LOOK WHO’S HITCHED!….In this month’s issue, T.A. Frank writes about Washington D.C.’s power couples. Nothing wrong with them, he says, except that it might be nice if the rest of us knew just who was related to whom:
When, for instance, Campbell Brown, anchor for the weekend edition of NBC’s Today Show, tied the knot with Dan Senor, longtime GOP operative and former spokesman for Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority, no one minded that Brown had first met Senor when interviewing him in Iraq and soon after taken a shine to him. People can’t help whom they fall for. Nor did anyone insist that Brown amend her NBC Web site bio to include information about her new spouse. That was Brown’s business.
Or take the case of American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Fred Kagan, who is widely credited with authorship of the “Surge” in Iraq. Kimberly Kagan, wife of Fred, is writing assessments for the Weekly Standard of how the Surge is working. Nowhere in the Standard, however, has there been any reference to her marriage. Blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote a pointed entry about this — “[T]hey picked the wife of the main author and one of the plan’s original architects. And they never disclosed these relevant facts” — and so did a few others, but it never rose above a minor grumble. The Weekly Standard stayed the course.
So what’s your power couple IQ? Bill & Hillary and Bob & Liddy are no brainers. Slightly harder but still pretty well known: Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell. Harder still: Russ Schrieber, John McCain’s media strategist, and Nina Easton, Fortune’s Washington bureau chief. And even harder: Ken Pollack, famously wrong Iraq analyst, and Andrea Koppel, CNN’s congressional correspondent.
And of course, there’s Philip Perry, former general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, who’s married to Liz Cheney, the veep’s daughter. But you already knew that because you read the Washington Monthly and we wrote all about him last month.
For more, check out our chart, “Washington’s 60 Sizzlingest Power Couples.” Here’s how to play: Count up the number of power couples on the list that you already knew about and then divide by 30. The result is your DC Power Couple IQ. Have fun!
