Citizens of the Green RoomBy Mark LeibovichBlue Rider Press, 2014This TownBy Mark LeibovichBlue Rider Press, 2013Last year two Princeton academics released an exhaustive study of 1,779 national policy surveys taken between 1981 and 2002. The survey results were divided by income, compared with the preferences of wealthy interest groups, and then checked against the policy ultimately enacted by the US government. The actual methodology is more involved: it takes the authors several pages to explain it, and many more to explain the results. The point was to test, for the first time, several long-standing theories of American democracy against something resembling scientific data. They concluded that the preferences of the average citizen have “near zero” influence on the making of policy.

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

They avoided calling the American system an oligarchy, because, as one of them put it in an interview, “it brings to mind this image of a very small number of very wealthy people who are pulling strings behind the scenes.” In fact there are a large number of wealthy people pulling strings behind the scenes. Too many wealthy people for an image, though you'll find many of them in the official photos taken at the swankiest parties. A broad-based oligarchy—oligarchy lite, maybe.It's not just campaign donations, though there's that, and more every year. The wealthy, and wealthy interest groups especially, apply political pressure, fund junkets, write legislation, and perhaps most importantly, offer gainful employment. Forty-two percent of representatives and fifty percent of Senators become lobbyists after they leave government. And lobbyists and donors are just one part of a larger, hydra-headed beast: the irrepressible Washington power elite. So how does this system work, and how do they live? Well, they live in the crassest, tackiest ways imaginable.From one point of view, Washington works like any other industry: credentials and talent are good, but networking is better. The most valuable talent is self-promotion, and the city's elites promote themselves constantly, everywhere: back rooms, meetings, parties, ceremonies, even funerals. Mark Leibovich, a national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, opens This Town, his bleakly hilarious dissection of the beltway social organism, with the funeral of NBC's Tim Russert:

You can't work it too hard at a memorial service, obviously. It's the kind of thing people notice. But the big-ticket Washington departure rite can be such a great networking opportunity. You can almost feel the ardor behind the solemn faces: lucky stampedes of power mourners, about two thousand of them, wearing out the red-carpeted aisles of the Kennedy Center.

Fast forward a video of the minutes before the service began and it would look like a time-lapse of Jupiter’s atmosphere, with anxious networkers swirling furtively around the most important people, hoping to book them on their show, plant the seed for a job opportunity, or simply be seen standing next to them. The Russert family isn’t bothered by the schmoozing. They’re annoyed at “the degree to which NBC has hijacked the Kennedy Center time as a network branding opp,” and they’re annoyed that former NBC president Andrew Lack is there. Russert hated Lack, just like he hated the Clintons. Yet the Clintons are there, and that's no bother because they were too important to leave out. The status game is always being played; there are rules and the family understands them, and the dearly departed understood them as well as anybody. No one is anyone in Washington without a network, without significant people to call “friends,” and “no one,” Leibovich explains,

was better attuned than Russert to the cultural erogenous zones of powerful men. He spoke endlessly and nostalgically about dads and sons and sports and Springsteen… He was expert at the male bonding rituals that lubricate so many chummy capital relations. … Like Dubya, Tim addressed people with thrown-off locker room nicknames (“Tommy B” Brokaw, “Matty” Lauer). He brought a contagious enthusiasm for the politics-as-football sensibility that defined the modern boy’s game. The ethos conveyed to and evolved with the next generation of boys. It has been embodied by Politico, the testosteroned website that aims to gorge political junkies like ESPN does sports fans.

Politico, the go-to synecdoche for online political journalism today, does long-form reporting, some of it very good, and they run opinion columns, mostly by politicians and ideological hacks like the National Review’s Rich Lowry. But their chief commodity is political score-keeping and gossip; they aim to “drive the conversation” by targeting Washington power-players and the wannabes buzzing about them. Politico’s most recognized and well-connected reporter, and therefore their most valuable, is Mike Allen, who publishes Playbook, a “tip sheet” of insider news, gossip, sightings, musings, and birthday lists which is e-mailed and posted on the web early each morning, 365 days a year.Leibovich profiled Allen, or “Mikey” as his friends and “friends” call him, for the Times Magazine in 2010 and won a National Magazine Award for it. It is reprinted in his newest book, Citizens of the Green Room, a collection of articles no doubt meant to capitalize on the success of This Town, which recycles and rearranges some of the material it collects. What’s most striking is how seamlessly Allen has acculturated himself to the social world of American politics, right down to its communicative tics:

Allen’s public bearing combines the rumpledness of an old-school print reporter with the sheen of a new-school “cross-platform brand” who has become accustomed to performing on camera. Every time Allen starts to speak—in person or on air—his eyes bulge for a split second, as if he has just seen a light go on. His mannerisms resemble an almost childlike mimicry of a politician—the incessant thanking, deference, greetings, teeth-clenched smiles, and ability to project belief in the purity of his own voice and motivations. He speaks in quick and certain cadences, on message, in sound bites, karate-chopping the table for emphasis. (His work is “joyful, exciting,” he says. It is a “privilege” to work at Politico with young reporters. “I love this company. I love what I’m doing.” And all that.) Over several discussions, Allen repeated full paragraphs almost to the word.

The career of Mike Allen shows that in political reporting, too many watchers have joined the party, and share, on a very basic level, its culture and self-regard. “If Mikey has a bias,” Leibovich writes in This Town,

it is in favor of Washington—the village, the mind-set, and the big, heady dream of it all. Since Washingtonians tend to engage oppressively in inside baseball, his focus tends toward the game itself—a morning romp through the city’s thriving vanity sectors: elites listening to elites, trading sound bites, and going into business together. In the post-Russert era, Mikey was, in his own eccentric and online way, a new mayoral figure. The great presider.

Politico harnesses Allen’s work and reputation to lure gossip, and occasionally news, but mostly it's a megaphone for the people it covers. “If you want to move data or shape opinion,” Politico’s co-founder and executive editor Jim VandeHei told Leibovich, “you market it through Mikey and Playbook, because those tens of thousands that matter most all read it and most feed it.”This kind of reporting – transactional, evanescent, status-obsessed – is perfectly attuned to Washington's chattering egomaniacs, and it's a tidy microcosm for a city where conflicts of interest are a feature, not a bug, of personal and professional relations. Playbook's celebratory style, for instance, blends reporting and free promotion. Shortly after This Town went to press, Erik Wemple of the Washington Post demonstrated at exhaustive length that Allen gives free and positive press to his advertisers, like the US Chamber of Commerce and British Petroleum (Allen is close friends with BP's Chief Executive). Allen and Politico don't believe they are doing anything wrong, and they said as much. Like many of their peers, they've been assimilated by phenomenon they are supposed to observe.One anecdote that graces both books relates a 2010 party for the financial reporter Maria Bartiromo, the “Money Honey.” (Washington, especially the newsroom, is still a boys club coping hamfistedly with the existence of undomesticated women). The party was hosted by Ed Rogers, a lobbyist and scribbler of cut-rate opinions for the Washington Post. Scheduled for attendance was Haley Barbour, then governor of Mississippi, possible candidate for President, and former lobbying partner with Rogers. Barbour couldn't make it, so Terry McAuliffe, prolific Democratic fundraiser, friend of Barbour, friend of Rogers, and professional friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, took over his speaking duties. Also speaking was NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell, friend or “friend” of all of the above (she covered the Reagan White House, where Barbour worked), and wife to Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve.Politico's report on the bash, in true society column fashion, just mentioned its attendees, but for a reporter willing to lose some friends there was a fascinating story behind the names. Barbour, a Republican, and McAuliffe, a Democrat, traveled the country holding well-paid, mostly scripted debates, and have gone into business together in the restaurant industry. While he was governor Barbour secured millions in incentives for McAuliffe's electric car company, a shady venture plagued by financial irregularities. Mitchell ostensibly avoids economic policy in her reporting, but found it difficult to do so during the Great Recession (for which her husband took a lot of blame), and anyway keeps attending the same parties as the people she is covering. At the Bartiromo reception she led a toast to the trio of Rogers, McAuliffe and Barbour (the latter was “a hero to a lot of people,” she said), and “soon after,” Leibovich writes, capturing the atmosphere, “everyone raised a glass—to the Money Honey, to the Macker [McAuliffe], to Barbour, to the whole team.” Barbour never ran for president – too much lobbying and too many racial remarks, even for Washington – but Bartiromo wound up moderating a Republican debate the year after. In a neat symmetry with Mitchell, she avoids reporting on politics in favor of business, but her husband is an executive at WisdomTree Investments, and her previous beau was an executive at Citigroup. As if to prove that no one in Washington will pass up an opportunity to monetize their reputation, she attempted to trademark the “Money Honey” sobriquet for a line of children's products designed to teach kids about money. McAuliffe is now governor of Virginia and Barbour is still getting rich.The most lucrative jobs in Washington are reserved for ex-politicians. They can freelance, making tens of thousands per speaking engagement, reciting canned spiel for bespoke-suited conference-goers (top journalistic brands like Thomas Friedman, and famous officials like Greenspan, can do this too). The real lucre, though, is in corporate boards and lobbying. Ex-Congressmen and women are not allowed to lobby their former peers for two years after they leave office, but they get around this by becoming “senior advisers,” nominally distinct but functionally the same. The brazenness with which they flout the spirit of the law is testimony to the way America's politicians view their jobs: as vehicles for power, fame (perhaps the occasional good deed), and then as gateways to wealth. Networking is the key: politicians must develop wealthy and powerful allies to hold office, and maintain and enlarge that network to run for higher office, wield influence, and earn money afterwards. No one suffers lasting damage for their avarice because everyone wants to do the same thing; the real danger is in upsetting one's friends.Greed afflicts the reputed defenders of public interest as well. I can remember watching Byron Dorgan's righteous Senate speeches on C-SPAN when I was young: seeing him fillet a lobbyist or a politician for their corruption, I remember thinking – briefly, but for a moment definitely thinking – that there might be a few people with integrity in Washington after all. Dorgan, who served on the Senate Appropriations Committee and thus, as Leibovich points out, had “vast knowledge of how Congress allocates cash,” retired and became the senior adviser to the lobbying wing of a big DC law firm.Some ex-politicians don't even care who they represent: former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt ran as a stalwart pro-union man his entire political career, but when he left office he joined Spirit AeroSystems and oversaw a brutal anti-union campaign. In the House he supported a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide of 1915; as a lobbyist he opposed the same resolution for $70,000 a year, courtesy of the Turkish government. “Genocide,” Leibovich writes, “goes down a little easier at those rates.” Former Senator Chris Dodd gets even better rates from the Motion Picture Association of America, which pays him $1.2 million per annum to run their organization. He'd promised repeatedly never to become a lobbyist, but, he explained, that was “before this opportunity was on the radar screen.” Former Senator Bob Kerry sympathized: he almost took the same job. “I don't give a fuck about piracy,” he told Leibovich. “But for that money, I have to admit, I started getting a little interested in piracy.”The Obama team, as it charged toward office, claimed to be different, and they criticized their peers with such reflexive, unbidden disdain that they probably believed their own moralism. Obama himself plainly hates the grubbier aspects of politicking, and his campaign took off with the help of small donations, unlike his better-networked opponent, Hillary Clinton. “But insider Washington,'” Leibovich writes, “is much larger than it used to be, to the point where it becomes inescapable.” Insider Washington has rules, and the foremost is quid pro quo. “People who worked on the Obama transition staff,” Leibovich writes, “received a 'no ego, no glory' document reminding them that they were volunteers working for the good of the country and should not expect anything in return.” For unimportant people, like field grunts, this might be true; for rich supporters, well... Obama's new ambassador to Hungary is a soap opera producer; his new ambassador to Argentina has never been to Argentina. But they each raised half a million for his campaign, and that's relatively small change compared to the donors he's nominated in the past.It's not just the favors. Obama's political team decried the “snowflake” reporting of outlets like Politico, but they read it anyway and designed their communication strategy with its twitterings in mind. They derided super-lawyers and agents like Robert Barnett, a man who would work for anybody, but used him when they left office to secure seven-figure book deals. Most fatefully, when it was time to hire a government, they stuck to the comforting familiarity of the establishment. As Leibovich so aptly puts it, “Though Barack Obama won the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton won Obama’s first term.” They hired long-time Clinton associates (along with an actual Clinton) for all the most important cabinet posts, men and women who were friendly with Wall Street, connected to the economic and foreign policy establishment, and familiar with the city's political big-shots—members of The Club in good standing, in other words. But what's most depressing is that it's hard to imagine them doing anything else. Force too much reform on Wall Street, deviate too far from the consensus on foreign relations, and all those long-time policy hands and political advisers and rich fundraisers will start jeering from the sidelines, and those people know reporters, lobbyists, opinion writers, representatives and Senators, and they'll call down a storm fierce enough to hollow out any presidency. It's not conspiracy; that's too comforting a thought. It's culture, and that is why Washington is so irredeemably corrupt.This Town was largely celebrated by reviewers when it arrived. Most of the criticism was rather silly: the author's targets limply gestured at Leibovich's own membership in This Town, or reported anonymously-sourced speculation about his psychological motives (this was Politico's method). Some people basically called him mean. David Lautner had somewhat more cogent things to say. In a mostly positive review for the LA Times, he claims that

What Leibovich leaves unsaid, however, is how few of the people he writes about actually matter outside their own self-obsessed social circles. Washington has many tribal cultures. The tribe Leibovich writes about consists mostly of nonideological back-scratchers and deal makers. But Washington is an increasingly ideological capital that makes very few deals anymore.

Yet, as Leibovich himself points out, gridlock is “good for business,” and the people Lautner believes wield real power, operating silently behind the curtain – the policy experts and major cabinet officials – owe their stations to Washington's network all the same.The best proof is negative. Lawbreakers, racists and adulterers can (sometimes) find themselves exiled from The Club, but when it comes to policy, it barely matters what someone has said or done, as long as they have friends who think alike. There might be a few less party invitations or a few tough interview questions (not too tough, though: you can't be rude to a fellow club member, or appear to “have an agenda”). If the DC network didn't matter, the war-drunk opinion pages of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal wouldn't exist in their present form, which are today the same as they were before the wars they advocated in the Muslim world discredited them. Just this past month, John Bolton, one of the architects of America's invasion of Iraq and its ill-advised “war on terror,” was published in The New York Times (eager, as always, for a fig leaf of bipartisanship to cover its liberal reputation) calling for a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure, which even the former head of Mossad doesn't believe can succeed, and urging the US government to support regime change in Iran, support the Iranian people don't want. It's eerily similar to the rationale for invading Iraq, but Bolton has friends and supporters in This Town, and is thus someone to be taken seriously, so he gets his ink and paper. As does Alan Greenspan (an economic disaster), Henry Kissinger (a war criminal), Robert Rubin (an economic disaster), Dick Cheney (a war criminal), and so on. These men and their acolytes are either in government, or waiting to join government with the next election. They are still members in good standing.Their circles are interconnected nodes in the same social and institutional network inhabited by the clubbier media hacks and politicians. Pace the critics, its tendrils reach everyone: the policy experts, the lobbyists, the commentators, the reporters, the interest groups, the corporate executives, the bureaucrats, the government officials, the Congress, the current President, and every would-be President, too. And despite the Internet age, the ceaseless turnover of generations, and the distrust of the electorate, these people who run America are still coming together to celebrate and promote themselves, to make “friends” and get rich, at Washington’s parties and funerals.____Greg Waldmann is the Editor-in-chief of Open Letters Monthly, and a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.