John Breaux—The well-connected former senator is leaving Patton Boggs to set up a new firm with his son. Is this Trent Lott’s next stop?

Paul Tagliabue—With the Super Bowl coming up, who better to offer advice than the former NFL commissioner, now back at Covington & Burling?

Laura Rozen—One of the recent hires in the new Mother Jones Washington bureau, blogger Rozen is a keen observer of foreign affairs.

Ted Leonsis—The AOL and Capitals hotshot is going back to Sundance this month with his latest venture into the film world, a soccer documentary called Kickin’ It.

Susan Molinari—With “America’s mayor” Rudolph Giuliani in the news, lobbyist and former congresswoman Molinari looks like she might have picked the right horse for 2008. A Giuliani Cabinet post ahead?

Brenda Frese—Maryland’s women’s-basketball coach is having another big season—and she’s soon to become the mother of twins.

Kris Baumann—The head of the DC police union has a lot of insights into the problems facing the department as Chief Cathy Lanier struggles to retain officers and lower crime—and maybe see the repeal of the city’s gun ban.

Bill Lecos—The president of the Fairfax Chamber of Commerce is right in the middle of the dispute over the Tysons Metro extension.

Dole, now a partner at Alston & Bird, has made millions representing clients he never could have aided as a senator. An example: Dubai Ports World, the Middle Eastern company that won a contract to manage several US ports before congressional opposition killed the deal.

Dole left the Senate not to lobby, though, but to run for president. Senate historians say the closest parallel to Lott’s departure was that of Democratic leader George Mitchell, who decided not to seek reelection in 1994 and instead joined Washington law and lobbying firm Verner Liipfert Bernhard McPherson & Hand.

Mitchell, who now lives in New York, became a unique figure in international circles. He has led diplomatic missions to Ireland and the Middle East while building a law practice that put him on the boards of such corporate giants as Disney; he’s been leading the investigation of steroid abuse in baseball.

He recruited Dole to Verner Liipfert before the firm was taken over by DLA Piper, now the world’s largest law and lobbying firm. Dole then left for Alston & Bird, where he recruited Mitchell’s Democratic successor, Tom Daschle, to his new firm after Daschle was defeated for reelection.

Daschle’s lobbyist wife, Linda, works at a firm cofounded by former Republican leader Howard Baker Jr. Baker left the Senate in 1985 to go back to practicing law. But in 1987 President Reagan tapped him to become White House chief of staff.

With Lott’s departure, Robert Byrd is the only former Senate majority leader still serving his state’s interest in the Senate.

This article first appeared in the January 2008 issue of Washingtonian magazine. 

When Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder looks at the NFL free-agent market, he’ll see big names.

New England cornerback Asante Samuel, Chicago linebacker Lance Briggs, Indianapolis safety Bob Sanders, and Pittsburgh guard Alan Faneca are likely to be available.

Snyder likes big names—any extra cash burns a hole in his pocket. And while his Six Flags fiasco has cut into his cash flow, the Redskins still make enough money to enable him to buy big in free agency.

Milbank is a keen observer of capital life. Photograph by Matthew Worden

Once the book Homo Politicus hits the stores December 26, it might be wise for author Dana Milbank to check his food for poison should he dine with fellow journalists—or politicians or lobbyists.

His anthropological take on the “strange and scary tribes that run our government” makes light of many usual suspects such as Nancy Pelosi and Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff and “Duke” Cunningham, but the Washington Post essayist also directs some deadly barbs at journalists.

“Here,” he writes, “the local chorus members, or choreutai in the Greek, call themselves journalists or reporters.”

Weekly Standard editor William Kristol is “choragus of a pro-Bush chorus,” whose cheerleading for the Iraq war “was reaching that of a Dionysian orgy.”

The choreutai are storytellers, but Milbank writes: “In Potomac Land, however, the vital tradition of storytelling is severely hobbled by Potomac Man’s inherent self-absorption.”

Milbank’s best specimen? Political analyst Mark Halperin, now with Time, whose online political Note for ABC News gave “the impression that the most important person in all Potomac Land was Halperin himself.”

Milbank’s dissection of Post icon Bob Woodward might delight most but infuriate a few—including Woodward.

All photos by Liz Gorman.

Some thought the Rales name on the poster was a pseudonym. Photograph courtesy of ZumaPress

When the credits roll at the end of the comedy hit movie The Darjeeling Limited, some Washingtonians might scratch their heads at seeing “Steven M. Rales, executive producer.” The film, featuring Owen Wilson, is about three brothers’ railroad journey through India to find their mother at a remote convent.

Bloggers on movie sites even speculated that the name was a nom de plume for Steven Spielberg.

In real life, Rales is more associated with the business of making hammers and wrenches. As the founders of Danaher Corporation, Steven and his brother Mitchell own Craftsman, which supplies nearly all the hardware for Sears. They often are listed as the two richest men in the District, worth about $3 billion each. Their late mother, Ruth, operated an antiques store in Potomac for years.

Last year Rales funded a film venture called Indian Paintbrush, with offices in Santa Monica. Danaher Corporation was named after a trout stream in Montana surrounded by the wild Indian-paintbrush flower.

The notoriously press-shy Rales popped up recently at the New York Film Festival with several of his children. He was seen there bantering with Washington filmmaker Aviva Kempner, who made a prize-winning documentary on Jewish baseball star Hank Greenberg on a shoestring budget. “It was a movie gathering,” Kempner says, “so naturally I asked if he would do lunch.”

Rales, an American University law grad, is just the latest Washingtonian seeking happiness in Hollywood.

Former AOL executive Ted Leonsis has put $2 million into a documentary narrated in part by Woody Harrelson on the “rape” of Nanking in 1937. And Redskins owner Dan Snyder has made no secret of his desire to turn his Six Flags theme-park investment into a Disney-like media empire.