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Quote Cuisine
"I love background," Wittmann says of his time in the McCain campaign. "Background is hilarious. A lot of journalists liked to call me on background because then they could have a Republican staffer saying heterodox things."
(By Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)
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In 1995, Wittmann was hired by the conservative Heritage Foundation, where his genius for quotemeistering burst into flower. He worked as one of Heritage's liaisons with Congress, and reporters started calling him for analysis of what was happening on the Hill.
"Most journalists don't live in a conservative milieu, so they needed a guide," Wittmann says. "So they'd come to me as . . . the Margaret Mead of conservatives."
"He has this knack," says Michael Franc, who was Wittmann's boss at Heritage. "He speaks in pictures, vivid pictures."
Franc remembers the exact moment that Wittmann achieved liftoff as a quotemeister. "Congress was melting down in some way and Marshall said, 'It's Bosnia without the peacekeepers,' and that was picked up everywhere. And he went on some nightly news show and after that, it fed on itself and reporters kept calling him."
That was in 1998, when Wittmann was mentioned 143 times in the news media, according to Nexis, the computer database, which is the Elias Sports Bureau of quotemeister stats. In 1999, his Nexis total shot up to 402. In 2000, it soared to 710.
Wittmann had hit the big time. But some folks at Heritage were not happy about that.
"There was some quote envy," he says. "Some people were jealous."
"I wouldn't describe it as quote envy," says Franc.
"There was definitely quote envy," says a former Heritage staffer who does not want to be shunned by former co-workers. "At a place like Heritage, people -- they're like senators, they wake up in the morning and they want to see their names in the paper. . . . They'd get quoted in the Wilkes-Barre whatever-it's-called and Marshall would be in the New York Times. He was in the big leagues and they were playing A-ball."
In 2000, Wittmann found himself in a political battle with his Heritage colleagues. They were all Republicans, of course, but Wittmann supported McCain for president and most of Heritage backed George W. Bush.
Things got ugly, he says, so he jumped ship, taking a job at the Hudson Institute, another conservative think tank.
Did Hudson hire him because of his quotemeistering ability?
