Free This Town by Mark Leibovich

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 lobbyists” 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