2009: Tommy Christopher’s Year In Review

I first met Major Garrett as he was leaving the White House one night. There was a campaign afoot to get him to use a South Park avatar (like Tapper and I did) on his Twitter account. At the behest of these tweeps, I told him about it, and he got a real kick out of it. He was still rather new to Twitter, and was still using a default icon.

Again, my assumptions were confounded when I got to know him a little better. He’s a guy who cares deeply about journalism, and whose status as a relative outsider I can relate to. His integrity and professionalism are above reproach.

We bonded one night over drinks at the Off the Record bar, and as the name suggests, what was said there will stay there. I mention it because it was my first trip to Off the Record, a famous bar for DC journalists. I had heard of it before, but I always pictured it as some dingy basement watering hole, populated with trenchcoated reporter types with big index cards that say “Press” sticking out of their old-timey hats. Yeah, not so much.

Off the Record is in the basement of the Hay Adams Hotel, a schmancier-than-thou inn that housed the Obama family for the buffer period between when the girls started school and when the Bush administration would permit them use of Blair House. It had the whole menu-without-prices thing going on. For purposes of this story, I will divulge that Garrett, thankfully, picked up the tab (without my knowledge).

One of the more surreal moments this year was the death of Michael Jackson. I was at the White House, and it was just after the briefing. There were dozens of journalists gathered at the North Doors of the Palm Room, waiting to cover Marine One taking off or landing, I forget which. Someone loudly said “Michael Jackson was rushed to the hospital?,” followed closely by news of his death, all of which we got from Twitter. As we waited, people watched Twitter, and let us know when the networks began to confirm (or catch up to) the news.

Covering Marine One’s departures and arrivals is a strange bit of business. I started doing it because it was there, and again, in hopes of capturing a cool picture. It also helps to have your own bank of President-y pictures to use in stories instead of using someone else’s. Beyond that, it seemed like a monumental waste of time for all these camera crews to be out there every single time. Then it occurred to me that there might be some sort of macabre, what-if-it-crashes factor at work.

Obviously, my time in the wilderness was short. Within weeks of leaving Politics Daily, I was back in the AOL fold with a freelancing gig for Asylum. Shortly thereafter, I was fortunate enough to score an introduction (via Lee Stranahan) to Rachel Sklar, who was staffing up a little outfit called Mediaite. She had heard about my Politics Daily troubles, and took a chance that I wasn’t the handful of trouble I might have appeared to be.

After a few months’ tryout as a weekly columnist (the extra content was gratis gravy), I graduated to full-timer.

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