The book is hardly an objective study of the vice president. Ex-Biden aide pens angry tell-all

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.


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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.

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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.

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“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.”