| On Tuesday evening, I was at The Hotel Chelsea for a fun little celebration with some of my partners and our friends at Bully Pulpit Interactive, the omnibus public affairs agency whose influence and network spans from Pennsylvania Avenue to California Street and beyond. Back in the earliest days of the Puck journey, the folks at BPI recognized the power of building a media company around a cohort of generationally-talented journalists, and putting them smack dab in the middle of the economic equation. Their sagacious honchos, like Andrew Bleeker and Scott Mulhauser, were instrumental in our early success. (O.G. partner Ben LaBolt is now back in the White House as Biden’s communications director.)
So we were all too thrilled to put together a small event in New York honoring the partnership with some of our closest friends along the Acela corridor. Naturally, this being a political crowd, the conversation instantly turned to what was going on concurrently on Capitol Hill, where a string of Kevin McCarthy acolytes and former acolytes were taking turns attempting to ascend the greasy pole, as Disraeli once put it, and fill the speakership void. Unsurprisingly, they found the Republican conference as unruly and inhospitable as their predecessor had.
That evening, I spoke to high-level veterans of the last four administrations, and their views were not all that sanguine, as you might expect. The whole thing was a mess, and the House Republicans were exacerbating the situation by seemingly expediting another government funding crisis—the very issue which effectively cost McCarthy his throne. It was a good night for a stiff drink.
At an off-the-record discussion during the evening, my partner Abby Livingston, Puck’s Capitol Hill expert, offered the assembled crowd some of her latest up-to-the-minute reporting on the turmoil and the ulterior motives of top Republicans. We’d assembled a sort of collegial, informal panel that also included myself, Dylan Byers, and Bill Cohan. During the chat, I’d intended to highlight some of the unique insights that each offered on their sphere of influence—Dylan’s thoughts on the Washington Post succession drama and CNN’s new era, for instance, in addition to Bill’s extemporizations and hypotheses on the new Pangaea-like formation of the entertainment streaming entities, including CNN’s owner, Warner Brothers Discovery. Indeed, the conversation inadvertently highlighted the Olympic ring-style Venn Diagram that embodies how we think about our power corners here at Puck.
I can’t reveal the details of the conversation, alas, since it was off the record. But I can relay that the real magic started when I bowed out and my partners began asking each other questions, further exemplifying that when you scale the heights of Wall Street, Washington, and the media, in particular, it’s all one very small world—and the world of Puck, to be sure.
Indeed, reality is often stranger than fiction, especially in the Puck Cinematic Universe. While we were chatting, Tara Palmeri was down in Washington gathering string on the latest unprecedented development in this bizarre saga. Unlike previously aggrieved or defenestrated speakers, McCarthy wasn’t high-tailing it for the higher calling of the lobbying trade or corporate board work. Instead, he signaled that he would be sticking around, strategically helping some in his conference try to clear the gauntlet of the 217 vote threshold.
McCarthy, whatever you make of the guy, is a sort of B-list Robert Caro character: he’s obsessed with power, with status, with making decisions. And he appeared to be leveraging his enormous fundraising infrastructure, or so it seemed, to remain relevant. If he wasn’t going to be speaker, so the logic went, he would be a sort of Tom DeLay-style shadow speaker who could pull the strings for Jordan or McHenry or whomever the G.O.P. lemonade stand served up next.
Unless, of course, McCarthy was truly engaged in a game of Vulcan chess, himself, to do the once unthinkable—to do all the right things, say all the right words, support the party, and then essentially Dick Cheney it all and emerge as the only person capable of doing the job. After all, another government spending decision looms in a matter of weeks. And McCarthy’s calculation to work across the aisle in order to avoid a ruinous shutdown makes him seem like Ghandi in retrospect.
If you have some time this weekend, I’d suggest turning your attention to The Kevin McCarthy Revival Plot, Tara’s tour de force on the machinations at play. I’ll admit that my eyes popped out of my head when Tara first told me about the story earlier this week. But, then again, I never thought Bob Iger would be returning to Disney. Indeed, these plot twists are the story of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
