Phil Elwood is one of Washington’s most wily manipulators of news. After his scathing memoir is published this June, will he ever spin in this town again?
. His Capital City column chronicles the inside conversations and big trends shaping Washington politics.
Elwood’s mind jumped from soccer to PE class, and from PE class to the national alarm about youth obesity. An idea emerged. Invoking a dormant Delaware-registered astroturf group called the Healthy Kids Coalition, he paid a lobbyist $10,000 to get lame-duck Democratic Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick to introduce a resolution vowing that, until K-12 physical education was fully funded, no tax dollars should be spent pursuing the World Cup.
The World Cup story is actually one of the less insane capers in Elwood’s forthcoming tell-all. | Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images Partly it’s because the book is less an example of braggadocio than an exposé — the sort of thing that a lot of reporters wish we’d published ourselves. By that point, will Elwood still be working in his chosen profession? My first reaction on hearing that he was planning a book was that the royalties had better be big, since the project might make Elwood unemployable. Sure, reporters admire a good raconteur, but the multinationals and multimillionaires who actually pay his salary might be less charmed by his Road to Damascus conversion.
As we discuss the takeaways from the book, the advice Elwood has for his own industry is pretty pat: “I hope people start asking the question, ‘Should we do things?’ Not just, ‘Can we do things?’” But the advice he has for my industry is much more direct: “I think they should be incredibly skeptical of people like me.” The book, in that framing, isn’t just a dishy tell-all. It’s a counterintelligence manual, laying out all the sneaky schemes that the Elwoods of the world are liable to deploy.
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