Getting ahead in the GOP: Rep. Patrick McHenry and the art of defending the indefensible.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Benjamin
• Position: Biography

His name, you notice immediately, is nearly an American hero's.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, 29-years old and a freshman Republican Congressman, is sitting calmly in front of an "ABC World News Tonight" camera, his prematurely grey hair parted on the side and pulled thick over his scalp. He is waiting for the show to begin. It is mid-July and a particularly perilous political moment. The House majority leader and conservative power broker, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), is in hot water for taking a series of ethically sketchy trips--to the Mariana Islands, to Scotland, and to Russia--funded by lobbyists whose clients happen to have benefited from loopholes DeLay helped write into federal law. Even for Congress, this is shameless stuff and, with rumors of an indictment imminent, many conservatives are backing away from DeLay. But if the House leader has a more committed supporter on the planet Earth than Patrick McHenry, he is certainly not an elected member of the United States Congress. McHenry is one of only 20 Republican representatives who signed on with DeLay's ultimately failed attempt to rewrite the House ethics process to grant himself effective immunity from indictment. DeLay needs something--a diversion, dynamite in the distance.

And here is McHenry. As the camera turns on, his face snaps into a bank teller's automatic smile. McHenry is the kind of young person whom other young people can't stand because he comes across as if he's been prepping his whole life to be 40. His voice is high-pitched, his tone world-weary, measured, sighingly cynical. Twenty-nine years old, he's seen it all before. "This is just the pot calling the kettle black," he says, arguing that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also took a trip she didn't fund herself. This is the Republican line of the day, even though Pelosi's trip was a nonprofit-funded visit to a US. naval base while DeLay's was a St. Andrews golf vacation financed by indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Nevertheless, McHenry's eyebrows temple upwards, neat geometries of piety. "They call their own failure to disclose travel a mere oversight. But when Republicans do it, they call it an ethical scandal" Dynamite in the distance. The news report pivots, and ABC correspondent Brian Ross spends most of the rest of the segment affirming that Democrats, too, have taken some trips they haven't paid for. A pox on both their houses. For McHenry, this is mission accomplished.

No political movement can survive on talking points alone. It requires an endless succession of faces, flesh and bone, elected officials willing to impose their smiling mugs in front of the camera even when the talking points are ridiculous. In the nine months since he came to Washington, McHenry has cultivated a role as a kind of fraternity pledge for the House leadership, willing to do the dirty work on behalf of crusades that the rest of his caucus will no longer touch. He was still pumping Social-Security privatization this summer, months after the GOP leadership had given up on the bill. He was still attacking Terri Schiavo's husband after other Republicans, with an eye toward opinion polls, clammed up. And in June, he was summoned by the cable networks to defend Karl Rove after it began to appear likely that the president's chief strategist had identified Valerie Plame as a CIA agent while talking to reporters.

McHenry is perhaps the most successful and precocious of the endless string of those guys, the youngish Republican representatives who show up on cable television to defend the indefensible. But McHenry has also mastered, far more quickly than most, the inside game, the art of cultivating personal relationships with the powerful. Soon after moving to Congress, McHenry hired Grover Norquist's press secretary as his own. More recently, he's been dating Karl Rove's executive assistant.

For his labors and for his promise, McHenry has won committee assignments and leadership positions like a row of shined medals, commemoratives for heroisms rendered. He's the only freshman to be part of the majority whip's team. He is co-chair for communications of the National Republican Congressional Committee, an exalted post that entitles him to help frame the national message for GOP candidates around the country. "He's got an awful lot of promise," House Majority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told National Journal for a profile headlined "Boy Wonder." He has shared the stage with President Bush at the insurance industry's annual convention. Both DeLay and the man who replaced him as House Majority Leader, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), have hosted fundraisers for McHenry, a rare privilege for a freshman. A puffy Weekly Standard piece praised McHenry's "tenacity."

When Newt Gingrich brought the Republican Party back to power in the House in 1994, he did it with a phalanx of gate- crashers--dentists, insurance agents, small businessmen--political rookies and ideologues, many of whom have recently been at odds with DeLay and the spendthrift House leadership. A decade on, the revolution has calcified into what is less an ideology than a system, a cluster of organizations that manage power and careers--a political machine. Like most of the post-Gingrich generation, McHenry's ultimate loyalty is less to principle or ideology than to the machine itself.

To understand the values and pathologies of an organization, it often helps to follow the career path of its most precocious stars. Henry Blodget, the famous late-1990s Wall Street TV analyst, made it by grasping that his employer, Merrill Lynch, wanted him to talk up stocks that his firm had an extra hidden financial interest in selling to an investing public eager to believe the normal rules of share prices were suspended. Similarly with Sammy Glick, the fictional young Hollywood up-and-comer in Budd Schulberg's satirical novel about the 1930s movie business What Makes Sammy Run?, who figures out that stealing scripts and snitching on members of the nascent screenwriter's union is the way to get ahead in the studio system. Patrick McHenry is the Henry Blodget, the Sammy Glick of Republican power in Washington. "What Patrick understands is the same thing that George Bush understood," the omnipresent conservative power broker Grover Norquist told me, "which is how the modern Republican Party works."

Taking credit

"You had to hand it to him. He was always improving. I mean, he was becoming more and more expert at being Sammy Glick. The way he was telling this story, for instance. He wasn't outlining it, be was acting it. What the story lacked in character and plot his enthusiasm and energy momentarily overcame."

--Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

McHenry represents North Carolina's 10th congressional district, an in-between place where the hollows and dipping...