Who's who

Washington Monthly, June, 2004

We hear that the big debate in the campaign of John F. Kerry is whether the candidate should visit Iraq. Stay tuned.

All campaign staffs try to control the flow of information to and from their candidate. Smart candidates seek to circumvent this barrier by carrying their own cell phones and sharing the number with a handful of longtime friends and advisors. John Kerry is one of them. Among those who have the number and with whom Kerry talks frequently are former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). Kerry also takes calls from--and listens closely to--a group of old friends, as The New York Times reported late last month. There's Tom Kiley, a veteran Boston pollster; John Martilla, a longtime Boston strategist; Ron Rosenblith, a political director of Kerry campaigns from the 1980s; David Thorne, a college classmate; and Michael Whouley, the political operative widely credited with getting the Senator's Iowa ground operation in shape last fall and helping pull out the win in that crucial first primary.

Another frequent caller is Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass). He and Kerry have not been particularly close through the years, but Markey won Kerry's affection with his tireless advocacy of the Senator's primary campaign, even in its darkest hours.

Markey was one of several from the Kerry camp who tried to dissuade Ralph Nader from running. Over the course of several conversations, mostly by phone, Markey floated a number of arguments including, we're told, the possibility that Nader might become some kind of "consumer advocate czar" in the Kerry administration. The congressman's chief of staff, David Moulton, who once worked for Nader, will say only that Markey urged Nader to "use his leverage" to get Kerry to make consumer issues a more prominent part of his campaign agenda. Asked by our colleague Paul Glastris, whose wife (and Monthly books editor) Kukula Glastris also once worked for consumer advocate, whether the consumer czar job had been floated, Nader responded: "Post-modern Greek mythology."

Speaking of phones and doorkeepers, it s widely understood that to have real influence in Washington, one must be on good terms, not so much with Cabinet secretaries, as with White House secretaries--that is, the assistants who sit in the outer offices of the president's senior advisors. As with much else in this town, uber-lobbyist/anti-tax activist Grover Norquist seems to understand this rule as well as anybody. Norquist had a deal with Susan Ralston, who until recently was the assistant to Karl Rove. An unnamed Republican lobbyist recently told Salon.com: "Susan took a message for Rove, and then called Grover to ask if she should put the caller through to Rove. If Grover didn't approve, your call didn't go through."

How did Norquist attain such influence over Ralston? Flowers every Friday? Redskins tickets? The answer, actually, is what the White House ethics lawyers call a "preexisting relationship." Ralston had formerly worked for lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close friend of Norquist's and a top fundraiser for House majority whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

Ralston has since left the pressure cooker White House job for possibly the most isolated island in Washington. She is now executive assistant to Eddy R. Badrina, the senior advisor of the President's Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

When Secretary of State Colin Powell and Undersecretary. Richard Armitage leave the administration before the start of a possible second Bush term--as their aides are saying they will--who might replace them? One possibility for the Armitage slot, we hear, is Robert Blackwill, the former ambassador to India and current National Security Council staffer who President George W. Bush put in charge of the "Iraqi Stabilization Group" That unit was set up in October 2003 to take authority for the increasingly botched U.S. occupation of Iraq out of the hands of Defense, State, and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and place it inside the White House. The job was so miserable that, according to The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, the three other members of Blackwill's team, Anna M. Perez, Gary R. Edson, and Frances F. Townsend, drifted away.

But Blackwill confirmed his reputation as a wily and determined operator late last month, when he helped outmaneuver Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy charged with picking a new prime minister for Iraq. Rather than wait for Brahimi's choice, Blackwill persuaded members of the Iraqi Governing Council to coalesce around Ayad Alawi, a Shiite physician with ties to the CIA and little domestic constituency in Iraq--which means, presumably, that he'll have to rely on the United States for support.

The Bush administration has seldom been shy about booting out former Clinton appointees from federal jobs. So, why has it decided to keep on Armando Falcon Jr., the Texas Democrat who heads the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which oversees Fannie Mac and Freddie Mac? The Bush administration had Falcon's successor picked out as early as February 2003, when it nominated former J.P. Morgan Chase lobbyist Mark C. Brickell. But Brickell withdrew his name from consideration in January, after the Senate Banking Committee failed to act on his nomination for nearly a year, and nobody else has been tapped to replace him. Part of the reason for Falcon's survival may be that he has become, unexpectedly, politically beneficial. With Fannie and Freddie facing scathing criticism over inaccuracies in their financial statements, having a Democratic Clinton appointee as their chief regulator offers the administration a modicum of political cover.