Courtesy photo
Frank Luntz’s annual baseball All-Star Game party has played its last inning, as the GOP pollster, wordsmith and frequent talking head is pulling up stakes in the town that made him famous and decamping for sunny Los Angeles.
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For seven years each summer, Luntz has been hosting a who’s who of the political and media worlds at his palatial McLean home, which is stuffed with a never-ending array of rare political and pop-culture collectibles — signed guitars, original newspapers, movie props, letters from presidents.
But at Tuesday night’s party, Luntz stood on his backyard patio and told his guests that it was “a special night because it’s the last one.”
He said he had been moved by the recent deaths of “people you all know” and that he was leaving his job, selling his house and moving to Santa Monica, Calif., where he could just “hang and live life.”
On Wednesday, he told us he would retain the title of chairman emeritus in his company, Luntz Maslansky Strategic Research, and planned to “start something new in January” from his new home.
Perhaps more problematic, a move to the Left Coast means packing up his original “Gone With the Wind” costume, motorcycle from “Easy Rider,” Paul McCartney-signed bass guitar and Palm Beach County, Fla., punch-card voting machine, among the thousands of other artifacts and memorabilia he’s collected.
“It’s me,” he said of his collection. “Every one of these things — how I acquired it — has a story.” With that in mind, he said he’ll give some of it to the Smithsonian, and the rest he’ll divide up among his homes in L.A., D.C. and New York.
On hand for the surprising news Tuesday: Republican Reps. Darrell Issa, of California; and Eric Cantor, of Virginia; top lobbyist Bob Livingston; CNN Bureau Chief David Bohrman; former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, Republican doyenne Barbara Comstock; and “West Wing” star and Bethesda native Richard Schiff. But the biggest surprise among the guests may have been former White House spokesman (and current White House persona non grata) Scott McClellan. Why? Well, right on Luntz’s own invitation to the party, the No. 3 reason to attend was to “Get advance copies of Scott McClellan’s new book, ‘Out of Left Field: My Totally Unprovoked Revolt Against My Favorite National Pastime and Rant Against a Bunch of Rumored Steroid Users.’ ”
