Something rotten

This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital. By Mark Leibovich. Blue Rider Press; 400 pages; $27.95 and £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“THIS TOWN” may be the most pitiless examination of America’s permanent political class—aka “the gang of 500” or “the Beltway establishment”—that has ever been conducted. With a wry touch, Mark Leibovich, a journalist with the New York Times Magazine, chronicles the tawdry work of Washington’s insiders and aspiring insiders. He refrains from presenting big thoughts about what is wrong with American politics and how it might be fixed. But it is impossible to read this book without concluding that something must be done.

Washington has always had a permanent establishment of politicians, lobbyists and journalists. But this class has exploded in size in recent decades, and has become more introspective and self-serving. The news media have produced a hydra of talking heads who are forever yelling at each other (debate) or pontificating about who is up and who is down (analysis). The lobbying industry has spent billions greasing the revolving door: in 2009 alone, special interests spent $3.47 billion lobbying the federal government. In 1974 3% of retiring policymakers became lobbyists. Now 50% of senators and 42% of congressmen do. And the internet has enabled a horde of young journalists to eke out a living peddling tittle-tattle to Politico, which provides constant caffeinated coverage of the city, or to dozens of other websites that trade in political gossip.

The huge expansion of “this town” has coincided with the merging of politics and celebrity culture. People in Washington now build their brands with a relentlessness that rivals Coca-Cola. And the city’s media dote on political operatives as if they are film stars. This fashion reached its apogee when Peter Orszag, Barack Obama’s first director of the Office of Management and Budget, became a Beltway sex symbol. A blog site called Orszgasm.com was soon devoted to chronicling the affairs of this unlikely Casanova with a calculator, who sported not one but two BlackBerry holsters.

While often amusing, this book is a story of disappointment. It opens with a “change election” that was supposed to sweep aside the old order and create a politics fit for the 21st century. Mr Obama even imposed a ban on lobbyists. But the Washington machine soon took over. When Mr Obama was an Illinois senator with big ideas and a silver tongue, his staff decried the media as “jackals”. But once in the capital, these same figures cashed in on their public service by getting lucrative jobs as lobbyists, bankers or talking heads. David Plouffe, an adviser to the president, joined the jackals at Bloomberg television. Mr Orszag went to Citigroup. Meanwhile, the city’s politicos grew richer while the rest of the country was mired in recession. Washington now has a higher income per person than Silicon Valley.

Mr Leibovich provides a succession of deft sketches. Bob Rubin, Bill Clinton’s first treasury secretary and a man who has made hundreds of millions on Wall Street, is “the undisputed king of the Ritz-Carlton Democrats”. Harry Reid, a senator for Nevada, could “pass for an oddball taxidermist who keeps a closet full of stuffed pigeons”. The slimmed Mr Clinton looks like “a skinny older guy wearing an oversize rubber Bill Clinton head”.

Then there are the parasites who feed off the parasites. The most prominent at the moment seems to be a woman called Tammy Haddad who spends her life throwing parties for the powerful and then basking in their reflected glory (“My job is to be around the most successful people, the most up-and-coming people, and the people who have impact”). She films interviews with her guests on her “Tam Cam”. Not content with throwing a book party for Arianna Huffington’s “Third World America” she provided embroidered “Third World America” pillows as well.

Mr Leibovich observes Washington’s failings brilliantly. He eschews the bias that mars so many political tirades, concluding that the city’s failings are thoroughly bipartisan. He seems to have been everywhere and interviewed everyone. But it is nevertheless impossible to finish this book without feeling a bit cheated. “This Town” is more a symptom of the problems that it describes than a cure. The news that Mr Leibovich was about to publish this book created a firestorm of debate in the city about how bad the place really is (which Mr Leibovich lovingly chronicles in his epilogue). The appearance of the book has sparked a similar conflagration. Washington’s narcissism has reached the point at which it is narcissistic even about its own ghastliness.