Why Presidential Hopefuls Love to Hate Washington, DC

— -- During an appearance at the American Action Network’s headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue on Friday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told the audience that he would never become a creature of the city he was visiting.

“I gotta tell you. As much as I love coming here, I love going home more,” Walker said at the event, hosted by longtime GOP fundraiser and AAN co-founder Fred Malek.

D.C., he said he likes to say, is “68 square miles surrounded by reality.”

In bashing D.C. even as he spoke from offices where one can practically see the White House from the window, Walker was carrying out a rite of passage for most presidential hopefuls, Republican and Democratic, who don’t currently work inside the Beltway: biting the hands of the D.C. power brokers whose rings they must simultaneously kiss.

“Washington is never particularly popular in the rest of the country and it’s not even popular in Washington,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye -- making it a prime foil against which governors and other non-D.C. leaders can project their own experiences within their states.

But those kinds of verbal jabs are taken with a wink and a nod by the lobbyists, fundraisers and other political types that get courted by these prospective candidates for money and support.

Take New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who during a recent speech used his outsider status in D.C. to demonstrate how a northeastern governor could relate to Iowans.

“If the values I'm fighting for every day in New Jersey and all across this country are not consistent with your values, then why would I keep coming back?" Christie asked a group of conservative voters at the Iowa Freedom Summit, hosted by Rep. Steve King, two weekends ago.

No, Christie continued, the idea that he is too moderate for Iowans is just “the conventional wisdom of Washington, D.C."

Christie may not like the ideas purported by the Beltway political class, but meeting with them is as essential as criticizing their home city.

He recently made the trip to the other end of the Acela corridor to powwow with technology industry heads convened by GOP donor Bobbie Kilberg -- an event that Kilberg said was meant to get to know the governor, not raise money for him.

On that same trip, Christie met with Republican lawmakers organized by Michigan Rep. Candice Miller, the second of its kind.

Christie is far from alone. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush likewise routinely condemns the chaos of Washington, like at a Jan. 29 speech in California: “For some odd reason, there's a dearth of leadership in the public square today. It's important to have leaders because now people believe that dysfunction is permanent in Washington, D.C.”

Yet, just the week before, Bush met with association executive and lobbyists at the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors headquarters, according to Politico, and had dinner with Malek that evening, per the Washington Post.

In two weeks, Bush will be back in Washington, attending two high-dollar fundraising events which cost a minimum of $1,000 and $5,000 respectively to attend, according to the New York Times.

And Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, like Walker, has fought the D.C. establishment literally from within, riling up listeners at the June Faith and Freedom Coalition meeting, held at D.C.’s Omni Shoreham Hotel, by saying, “people are ready for a hostile takeover of Washington, D.C., to preserve the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.”

Candidates playing the outsider card have an added advantage over those who currently work in Congress, one of the most reviled institutions in the country, not just D.C. No matter how much they rail against D.C.’s dysfunction, Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, will have an extra hurdle simply because of their offices’ DC ZIP code. One antidote to this would be to locate their future campaign offices elsewhere, including their home states of Texas, Kentucky and Florid respectively.

“You want your campaign sort of away from the Washington news cycle, the Washington echo chamber,” said Ed Rogers, co-founder of the BGR lobbying firm.

Even still, while Washington may not be Ground Zero for raw dollars, it’s much more central in terms of the influence and institutional support necessary for a top-tier campaign, Rogers added.

“Political leadership comes here. Political talent comes here. So the challenge for Republicans and Democrats both is to try to cherry-pick what you can without being contaminated as having embraced the very thing you’re running against,” Rogers said.

Republican strategist John Feehery warned that while Washington audiences are sophisticated enough to understand an anti-Washington message, candidates must be careful not to go too far when drawing distinctions with the Beltway establishment, like he said Barack Obama did when he pledged not to hire any lobbyists to work in his White House, but later loosened that restriction.

“I’ve seen this, where people come in here from outside and they don’t have an appreciation for the audience that they have. And they seem a little bit tone-deaf, Feehery said.

Rather than harp too much on the District’s faults, Feehery said, candidates should focus on how to reform them.

“Everybody can talk about how dysfunctional [Washington] is, but not everybody can talk about how to fix it.”