Giving Up the Beltway for Freeways and Palm Trees

There’s a flashback episode of “The West Wing”: a Hollywood PR woman is fired before breakfast because her client’s movie got only two Golden Globe nominations. She slinks back home to find a job offer waiting for her at poolside: press secretary to a presidential candidate.

Maybe you think TV is fiction, but for my money the only bit in that episode that isn’t practically documentary is that the woman goes home in a taxi.

The rest is perfectly plausible: L.A., Bill Clinton’s home-away-from-home, is now the hot address for White House alums, Democratic birds who have flown west to weather the long Republican winter.

This isn’t the Ike-in-Palm-Springs crowd nor the San Clemente expatriate set. They’re young, smart and ambitious. They came of political age with Clinton and are not yet legally old enough to run for president themselves.

Like that wistful, wishful 1980s Nixon button, this crowd, too, is tanned (ridding itself of Beltway pallor), rested (making money in the private sector) and ready (for another inspiring candidate to come along).

They’re in the mayor’s office and the movie studios, the dot-coms and the white-shoe law firms, with nonprofits and big Demo donors, content for now but like a farm team waiting to be called up to the majors.

A Democratic presidential contender who started dialing after breakfast today could staff a West Wing campaign from the West Coast by midnight Pacific Standard Time.

As Republicans do the Texas two-step at Beltway balls on Saturday night, these Clinton grads gather for an anti-inauguration party. Tex-Mex will not be served. Country music will not be playing. Listen for the Clinton anthem, “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” a song recorded when they were in swaddling clothes and not black tie.

As Peter Shakow told me in the regretful timbre of someone getting his first AARP membership card, “When George Bush takes office, it’ll really be the end of my 20s.”

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Marina del Rey, the current “Clinton ghetto,” is where Nixon dirty trickster Donald Segretti once set up White Housekeeping. The epicenter is a certain Apartment 101. Generations of Clinton staffers have hung ties and toothbrushes there, and its present occupants are L.A. Deputy Mayor Ben Austin and O’Melveny attorney Shakow, who also shared space at the White House political affairs office and still aren’t sick of each other.

Across the street is Rod O’Connor, the Democratic Convention’s chief operating officer. Blocks away is Chad Griffin, ex-White House press office, now working for Rob Reiner. Nearby are Rica and Jon Orszag; she is a Valley native who was Clinton’s radio director, he worked at the National Economic Council. Jon’s brother had a West Wing desk, too, as did Rica’s sister, who is now with the L.A. branch of Vernon Jordan’s law firm.

Still with me?

Ari Swiller came west from 1600 Pennsylvania to work for Ron Burkle, who has bankrolled Clinton campaigns and hosted the First Body. There’s an ex-Pentagon person in Palms, an ex-cabinet affairs fellow at Warner Bros., an ex-convention guy at work on a school board election.

Absent a national campaign, they meet now and then at DL21, Democratic Leadership 21st Century, their own political salon, which invites local and state politicians to gab.

Sean Burton, who started the group, went from heading Clinton’s Saxophone Club to AOL-Time-Warner’s Internet division. New York, D.C., even San Francisco were “a closed community, especially in politics,” he found. “L.A. is a place where you can make a name for yourself without having been from here. You can come to this city and make an impact.”

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First-generation Clintones--sounds like a doo-wop group, doesn’t it?--established the base camp here: Dee Dee Myers, onetime White House press secretary; Mickey Kantor, former commerce secretary, who may be back by year’s end; Derek Shearer, ambassador to Finland, who returns to Occidental College. And John Emerson, an investment banker and L.A. charity volunteer, was Clinton’s deputy assistant. He brought so many Californians into the administration--as many as 500--that his nickname was “Secretary of California.” In the last two years he’s felt “like an employment consultant” to dozens wanting to work here.

Clintonians have registered the usual surprise that traffic is not so bad and Angelenos not such dullards as they’ve heard. And they’re learning that politics anywhere is a very small world: One Clinton alum is dating a woman who has a friend who is roommates with Monica.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com