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player ready...The stunning tale of White House deceit and cronyism can now be told.
Your tax dollars go for feeding Scamper, the First Dog. A U.S. Park Service ranger occasionally walks him. But, curiously, the usual ranger was recently replaced by another, who happens to be a cousin of the president.
A perception problem quietly develops. First it had been claimed that the First Family walked the dog. Now, it’s clear a ranger does.
Then it turns out the dog food paid for by citizens comes from a huge agribusiness firm with big holdings in the president’s home state.
The press is outraged. The White House fumbles and the media discerns a “bunker mentality” at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. To make matters worse, though it’s hush-hush, a veterinarian dispatched to check out the dog stumbles on the first lady and another woman making love.
Scampergate is upon us.
Well, at least in the mind of Chicago native Sidney Blumenthal, a cerebral and droll Washington-based special political correspondent for The New Yorker magazine and author of a fine book on the 1988 presidential campaign, “Pledging Allegiance” (HarperCollins).
He’s been back with his folks in Rogers Park, getting ready for Monday’s one-night-only performance of “This Town” at the Doubletree Guest Suites, 198 E. Delaware Pl.
It’s a play, his first, about the ego-filled, ethical cesspool of an upper rank of Washington journalism and politics and will be performed and taped for airing April 14 by WFMT-FM 98.7 as part of its Chicago Theatres on-the-air series.
The cast includes veteran character actor John Randolph and includes a cameo appearance by WGN’s Roy Leonard as Clark Badger, a slick and very powerful agent-attorney for media stars.
“There’s really no political theater in Washington to speak of,” explained Blumenthal, 47, and a graduate of Sullivan High School. “There’s some feeble cabaret. People singing rhyming songs. You get (comic) Mark Russell and the Capitol Steps (a troupe), sort of suburban dinner stuff.”
He started writing what turns out to be a fun look at capital mores in late 1994. It was a way to raise questions about the Washington scene and pose them more appealingly than if he produced “some flat, hectoring article.”
Blumenthal, who’s also been a Washington Post political writer, captures the languor of the White House briefing room. “I’ve spent one-fourth of my adult life sitting here waiting in the front row of this briefing home,” moans one reporter early on as the assembled, especially the TV guys, plot how they can make lemonade out of lemons and get something on their network newscasts.
More telling, he’s on target with certain dynamics pervading the capital, which can spur so many–the pursuit of fame and riches. The obsession with inflating minutiae. Reluctance to focus on all-too-many substantive (i.e. boring) tales. Being seduced by the powerful (he’s captured that well). Craving to be a pundit.
Power, money and ambition are lures. Half the time, Blumenthal’s big-time reporters seem to be playing a can-you-top-this game when it comes to their outrageous speaking fees garnered from special interests. (Full disclosure: At least one Blumenthal “fictional” tale of such is clearly drawn from an item in this column).
Blumenthal, who hopes the play will one day be performed in Washington, swears that the three principal network reporters are composites. It’s not hard to figure that certain other figures are pretty darn close to real-life characters.
There’s Bill Whitney, who’s from what Blumenthal would term the “David Brinkley-Britt Hume-I’m Important-I’m-An-Institution” school. He is awfully complacent and, alas, a sex scandal ultimately inspires his precipitous fall.
Loretta Hall, a Whitney competitor, is brittle and ambitious and “trades on an image of cynicism and toughness to advance herself,” as Blumenthal put it during a Friday chat.
She is nasty and backbiting and seeks to advance herself by somehow melding her career with that of her husband, an editor at The New York Times. A sort of First Media Couple, or so she hopes.
Then there’s Burton Bird, enduring what the playwright terms “the id of a midlife crisis for a network correspondent. Every anxiety, every fear is on the surface. He’s a careerist of limited horizons whose talents have brought him this far but who understands all the professional pressures impinging on him and is always terrified about what they’re doing” at headquarters, back in New York.
There are two other nicely crafted characters. Crusty newspaperman Frank Langley, who craves being an insider and having big, fat steaks at Morton’s with Larry King, and devilish Mason Copperhead, staff writer for an alternative magazine in New York who shows up right from the O.J. trial and pulls the wool over everybody’s eyes.
Pretending to be chummy, he plays everybody for a fool since he really sees Washington as a collection of hicks. Ultimately, he scorches them in a piece, but in the process betrays himself as scum out only for himself.
And the action all revolves around Scampergate, fueled by Bird’s inflated claims of scandal and his melodramatically intoning about how “the perception of an ethical meltdown hangs over a troubled White House.”
At the same time, he desperately wants more time on his network’s Sunday morning show, “Press Beat,” moderated by big shot Phil Riley. Riley is a character who must be inspired in part by NBC’s Tim Russert, a former congressional aide, host of “Meet the Press” and the network’s Washington bureau chief, as well as by Bob Beckel, a longtime political consultant who surfaces on CNN’s yellfest, “Crossfire.”
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Bird gets miffed with how “Riley moderates `Press Beat’ like some know-it-all-Charlie-king-of-the-hill and he wears that bureau chief hat like a crown.”
“But has Riley ever done a story? I mean, ever, in his life? I love it how he talks about “we in the media.” But was he ever in the media before he became the Holy Roman Emperor? No, Phil Riley was a political hack, a campaign consultant, with an unimpressive win-loss ratio. How he parlayed that into lord-god-king-big-shot I do not know.”
Riley’s agent, as is true with two of the three network White House correspondents, is the potent Badger. He is surely based on Robert Barnett, an attorney-agent who is married to Rita Braver, CBS’ White House correspondent, and represents tons of media folks.
Ultimately, Bird’s desperate attempt to get a “regular substitute” title with “Press Beat” fails as Badger shafts him. The lawyer sells him out by negotiating a deal whereby Riley becomes the network’s boss and is replaced as moderator by none other than Bobby Rochester, the White House communications director.
One can imagine that happening.
Ultimately, it seems that Blumenthal’s effort is not just a look at how things work in “This Town,” but also an indirect defense of none other than Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Blumenthal is a Clinton partisan (and has at times been chided for same) and feels that the Whitewater and travel office disputes are “hollow scandals. Has Sen. (Al) D’Amato found anything? Travelgate is an absurdity. Whitewater is a political weapon.”
But, of course, this town loves it all.
Cokie watch
Thanks to a loyal reader in the administration of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, this goodie is passed on.
CBS News’ Lesley Stahl, who tends to take about $20,000 per public appearance and even took $20,000 from a big insurer during the health-care debate in Congress, will be the luncheon speaker March 11 when the Advertising Research Foundation holds its annual conference in New York.