LIST ENVY

Excuse my excitement, but I hadn’t expected to be, shall we say, included. The first news reports I heard, on CNN, said that the Clinton administration had released a list containing the names of “prominent Republicans” — 340 in all — whose secret FBI files had been sought and reviewed by the White House. CNN mentioned, specifically, the names James Baker, Marlin Fitzwater, and Tony Blankley.

Now, I had worked — briefly but not, alas, briefly enough — in the Bush White House. But I’m not a Republican and I’m not prominent, although I am personal friends with Fred Barnes. I soon learned, of course, that the White House list, quickly dubbed the “Clinton enemies list,” contained mostly the names of unprominent Bush staffers. I qualified! So it wasn’t a complete shock, merely a pleasant surprise, when I checked my voicemail last Monday morning and heard the shout of a former White House colleague: ” Congratulations! You made the list!”

I noticed an edge to my friend’s voice — one that became increasingly familiar to me as the week wore on. Beneath his chipper good wishes (sincere enough, I suppose) was unmistakable evidence of a psychological disease that has gripped Our Nation’s Capital: list envy.

My friend, God love him, hadn’t made the list. Neither had Haley Barbour, who went public, unashamedly, with his own list envy. “I’m hurt,” he told The Hill newspaper, voicing the desperate hope that maybe his folder had Casual simply been misfiled. Ha. He should be so lucky.

As the world now knows, the list stops mysteriously at the letter “G.” If you are, say, a Johnson, or a Rickenbacker, or a Smith — no matter how hard you labored for George Bush, no matter how juicy your FBI file — you, perforce, aren’t on the list. And even more mysteriously, many Bushies and Reaganites with names in the A to G range aren’t on the list either.

Thus the list lists Jean Balestrieri, Bill Bennett’s receptionist when he was drug czar, but not David Bates, Bush’s cabinet secretary. It omits Spencer Abraham, a top aide to Dan Quayle and now a rising Republican star in the Senate, but includes . . . well, me. Try as we might, no one has yet devised a unified field theory to explain the bizarre omissions and inclusions.

Not that I’m trying all that hard. I’m too busy just being a guy who made the list. It’s almost a full-time job: fielding phone calls from distant friends, soaking up the admiration of family members and coworkers, consoling former colleagues stricken with list envy, and acting shy and confused to inquiring reporters. Aren’t you outraged? they ask. Have you considered filing a lawsuit? No, no, I tell them, I just feel so . . . so violated.

Those of us on the list have a duty, it seems to me, to maintain our humility, and our dignity. At least in public. In my private moments, I have contrived a theory, not to say fantasy, as to how the list came to be.

I think back to 1993, when the requests to the FBI were apparently made. Is it any coincidence that at precisely the same time, I was working for Washingtonian magazine, writing several pieces that — if I do say so myself were none too flattering to the new administration? An example: my hard-hitting expose on the pizza-ordering habits of the Clinton White House. Staffers for previous administrations, working late into the night, had been content to call lowly Domino’s for a plebe pepperoni with extra cheese. Not this Chablisand-camembert crowd. The Clintonites, I discovered, were ordering pizzas from a fancy-pants bistro in the Palisades, topped with pesto chicken and goat cheese. I blew the lid off that story. My piece was a scorcher, confirming the image of a White House out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans who go to work every day, play by the rules, and eat pepperoni.

It is not difficult for me to imagine the scene that ensued in the Oval Office, with Clinton angrily hurling the new issue of Washingtonian across the room.

He turned to Bernie Nussbaum, I think. “Bernie, this bastard at the Washingtonian is tearing the bark off us month after month,” the president shouted in a flash of his famous temper, maybe. “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome hack?”

“We could get his FBI file, dig up some dirt,” Bernie said, probably. “Then throw in a bunch of other names, just to mess with their minds — Baker, Fitzwater . . .”

“And that receptionist in Bennett’s office: what’s-her-name,” Clinton said. “We could do it. But it would be wrong.”

Chuckle-chuckle.

Bernie turned to go. “And maybe Barbour too?”

“Nah,” Clinton said, I’m almost sure. “Screw “im.”

Eat your heart out, Haley.

ANDREW FERGUSON