“I did that too, and I also got slammed!,” Walter Isaacson told me earlier this week. The veteran journalist, former editor of Time, one-time cable chief and biographer of history’s great men was referring to Chris Licht, the newly installed chairman and C.E.O. of CNN, and a recent trip he’d taken to Capitol Hill. Licht had ventured to D.C. in mid-July to meet with lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, ostensibly as part of an icebreaking, get-to-know-the-players tour. But Licht’s true objective, several sources told me, was to convince highly skeptical Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and John Thune that they would get a fair hearing on his network, and that they should come back on its airwaves.