Illustration by Matthew Woodson
Kurt Bardella is not a guy you can easily root for. He activates your radar and not in a good way. He laughs too much and too loud. He hangs out in cigar bars. When he talks with you, you suspect you are being worked.
Illustration by Matthew Woodson
Like Father Figure, Like Son Kurt Bardella and Darrell Issa.
I liked him instantly.
By that I mean Bardella gave me a headache, but I liked that he flouted the norms of the smooth Washington hustler. In a city where even the most rabid striving must be cloaked in nonchalance, Bardella never pulled this off or even tried. He was not shy about sharing — on his Facebook page — his ultimate ambition: to become the White House press secretary. He was not reticent in acknowledging a danger of his brash style: "I'm never that far away from blowing myself up completely," he told me once. "It's all part and parcel of my inferiority complex." But generally, Bardella added, he was pretty good about channeling his demons in a way that benefited his boss, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California.
Bardella evinced a desperation that made him more honest than people in Washington typically are. Or maybe "transparent" is a better word, because he did seem to lie sometimes (or "spin" sometimes), at least to me. Even as he stuck out among earnest Hill deputies, something about Bardella wonderfully embodied the place. It's not that Washington hasn't forever been populated by high-reaching fireballs. But an economic and information boom in recent years has transformed the city in ways that go well beyond the standard profile of dysfunction. To say that today's Washington is too partisan and out of touch is to miss a much more important truth — that rather than being hopelessly divided, it is hopelessly interconnected. It misses the degree to which New Media has both democratized the political conversation and accentuated Washington's myopic, self-loving tendencies. And it misses, most of all, how an operator like Kurt Bardella can land in a culture of beautifully busy people and, by trading on all the self-interest and egomania that knows no political affiliation, rewrite the story of his own life.
I first met Bardella in May 2010, when he was really starting to make a name for himself. If Republicans won the majority in the House that November, Issa would become chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Good for Issa, and by the first law of Washington career gravity, good for Bardella.
The first surprise upon meeting Bardella was his appearance. His Italian name and blustery phone comportment suggested something other than a rail-thin 27-year-old Asian-American in pinstriped suit and tie and matching hanky in the breast pocket. He looked like a teenager playing grown-up.
Something about Bardella cried out for mothering, or fathering, which I suspected might be true even if each of his three fathers (one birth, one adopted, one step-) had not abandoned or alienated him on the way up. He said that the displacement of his youth, his lack of a college degree and his entry into the political work force at a very young age (17) engendered in him a fear that he had no business running with these bulls. So he was a jittery wreck, working long into the night, in the service of pleasing Darrell Issa, or else.
You hear the formulations "He's like a father to me" and "He's like a son to me" quite a bit in Washington. Politicians like to self-mythologize through their fathers: John Edwards was "the son of a millworker," John Boehner "the son of a barkeeper" and so on. "Every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes," Barack Obama wrote. The dad thing makes a tidy device for any politician's story, but the prevailing social dynamic of Washington so often does mimic the quest for paternal love. It is, in many ways, a city of patrons and protégés. "Who do you work for?" is often the first thing people ask here.
But when Bardella said, "Darrell is like a dad to me," he sounded genuine. "Darrell cares," he'd say. "He fills a certain void."
Mark Leibovich is the magazine's chief national correspondent and the author of "This Town," about life inside the Beltway, from which this article is adapted.
Editor: Joel Lovell
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