Adding another
wild-card to the 2012 campaign’s final days, a former
aide to Vice President Joe Biden has written a tell-all Washington
memoir in which he lacerates the former Delaware
senator as an “egomaniacal autocrat” who was
“determined to manage his staff through fear.”
The book is
hardly an objective study of the vice president,
however. Author Jeff Connaughton, a Biden Senate
staffer turned lobbyist, is by his own admission
deeply disillusioned with the capital and
embittered about his experience with the man who
inspired him to enter politics.
Connaughton
wrote “The Payoff,” which came out last month,
in the fashion of guilt-racked whistle-blower:
he was a party to a corrupt system and now wants
to blow the lid off the game.
“I came to
D.C. a Democrat and left a plutocrat,” he
confesses.
As chief of
staff to former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.),
Biden’s successor, Connaughton was radicalized
by his unsuccessful experience trying to get an
amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation
bill that would have broken up the country’s
largest banks. So he left Washington politics
and wrote what he believes is the unvarnished
truth about the country’s political system. The
big reveal: Big banks control both parties.
“It’s time
people understand why – and how – Wall Street
always wins,” Connaughton writes at the outset
of his book.
He is harshly
critical of his own party and the Obama
administration, arguing that the president is no
different than most other Washington Democrats
in his willingness to kowtow to Wall Street.
President Obama and Biden, he writes, are “both
financially illiterate.”
“The Payoff”
is every bit the cri de coeur of a
man who, as he writes, is “willing to burn every
bridge” in order to indict the transactional
Washington lobbying and political culture.
(After Kaufman’s term ended, Connaughton fled
D.C. and moved to Savannah, Ga.)
But the book
is also a reprise of the familiar cautionary
tale about an idealistic young politico who came
to Washington to make a difference but went
native – and was let down by the powerful man he
looked up to.
Time and
again, over the course of decades, Connaughton
tells of being disappointed in Biden or not
receiving the treatment he felt he was due. He
doesn’t hide his sour grapes - he’s up front
about his unhappiness and that he never gained
the full trust of the former Delaware senator.
“Only a
handful of people ever made it into his inner
circle,” he writes, adding: “I simply wasn’t one
of the chosen.”
What’s
remarkable about the book is the lengths that
Connaughton goes to portray his former boss and
political idol in a bad light, piling up
embarrassing anecdotes and examples of when
Biden couldn’t be bothered to help one of his
own aides.
In the
prologue, Connaughton recounts the 2008 campaign
gaffe when Biden predicted that Obama would be
tested soon into his term.
In a meeting
with Connaughton and some of his other advisers
a few days after the election, Biden revealed
that he had been upbraided by an angry Obama.
“Biden told us
that Obama had called him and told him sharply
that he didn’t need public tutoring: ‘I don’t
need you acting like you’re my Henry Higgins,’”
Connaughton writes. “Biden said his private
reaction was, ‘Whoa. Where did this come from?
This is clearly a guy who could restrict my role
to attending state funerals or just put me in a
closet for four years.”
Biden added:
“I’m going to have to earn his trust, but I’m
not going to grovel to this guy. My manhood is
not negotiable.”
Biden’s office
declined to comment on the charges beyond
issuing a general statement.
”The Vice
President has not read Mr. Connaughton’s book
but remembers working with him over many years
in both the Senate and on various campaigns,”
said a Biden aide. “The Vice President values
his relationships with all members of his staff,
and appreciates their hard work and dedication
to serving the public. He wishes Mr. Connaughton
all the best going forward.”
But Biden
officials did direct POLITICO to some former
aides who offered a very different account of
their one-time boss.
“He took a
real interest in younger staffers,” said Herbie
Ziskend, who traveled with Biden after the
Delawarean became Obama’s running mate. “In the
midst of a busy day , 16 hours of campaigning,
he’d sit in plane, ask how my family was doing,
ask my thoughts on the campaign in a genuine way
that he didn’t need to do.”
Annie
Tomasini, who worked for Biden in Iowa in the
2008 caucuses and then followed him to the
vice-president’s office, described a similar
experience, calling him “a mentor.”
“Here I was a
20-something year-old kid working for him and he
was always asking about me and my family and
where I was from,” she recalled, noting that
Biden singled her and another junior aide for
praise at a staff party following Biden’s
withdrawal from the presidential race. “He was
incredibly kind.”
The Biden that
Connaughton describes, however, is sharply at
odds with the familiar image of a charming, if
gaffe-prone, pol who never met a stranger.
To people he
didn’t know or his Delaware constituents, Biden
was warm and engaging. But to those in his orbit
who were not family or close friends, he could
be cold.
“Like
Napoleon, Biden had captured his personal Toulon
at a very young age,” Connaughton writes of the
man who was elected to the Senate before his
30th birthday.
He tells of
raising money for the senator and getting little
in the way of appreciation – not even a
thank-you note until he dropped a hint he wanted
one – and of Biden treating young aides poorly.
Connaughton
recalls a story from the lead-up to Biden’s
ill-fated 2008 presidential run.
“Later in the
campaign, a twenty-three-year-old fundraising
staffer got into a car with Biden with a list of
names and phone numbers: ‘Okay, Senator, time to
do some fundraising calls,’” Connaughton writes.
“Biden looked at him and said, ‘Get the f**k out
of the car.’”
Connaughton
fell hard for Biden in 1979 when the
vice-president, then a young, ambitious senator,
gave a typically fiery speech at the University
of Alabama and Connaughton, a student, rode back
in the car with the senator to the Birmingham
airport.
By 1988,
Connaughton had found his way to Biden and
worked as a junior aide for the then-senator’s
first presidential foray before landing a job on
his Senate staff. After graduating from law
school, he explains that he wanted to land a job
in the White House Counsel’s office. So
Connaughton says he asked Kaufman, then Biden’s
chief of staff, if the senator could put a call
into Abner Mikva, Bill Clinton’s White House
counsel. Kaufman told Connaughton that Biden
wouldn’t do it because Biden didn’t like Mikva.
“Ted tried to
console me,” Connaughton writes of Kaufman: “
‘Jeff, don’t take this personally. Biden
disappoints everyone. He’s an equal-opportunity
disappointer.’ ”
In an
interview, Kaufman said he doesn’t recall this
specific conversation but emphatically denied
that he would say such a thing about Biden, his
former boss and close friend.
“In general, I
would never say ‘Biden disappoints everyone’
because I don’t believe it,” said Kaufman,
adding that he never recalled hearing Biden say
anything negative about Mikva.
He declined to
discuss the book or Connaughton further.
Connaughton
writes that the turn of events left him to
conclude that Biden was not interested in
helping those who had been loyal to him.
“His
ambitions, I was coming to understand, were
mainly about himself,” writes the former
staffer.
Connaughton
did wind up landing the White House job and
ultimately made his way along the well-trod path
to K Street, joining Covington & Burling and
wasn’t disappointed enough in Biden to not use
the senator to his benefit
“In my new
career as a lobbyist, I dropped Biden’s name
shamelessly,” writes Connaughton. “Perpetuating
the myth that I was close to him enhanced my
cachet and standing in Washington. It was like a
political version of codependency. Biden’s
slights could be painful, but it seemed too late
to break ranks, even though the relationship
never actually helped me when I went to work
with [Washington lawyer-lobbyist] Jack [Quinn].
Biden never lifted a finger for me or for one of
my clients.”
Still a
lobbyist when Biden prepared to run for
president once again 5 years ago, Connaughton
signed up to serve as the Treasurer of the
senator’s PAC.
Mocking
Biden’s long-windedness, Connaughton recalls a
Houston dinner fundraiser he organized
“As a longtime
staffer, I knew to keep flexing my knees while
standing through a Biden speech,” he writes.
“After awhile, I noticed that the room was
getting uncomfortably warm. Suddenly, a woman
fainted. Two men caught her and carried her out
a side door. Biden just kept on speaking … As
the guests filed into the dining room, I stood
in the foyer and asked a couple of them for
their impressions. ‘He’s got senatorial
disease,’ one said. ‘He talks too much.’ At that
moment, the front door opened, and the foyer was
bathed in the flashing red lights of the
ambulance into which the fainting victim was
being loaded.”
Connaughton
briefly returned to Bidenworld in the days after
the 2008 election, but quickly had to resign his
position as chair of the vice-president’s
inaugural committee because of the new
administration’s tough rules on lobbyists.
“It didn’t
seem fair,” he writes. “Biden had never helped
me once as a lobbyist, yet I was paying the
price.”
So instead of
working for the new vice president, Connaughton
became the top aide to Kaufman, and, while still
admiring of the appointed senator, left at the
end of Kaufman’s abbreviated term appalled at
how Washington works.
“Money is the
basis of almost all relationships in D.C.,” he
writes. “And, in a nutshell, this is why our
political campaign system and DC’s mushrooming
Permanent Class — who alternate between
government jobs and lawyering,
influence-peddling and finance — mean Wall
Street always wins.”
Democrats, he
argues, aren’t much different than Republicans
when it comes to selling out. Connaughton
describes the Washington taxonomy of the
lobbyists, consultants and lawyers he calls
“Professional Democrats.”
“If the Marine
Corps’s hierarchy of allegiance is unit, corps,
country, God, then the hierarchy for a
Professional Democrat is current firm,
former-elected-official boss, the congressional
Democratic leadership, and the president (if he
or she is a Democrat),” Connaughton writes.
That was the
true faith he lived by for about 25 years until
he finally left the capital, bought a dog and
took refuge in Savannah.
Connaughton
recounts the conversation he had with his father
upon quitting the political game.
“ ‘I can’t
believe after all those years of blood and sweat
for Biden he never even gave you a crumb,’ ” he
writes of his dad’s reaction. “I didn’t even
know how to put any context around that for him,
it’s just too complicated. I’d learned the hard
way: loyalty for loyalty’s sake is a fraud. I
was guilty.”
