The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House by Todd Chuck

Author:Todd, Chuck [Todd, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.to
ISBN: 9780316234863
Amazon: B009GAR9UY
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Chief Executive Learns to Manage

Mike Strautmanis has a long pedigree as a Washington hand. He had been chief of staff to the general counsel at the United States Agency for International Development during the Clinton years, then served as legislative director to Representative Rod Blagojevich. During law school, he had worked at the legal firm Sidley Austin, where he met Michelle Obama and eventually her husband, Barack. Because of that friendship, in November 2004 he had been tasked with showing the senator-elect from Illinois around Capitol Hill.

At one point, the two men paused in the Hart Senate Office Building to take a break. “So, Mike,” Obama said, “what do you want to do in my Senate office?”

Strautmanis thought about it. He had been around Washington long enough to want a shot at the chief of staff’s job. He’d never run a Senate office before, but he had seen how a good office operates, and he thought he was up to it.

But Obama had a different idea. After all, he asked Strautmanis, did he really think both the senator and the chief of staff should be learning the ropes of their new jobs at the same time? For his part, Obama didn’t have any experience running such a big office. His budget, provided by the Senate, would be about $3.5 million a year, and he would have to use that money to set up field offices, then divide salaries among senior, legislative, and constituent service staffs. And for all the attention Obama drew to his healthy ego, he acknowledged his shortcomings. In fact, he had already approached the man he wanted to run his Senate office—Pete Rouse.

What Barack Obama was good at was oratory, as he had demonstrated during his Senate campaign and the convention speech on John Kerry’s behalf that vaulted him into the national political spotlight in 2004. What he was not good at was organizing and managing a staff. Even before Rouse had come on board, Obama had hired Robert Gibbs, his campaign spokesman, and then a scheduler; Rouse told him to build an organizational chart, making decisions about how many Illinois-based staffers and Washington-based staffers he wanted first and filling in the names later.

Gibbs and David Axelrod had wanted Obama to move quickly to open offices downstate, to increase his visibility in the most Republican parts of Illinois. They wanted to open nine or ten offices throughout the state, which would eat up a big part of his budget. But Rouse talked them out of this; if they decided to shuffle priorities later and to hire more legislative staffers in Washington, it would generate bad press in downstate newspapers if doing so meant shuttering an office in a smaller community. Wait until the office is established and priorities are set, Rouse counseled, before you commit to opening too many outposts back home.

Those were the sorts of decisions that counted as important before Barack Obama ran for president. And even the decisions he had to make

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