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Illustrations by John Broadley | Tired of swiping, sick of getting ghosted and starved of the party scene, D.C.'s single power players are resurrecting an old-timey way of looking for love: Matchmakers. Jessica Goldstein spent this spring calling up a murderer's row of matchmakers to dig up the inside intel on how these services work. It's expensive, awkward and sometimes even romantic — a story of heiresses and TV hosts, senators' children and the eligible bachelors of the L'Enfant Plaza Starbucks that will have your group chat blowing up. Whether you're love-lorn or long off-market, you're gonna wanna read the whole article. In the meantime, here are some details to whet your appetite: — Clients include: TV hosts, ambassadors, political fundraisers, attorneys at the Department of Justice, high-up folks at Treasury and IMF and the SEC, owners of political consulting firms, the owner of a D.C. sports team, a speechwriter for Michelle Obama and, yes, politicians in various stages of running for office. — One VIP client requested his matchmaker set him up with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, uh, has a longtime boyfriend. Another asked for Margot Robbie, the married movie star. Straight Washington women are crushing on their newscasters: CNN's Jim Acosta, Fox's Bill Hemmer, NBC's Steve Kornacki. — A go-to spot for matchmakers looking for eligible bachelors is, seriously, the L'Enfant Plaza Starbucks. — It is not rare for D.C. men to begin a date by placing not just one but two phones on the table — a doubling-down on the silent statement that they are very important. Really, guys? Read Goldstein's story.
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| "In a recent fire, Bob Dole's library burned down. Both books were lost. And he hadn't even finished coloring one of them." Can you guess who said this about Senator Bob Dole in 1985? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.
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Henry Kissinger on Sept. 11, 1973. | Henry Griffin/AP Photo | Is the State Dept. Trolling Henry Kissinger? … Next week, the State Department will dedicate a conference room to Archer K. Blood, the late American diplomat who, in a move that threw his career off course, protested the U.S.'s turning a blind eye when its ally, Pakistan, carried out a shockingly bloody crackdown in what was then East Pakistan. "But another name will likely linger, unspoken," writes Michael Schaffer in this week's Capital City column : Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state most associated with America's support for what many scholars now understand as a genocide. "It's not hard to interpret the honor as an implicit slap at the 99-year-old master of realpolitik, delivered in the Foggy Bottom building that Kissinger used to rule — and where Blood saw his career derailed for protesting his policy," Schaffer writes.
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| If you haven't been watching the recent Jan. 6 hearings, you aren't alone. Here are some pointers in case you need to convince your friends that you spent several hours watching the committee's hearings this week. (From magazine contributor Ankush Khardori) — Are you a Democrat or a fan of Liz Cheney? Tell people you cried when Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers read from his diary about relying on his faith to navigate the post-election tumult. — The real star of the week was "Lady Ruby" Freeman, who sat quietly behind her daughter during her testimony, occasionally wiping away tears. Be sure to mention that you caught the riveting excerpts from her videotaped testimony, when she explained that thanks to Trump there's "nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere." — Venture a guess as to how many drinks Rudy Giuliani had before he told Rusty Bowers and other members of the Arizona Senate that he had proof of election fraud. — How about that guy with the perpetually furrowed brow sitting in the audience on Thursday? You of course recognized him as former Mueller prosecutor Greg Andres, who was at the hearing representing former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue.
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Illustration by Michelle Rohn | A Real Therapist's Advice for the Conways … At the very moment Kellyanne Conway held a party for her pro-Trump book, Here's the Deal , at D.C.'s Cafe Milano earlier this month, her husband was trashing the former president on MSNBC and CNN. The couple has been famously divided over Trump since he took office. "I was looking at the possibility," Kellyanne writes in the book, "that the man who always had my back might one day stab me in it." Which begs the question: How, in this hyper-partisan age, do we keep politics from wrecking our relationships? To find out, Joanna Weiss sat down with Jeanne Safer, a psychoanalyst and author of I Love You, But I Hate Your Politics: How to Protect Your Intimate Relationships in a Poisonous, Partisan World. Her advice? "You have to be actually interested in what they have to say, not in changing their mind."
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| 43 percent … of atheists say they'd be very uncomfortable marrying someone from a different political party — by far the highest percentage of any group, followed by voters who say women's issues are their top priority (28 percent). Twenty percent of Democrats say they'd be very uncomfortable, compared to 15 percent of Republicans. Every week, The Weekend inserts a question in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll and sees what the crosstabs yield. Got any suggestions? Email us at politicoweekend@email.politico.com.
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J.D. Vance greets supporters during a rally at the Delaware County Fairgrounds on April 23, 2022 in Delaware, Ohio. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images | The White Working Class War … Much has been said about J.D. Vance's conversion from Trump critic to MAGA heir. But the pundit class has missed an important through-line in Vance's politics, writes Lisa R. Pruitt this week . "In his memoir, Vance pitted two groups of low-status whites against each other — those who work versus those who don't." While elite progressives tend to see the white working class as monolithic, Vance's competitiveness in the Ohio Senate race can be explained in no small part by his ability to politically exploit this cleavage. Democrats could learn from his success. But to appeal to these voters, they'll need to move beyond dismissing the entire white working class as racist and stop condescending to them about "voting against their own interests."
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| On September 21, 1984, Ronald and Nancy Reagan had dinner at the home of Rudolph ("Ruddy") Hines, the president's official pen pal for nearly five years. Hines was selected by his school, Congress Heights Elementary — since renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary — for his reading and writing skills after Reagan visited the Southeast Washington D.C. institution in March 1984 and announced the epistolary initiative. Reagan's letters included advice, anecdotes and even foreign policy insights: "On Wednesday the 18th of April, Mrs. Reagan and I have to start on our trip to China. ... The trip is to meet with the government leaders of China and see how our two countries can become better friends," he wrote in 1984. In Ruddy's note inviting the Reagans to dinner , he warned: "You have to let us know in advance so my mom can pick up the laundry off the floor." Ruddy ended up cutting the dinner short to attend a Michael Jackson concert.
| | | **Who Dissed? answer: It was Jack Kemp, whom Dole later chose as his vice-presidential candidate in the 1996 campaign against Bill Clinton, setting aside some apparent past differences. The library quip came after Dole, in a meeting of young Republicans, said, "Kemp wants a business deduction for hair spray." | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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