Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin, The Examiner
2007-01-26 08:00:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin cover people, power and politics in the beltway each weekday. Email them at yan@dcexaminer.com .

Washington Life unveils D.C.’s top youngsters

All too often, Washington seems to be about curmudgeonly old men with white hair and bad suits. But beneath that crust of gray is a city pulsing with the young and fabulous, and Washington Life magazine is out to prove it to you.

Yeas & Nays has gotten its hands on an exclusive sneak peak of some names on the society magazine’s second annual “Young and the Guest List,” a highly anticipated roster of the under-40 set “who have proven themselves through their philanthropic and professional efforts, and style.” The magazine hits newsstands Feb. 1, and Washington Life will celebrate the issue with a huge bash Feb. 22 at the Meridian House with all those on the list invited.

Several online forums have been aflutter with discussion about who would make the list, including LateNightShots.com. Said poster “sp”: “Who do you think is getting the boot from last year’s list? Word on the street is they cut the riff-raff and it’s much smaller.”

Some of the names on the list you may recognize: The Bush twins, obviously, made the cut. So did Mayor Adrian Fenty (and wife Michelle), Norah O’Donnell, Harold Ford Jr., and Reps. Patrick Kennedy, Linda Sanchez and Adam Putnam.

But the magazine tries to include not only the people you know, but the ones playing big roles behind the scenes, and the ones you’ll want to know in a few years when they’re hotshots. Like Jared Cohen, an author and member of the Policy Planning Staff in the Office of the Secretary of State, as well as Tim Chi and Lee Wang, co-founders of Blackboard software and Wedding Wire.

As the front cover suggests, being beautiful, while certainly not everything in this world, can’t hurt your chances of making the list, either. Erika Gutierrez (daughter of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez) and Marco Minuto (law student, entrepreneur and philanthropist) adorn the cover with all their beauty. “Washington has become a much more social and hip place in recent years,” Minuto said. “This list is a fun way to reflect that.”

Ford: I still love football, girls

Former Rep. Harold Ford Jr., D-Tenn., took some heat during his unsuccessful Senate campaign last year for his enjoyment of football and pretty girls. Not that he’s changing his habits.

“As I made clear” last fall, said Ford at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast Thursday, “I love Jesus, I love girls and I absolutely love football.”

Ford, who is taking over as chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, attended a Super Bowl party thrown by Playboy magazine in Jacksonville in 2005. His opponents tried to make political hay out of it last year by setting up a Web site called FancyFord.com and — most infamously — running an ad in which a buxom blonde, who says she met Ford at the party, beckons, “Harold, call me.”

Ford did not address the substance of the ad, but indicated he’d love to go back to the Big Game. He’s not attending this year, due to a speaking engagement. “But I love it,” he hastened to add.

“Republicans try to make going to the Super Bowl a bad thing,” said the 36-year-old. “They’re sitting up there in their boxes.”

Race also became a factor in the campaign, but Ford refused to blame his loss on racism. “I knew I was black when I started the race,” he quipped.

Fiorina felt same scrutiny as Pelosi

Before Speaker Nancy Pelosi broke through the “marble ceiling” in government, Carly Fiorina broke the glass ceiling in the corporate world. And she made it clear yesterday to an overflow crowd at Nathans of Georgetown that she can certainly relate to what Pelosi is going through.

Remarking on all the attention paid to Pelosi’s appearance, Fiorina remembers enduring the same thing “extensively” when she took the helm of Hewlett-Packard in 1999.

“There was a great deal of commentary all the time about my hair, my clothes,” she said, adding that she thinks women will finally be equal “when as much attention is paid to Donald Trump’s hair, which is far more interesting than mine.”

The 52-year-old Fiorina, who is promoting her new book, “Tough Choices,” said she’d consider going into politics, but refused to answer whether she’s a Republican or Democrat, calling the question “too polarizing.”

Out of power, out of the loop

Some Republicans think the Democratic leadership isn’t doing a very good job keeping the minority party up to speed on the legislative schedule.

Yeas & Nays got our hands on an e-mail exchange between House Republican Study Committee Deputy Director Paul Teller and a senior Republican leadership staffer (SRLS). When Teller asked the SRLS, “Any word on next week’s schedule?” the SRLS just laughed at the notion Democrats would keep Republicans in the loop, simply responding, “hahahhaahahahahahahaha.”

Anti-green silver screen

There are a lot of places where you might find a group of conservatives leery of environmentalists, but the National Geographic Society isn’t one of them.

Yet there they were Wednesday night, watching a premiere of “Mine Your Business: A Documentary About the Dark Side of Environmentalism.” The movie argues that environmentalists want developing countries to “stay as ‘traditional peasants’ forgetting all the while that the poor people desperately want progress and desperately want to enjoy the good, healthy and long life we in the west take for granted,” according to a Director’s Statement posted on the movie’s Web site.

But isn’t the National Geographic Society the kind of place you associate with pro-environmentalism?

“An outside group rented it and renting the space never implies a relationship or an endorsement,” said M.J. Jacobsen, vice president of communications for the Society.

But the protesters outside the screening weren’t too happy and, at one point, even engaged director Phelim McAleer in a debate. It ended with McAleer yelling at them, “You can’t say anything to me!”

Greenpeace Research Director Kert Davis said, “It’s a shame that they stooped to renting space to a propaganda film funded by the mining industry.”