So, a liberal writer finds little interest in the past when it can damage a liberal, but has a keen interest in a conservative’s past when it can damage him. So where’s the news there? There isn’t any to be found there. It is found in the all access pass that Lizza gets to Issa’s D.C. office. Ironically it is Kurt Bardella, Issa’s 27 year old spokesman, and supposed media wunderkind, that becomes the news… and not the good kind. “Issa calls him ‘my secret weapon,’ he fiercely screens all interviews. Bardella has a reputation as one of the savviest young spokesmen on Capitol Hill, someone who understands the complicated new media environment.”
If boasting non-stop is savvy, then Bardella is the savviest of them all: “Some people in the press, I think, are just lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That’s just embarrassing.” Referring to the recent incident when Howard Kurtz thought he was talking to Issa but was in fact talking to Bardella, he argues that he was not trying to dupe Kurtz: “I think anyone who knows me well enough knows I’m far too fond of myself to abdicate my own identity in favor of someone else’s.”
Bardella brags about his strategy to concern himself with D.C. media primarily and hometown reporters secondarily: “My goal is very simple,” he said. “I’m going to make Darrell Issa an actual political figure. I’m going to focus like a laser beam on the five hundred people here who care about this crap, and that’s it.” God complex anyone?
Bardella also weighs in as an unsettling half psychologist/half father figure regarding his boss: “Darrell’s sensitive about fixating too much on his past,” Bardella said. “Obviously, the stuff that happened . . .” His voice trailed off. “We can talk about it, as well we should. It is part of his past, but it does make him somewhat wary.”
The writer Ryan Lizza follows Issa and Bardella to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where Issa is treated like a rock star by many attendees due to his tenure as the chairman of the trade association. This seems like an unmistakable positive for Issa in the article, and it is… until Bardella mouths off in front of Lizza like he’s auditioning for Jersey Shore. Talking about a mobile phone app featured at the trade show that starts your car, of all things, Bardella says, “They don’t need any bells or whistles or naked women. But I enjoy the ones that do. I’m a guy, you know. Nothing wrong with admiring God’s work—the plastic surgeon’s work, too, I’m sure. Some of these chicks, though, I just want to feed, because they’re really, really thin. I’m, like, ‘God, eat something!’ ”
Bardella may have found out that Lizza is not the “lazy as hell” type of reporter that he brags about using like a tool. Instead Bardella’s reckless quotes made a story that would have been a glorified Wikipedia entry on Issa, with a few new quotes from old Issa associates who sounded like jilted ex lovers, into a real story. It’s a story about a brash spokesman who got outsmarted and did his boss’ image no favors.