Free This Town by Mark Leibovich Page A

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