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the nation’s capital. “Luke, this is for your pop,” Springsteen says, leading into an acoustic version of “Thunder Road.”
    As I walk out, I get a big hug from Tammy Haddad, a veteran cable producer who repurposed herself in recent years as a professional party host, event organizer, and full-service convener of the Washington A-list. Haddad, a towering in-your-face presence with black hair bisected by a white streak, is a human ladle in the local self-celebration buffet. She tells you how great you are, how you really need to meet the author, or cohost, or honoree, or whoever, and that by the way,
she just talked to Justice Breyer!
“Over the Rainbow” plays as Tammy and I and the rest of The Club schmooze our way up to the Kennedy Center roof for an actual cocktail party.
    And there, glowing over the Potomac and the monuments: a double rainbow, surely a message from heaven’s green room to the power mourners, now sipping Heinekens and white wine. Everyone says so. “Is anyone still an atheist now?” Luke asks, according to Tammy, who will write a blog post later about the “Russert Miracles.”
    Or: an opposing viewpoint on the rainbow from the since-departed atheist Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate: “No benign deity plucks television news show hosts from their desks in the prime of life and then hastily compensates their friends and family by displays of irradiated droplets in the sky.”
    God could not be reached for comment. But let us at least agree that He is quite obviously attuned to the doings of politics and media. That is why so many would-be leaders say they are being “called upon” to run for president, and why eulogists lean so heavily on the trope that God runs an HR department that recruits people like Sunday hosts and yachtsmen into heaven. When Andy Rooney died a few years later, the CBS anchor Scott Pelley compared Rooney to Cicero and Dickens and certified that “apparently, God needed a writer.” (Apparently CBS did not, because Rooney had been pushed out a month earlier.)
    And God just loves Washington; of that we are certain. His presence is indeed potent at the Kennedy Center, although everyone keeps looking around for someone more important to talk to.
    Tammy can’t stop talking about the Russert rainbow. It makes for an enthralling, powerful, and stagnant spectacle—that same wonderland feel that can make Washington’s monuments seem like a stage set. Is it real or papier-mâché? Or maybe God meant the rainbow to resemble an NBC peacock—a celestial branding play. Whatever, it all fits the “narrative” of a momentous time. It is no longer enough just to follow the unsexy business of governance in the seat of power. No more boring and stodgy in This Town. Vintage square rooms have given way to light-headed news cycles and public servants have graduated into killer personal franchises. The Washington story has become something more momentous, befitting a “narrative”: a pumped-up word in a pumped-up place where everything is changing, maybe more than in any city in the country, in line with the hopeful imperative of the next president.
    Or maybe nothing is changing at all, and the only certainty is that the city fathers of This Town will endure like perennials in a well-tended cemetery.



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    Suck-up City
    The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp.
    J ACK L AIT AND L EE M ORTIMER ,
Washington Confidential
    September 2008–January 2009
    I t was a time of hope and rebirth, except that the economy was cratering. That was a problem, and for the media too. I ran into Andrea Mitchell at the October 2008 debate in St. Louis between opposing running mates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. Andrea was in the midst of a rough moment because a lot of people were blaming her husband, Alan Greenspan, for the financial collapse. His free-market, Ayn