Byrd to Obama: Slow down, senator

If — as some are now speculating —Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is considering a surprise run for the White House in 2008, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the lion of the Senate, has already counseled him against it.

So says Obama himself in his new book, “The Audacity of Hope,” due out early next month.

In an early meeting between the two men in Byrd’s private hideaway, “He told me I would do well in the Senate but that I shouldn’t be in too much of a rush,” writes Obama in a manuscript sent to our offices.

“[S]o many senators today become fixated on the White House, not understanding that in the constitutional design it was the Senate that was supreme, the heart and soul of the Republic.”

Obama also recalls the run-up to his Senate campaign, when an adviser lamented that it was too late for Obama to acquire “a nickname or something” other than “Barack,” and marching in Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade “in the very last slot … just a few paces ahead of the sanitation trucks.”

On his first meeting at the White House, he remembers shaking the hand of the president, who turned to “an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.”

“Not wanting to seem unhygienic,” the senator writes, he also “took a squirt.”

He told Yeas & Nays that the process of writing this book was similar to his first, “Dreams from My Father,” “in the sense that they were both painful.”

“I write on my own — I don’t have assistants,” he said. “I’d get home about 8, have some dinner and write from 9 to 1. And work on weekends.”

He said it’s “not a 10-point-plan book. Rahm already wrote that one.” He was referring to his fellow Chicagoan, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a former aide in the Clinton White House. “It’s more of a reflection on how we need to think about our problems.”

Nevertheless, the real question for political observers remains: Is it a presidential campaign tome? Only time will tell, but he’ll have another couple cracks at the best-seller list should he decide to throw his hat in the ring for 2008 or 2012. He’s on the hook for yet another book in his current contract with Crown Publishing, as well a children’s book with Alfred A. Knopf.

Stevie Wonder gets his gear in Arlington

The usual assortment of random folkies, metalheads, punks and tech wizards were perusing the wares at Guitar Center in Seven Corners on Sunday when who should walk through the door but R&B icon Stevie Wonder.

“The place was quite abuzz,” says our source.

Stevie, with only a “couple guys” in tow, was in the market for a new keyboard, as his was apparently on the fritz.

A manager at Guitar Center confirmed the sale, but wouldn’t specify what exactly Stevie is plugging into his amps these days. This is a town of secrets, after all.

When we inquired what business Stevie might have had in the area this weekend, so soon after performing at the Capitol Fourth event on Independence Day, a former member of his inner circle cracked, “He was sightseeing, what do you think?”

Alas, he couldn’t tell us the real reason, and the music legend’s publicist couldn’t be reached by press time.

The Midwest’s D.C. power team

Why is it that, when Miami University’s new president, David Hodge, came to town Monday for a reception in his honor, the setting was not a hotel reception room or an alumnus’s home, but rather … the Longworth House Office Building?

Perhaps Miami of Ohio was trying to make a statement: Look out, D.C., here we come. Or rather, here we are.

Although Washingtonians are used to seeing successful alumni from Harvard (Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.), Princeton (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) and Yale (President Bush), they may want to start getting used to seeing more RedHawks around town.

Miami University doesn’t sit atop U.S. News & World Report’s list of top national universities — they’re at No. 60 — but the alumni of this 15,000-plus student university located in Oxford, Ohio, are having an impact in the nation’s capital.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Rep. Mike Oxley, R-Ohio, all are alums.

And the university can also brag about such D.C. notables as White House Social Secretary Lea Berman, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, Radio America Founder and former Reagan administration official Jim Roberts and The Examiner’s own Bill Sammon.

By the way: The university is in the district of House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. Although Boehner attended Xavier University in Cincinnati, his flack Don Seymour attended Miami.

“We like to call ourselves the Harvard of the Midwest,” says Chad Pergram, ’91, chief correspondent for Capitol News Connection and director of Miami’s Inside Washington Program, which brings nearly 30 students to Washington each summer for internships and an education in all things Washington.

Or maybe they’re the Georgetown of Ohio?

GOP says goodbye to two chairmen

Two of Capitol Hill’s most prominent Republicans get their goodbye wishes tonight.

International Relations Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., who made his name nationally as chairman of the Judiciary Committee during President Clinton’s impeachment, will be feted at the J.W. Marriott.

Sponsored by the Jesse Helms Center, the event features remarks by Vice President Dick Cheney.

And only a block away, Financial Services Chairman Mike Oxley, R-Ohio, receives his well-wishes at the Willard Hotel.

Oxley’s crowning achievement is the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform legislation.

Katie’s not too cool for D.C.

Although she’s in the big CBS chair in New York, Katie Couric hasn’t forgotten her D.C. roots (born and raised in Arlington, worked at WRC-TV).

She was spotted at the Palm on Saturday night — and in town, we hear, to interview Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — with a large table of friends. Also in the room was fellow TV personality Greta van Susteren and her husband.

So popular was Couric that Palm employees had to run a bit of interference to keep fans from approaching her table. One lucky fan did, however, manage to get a word in with Couric and told her that morning workouts just weren’t the same without her face on the “Today” show.

Such flattery elicited a big smile and hug from CBS’s top news anchor.

Speakeasy

“If a truck blew up, it didn’t matter to them. They just got a new one in five minutes. They were buying Escalades for anybody who worked for Halliburton,

people who didn’t need these vehicles.”

– Shane Ratliff, former truck driver for Halliburton