchanges this October. Never mind that determining eligibility for the exchanges depends on employers reporting their insurance offerings — reporting that now won’t happen.
Jarrett portrayed the decision as about “cutting red tape.” But if you pass a horrendously complicated law placing new burdens on employers, you aren’t cutting red tape, you are adding to it. And a delay doesn’t cut red tape — it only delays it.
“As we implement this law,” Jarrett explained, “we have and will continue to make changes as needed.” But the law is supposed to be the law, not optional suggestions from Congress. In Jarrett’s view, Obamacare is little more than warrant for the Obama administration to decide how it wants to run the American health care system, one executive decision at a time.
It has become a trope among defenders of the law that its flaws are the fault of Republicans because they don’t want to fix them. They must have seen their own peculiar version of “School House Rock”: The first step in making a law is jamming a 2,000-page bill down the opposition’s throat. The second is whining that the opposition won’t fix problems inherent in the bill jammed down their throats. …
More on this mess from Yuval Levin.
Until yesterday, the administration had basically put on a brave face about the difficulties arising in its implementation of Obamacare. With a few minor exceptions (now especially notable among them the one-year delay of key requirements for the new small-business exchanges), they have pretended everything was fine, and have enabled a chorus of defenders on the left to do the same. Last night’s announcement of a one-year delay in the implementation of the employer mandate is the first serious indication that the administration sees that the wheels are coming off the bus, and is very worried about it.
Attempts to downplay the significance of this decision fail, I think, to reckon with how very difficult and embarrassing it must have been for the administration. You don’t announce something like this just before the start of a long holiday weekend while Congress is out of town if you’ve got a good case to make for yourself. The administration presumably intended to announce the decision after business hours tonight (Wednesday), not last night, but the news leaked to two Bloomberg reporters and they had to scramble some. The formal announcement came through a “Treasury Note,” essentially a blog post by the Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at Treasury, which had the hilariously Orwellian title of “Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner.” The post mostly discussed the administration’s decision to delay employer reporting requirements for a year (and more on that below), and toward the end noted in passing that this also meant the employer mandate would be delayed. That’s a very odd way to break news like this. It seems clearly to be a move the administration did not want to make.
This would have been a very tough decision to come to for several reasons. Not least of them is that, as I say, it is the first major acknowledgement of a serious problem implementing this law, and it is a problem with an element of the law that is by no means the most difficult to implement. If they’re actually telling the truth that they can’t handle getting employer reporting requirements into place, how are they doing getting the exchange system into place? But perhaps more troubling for the law’s defenders, this decision is even more likely an acknowledgement of some of the economic irrationality of the law. I doubt that just implementing reporting requirements is the issue here. More likely, the administration agrees with some of its critics who have argued that this element of the law would hurt the economy, and especially employment. And they probably also saw that the pressure from employers to avoid both the reporting requirements and the mandate was going to create huge problems for their PR effort in the fall. That would make this decision a little easier to understand, but there must be more to it to explain the enormous costs and risks they’re taking by doing this.
For one thing, they run the risk of badly dispiriting their supporters going into the fall. The administration’s brazen disregard for and denial of plainly evident problems with Obamacare has been absolutely central to sustaining the morale and dedication of the law’s defenders. If that mask is dropping, they could be in for serious trouble. …
Craig Pirrong sums this up well at Streetwise Professor
… there is the Constitutional issue. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution directs the President to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” For worse or worst, Obamacare is law-at Obama’s insistence. It is his Constitutional duty to execute the law. He should not be able to walk away from this duty, just because it is politically expedient to do so. That would be true if he hadn’t pushed the measure into law, but it is all the more necessary because he did, to hold him accountable for the consequences of his political choices.
Obama is the Chief Executive. He needs to perform his Constitutional duty. His black letter Constitutional duty. His duty to execute the laws faithfully. To fail to do so is to undermine the Constitutional order, in particular by respecting the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. The blending of such responsibilities is a recipe for tyranny.
More tomorrow on the continuing excitement of a country run by law school faculty. What could go wrong? They’ve done such a great job with their own institutions.