Does Valerie Jarrett Get Secret Service Protection
The Other Power in the West Wing
WASHINGTON — President Obama was in a bind, and his chief of staff could not effigy out how he had ended upwards there.
Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were up in artillery last fall over a proposal to require employers to provide health insurance that covered nascency control. But caving in to the church's demands for a broad exemption in the proper name of religious freedom would pit the president confronting a crucial constituency, women's groups, who saw the coverage as bones preventive care.
Worried about the political and legal implications, the chief of staff, William K. Daley, reached out to the proposal's author, Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary. How, he wondered, had the White House been put in this situation with so little presidential input? "You are way out there on a limb on this," he recalls telling her.
"Information technology was then fabricated clear to me that, no, in that location were senior White House officials who had been involved and supported this," said Mr. Daley, who left his mail early this year.
What he did not realize was that while he was trying to put out what he considered a fire, the person fanning the flames was sitting just one flight up from him: Valerie Jarrett, the Obamas' first friend, the proposal'southward chief patron and a tenacious White House operator who would ultimately outmaneuver not just Mr. Daley only also the vice president in her endeavor to include the broadest possible contraception coverage in the assistants's wellness care overhaul.
A Chicagoan who helped Mr. Obama navigate his rise through that city's ambitious politics, Ms. Jarrett came to Washington with no national experience. Merely her unmatched access to the Obamas has fabricated her a driving strength in some of the most significant domestic policy decisions of the president'due south first term, her persuasive ability but amplified past Mr. Obama's insular direction fashion.
From the first, her official job has been somewhat vague. But nearly four years on, with Mr. Obama poised to have his party's renomination this week, her standing is clear, to her many admirers and detractors alike. "She is the unmarried most influential person in the Obama White Business firm," said ane former senior White House official, who similar many would speak candidly only on condition of anonymity.
"She'south there to try to promote what she understands to be what the president wants," the former aide said. "Ultimately the president makes his own decisions. The question that is hard to get within of, the black box, is whether she is really influencing him or merely executing decisions he's made. That's similar asking, 'Is the light on in the refrigerator when the door is closed?' "
Even so if that answer remains elusive, interviews with more than two dozen former and current administration officials offering a portrait of a woman wielding a many-faceted portfolio of power.
Partly it is her ubiquity, the guiding paw in everything from who sits on the Supreme Court to who sits next to whom at state dinners, the White Business firm staff memos peppered with "VJ thinks" or "VJ says." When the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett showed up for a private lunch with the president last July, the tabular array was set up for three.
Ms. Jarrett frequently serves as a counterweight to the more centrist Clinton veterans in the assistants, reminding them and her innately cautious boss that he came to Washington to practice big things. Some of his boldest moves, on women's issues, gay rights and clearing, have been in areas she cares most nigh. If Karl Rove was known as George W. Bush'southward political brain, Ms. Jarrett is Mr. Obama's spine.
She is also his gatekeeper, sometimes using that ability to tip the balance in internal debates. After the fiscal crisis, as the assistants grappled with how to rein in Wall Street, Ms. Jarrett made certain that Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman whose voice was being drowned out, got a meeting with the president. The result: tougher measures than the president'south acme economical advisers were advocating.
And she is the president'southward protector in chief, or equally Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner put it, the person who must be as "all-seeing as possible" in spotting trouble on the fashion. Those whom she deems to have failed Mr. Obama tell of scolding tardily-nighttime calls and her trademark accusation of expose: "You lot are hurting the president."
But she has also steered him toward controversy, equally in the contraception debate. And some of Mr. Obama's almost senior advisers worry — mayhap not entirely without jealousy — that her direct access to the president has at times led to one-half-baked conclusion making and unclear lines of authorisation.
Mr. Obama's first two chiefs of staff, Rahm Emanuel and Mr. Daley, clashed with Ms. Jarrett over strategic management and over who had greater authority to interpret and deport out the president's wishes, several officials said.
"He's got a real mess in the W Fly," said one close presidential adviser. "Valerie is finer the chief of staff, and he knows, but he doesn't know. She'south well-nigh like Nancy Reagan was with President Reagan, but more than powerful."
Two Who 'Clicked'
The week later the 2008 election, Mr. Obama implored Ms. Jarrett to join him at the White House. She was contemplating putting her name forrard for the Senate seat he had just vacated, merely she speedily put those aspirations aside.
Together they carved out her wide-ranging task description: senior adviser to the president and main liaison to the business community, state and local governments and the political left.
"For him, I recollect it was more important that she be at that place than that she have any specific task or set of problems," said Susan Sher, Michelle Obama'south 2d chief of staff and a longtime friend of Ms. Jarrett.
Ms. Jarrett declined to be quoted for this article, beyond a statement: "My part is to ensure that a broad and diverse range of perspectives are heard to inform the president's decision making process," she said, and to "give the president candid advice."
Parsing the psychology of the president'south bond with Ms. Jarrett has become something of a Due west Wing pastime: is she some sort of mother or sister figure to an only child whose own parents variously abandoned him?
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Close friends say that in Ms. Jarrett, the introverted president simply establish someone who understands what makes him tick amend than near.
They met more than ii decades ago, when Ms. Jarrett — a lawyer, like both Obamas — offered Mrs. Obama a chore in the Chicago mayor's office.
Ms. Jarrett was a unmarried female parent who had come up the ranks of city government, the daughter of a prominent African-American family. Her granddad, Robert Taylor, congenital much of Chicago'south public housing, her father was a pioneering doctor, and her mother had a Chicago street named after her for her work in early on childhood educational activity. Mr. Obama was a rootless merely ambitious Harvard police force graduate, looking to brand a political proper name.
At their outset dinner, they talked about a "philosophy of empowerment" for the downtrodden. "That's where we clicked," she later on told Ms. Sher, and from so on she was adamant to introduce Mr. Obama, almost 5 years her inferior, to the activists and donors he needed to move first to the legislature and so to the The states Senate.
In their small social circumvolve, Ms. Jarrett, who would become on to run a Chicago existent estate company and sit on numerous borough and corporate boards, "was always seen as the developed in the room," the one looked to for guidance, said John W. Rogers Jr., a longtime friend of both Ms. Jarrett and the president.
Replicating that role in the White Firm, however, has non been easy.
To some extent, Ms. Jarrett is part of a White Business firm tradition. Bill Clinton brought along his fellow Arkansan Bruce Lindsey as his Mr. Fix-It. Mr. Bush had his Texas confidantes, Karen Hughes and Harriet Miers.
But few take had the stature — and the power to stride outside traditional White House protocol — of Ms. Jarrett. She is the but staff fellow member who regularly follows the president home from the W Wing to the residence, a practice that has earned her the nickname "the Night Stalker." By solar day, Mr. Obama is "Mr. President" to her, but in social settings, he is just "Barack." When the Obamas take an out-of-town intermission, she often goes along.
Afterwards a ratings agency downgraded the nation's debt last yr, it was non the Treasury secretary at the president's side, helping map out how to manage the market's reaction. According to a participant in the discussion, information technology was Ms. Jarrett, who had joined Mr. Obama and a few close friends at Camp David for his birthday.
"In that location is an inherent claiming in managing anyone, this is not item to Valerie, who is a senior adviser and role of a structure, and also close personally with the family unit," said David Axelrod, the president'southward chief strategist. "Patently it's cleaner and less complicated if everyone is discussing things at the same meetings. Only it's a manageable trouble."
Aides say she never uses her individual time with the president to relitigate decisions. Still, the White House is organized effectually the principle that the president's time is an administration'south most valuable commodity, not to be spent on low-priority matters or those not fully vetted. Even so several officials say that is what happened with one of Ms. Jarrett's pet projects, Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics.
Based on her assurances that his personal appeal to the Olympic commission could assure the bargain, the president flew to Copenhagen. During the flying dorsum, CNN reported that Chicago had not survived the commencement round of voting.
"At that place was total silence," i official recalled. "It was a long trip dwelling house."
Ms. Jarrett cuts an elegant figure in the W Wing, with her pixie haircut and designer apparel. Aides say she can be thoughtful in little ways that matter, enlisting the president to rally staff members subsequently political or personal setbacks. But she can likewise be imperious — at one effect ordering a drinkable from a four-star general she mistook for a waiter — and fastened to the trappings of power in a fashion some in the White House consider unseemly for a member of the staff.
A case in point is her total-time Cloak-and-dagger Service item. The White House refuses to disclose the number of agents or their price, citing security concerns. Merely the appearance and so worried some aides that 2 were dispatched to urge her to give the item up.
She listened politely, one said, simply the agents stayed.
A Sometimes Testy Link
Working from a cozy part previously occupied by Mr. Rove, with a staff of well-nigh 3 dozen, Ms. Jarrett is the president'southward link to the earth exterior the White House chimera.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice occasionally uses Ms. Jarrett, with whom she has get friendly, as an informal back channel to pass along foreign policy views, officials said.
And Bob Riley, a quondam Republican governor of Alabama, remembers the style Ms. Jarrett responded to his pleas for equipment to contain the BP oil spill in 2010. "Within 24 hours, what we had been told was an impossible task was done," he said.
Often, though, Ms. Jarrett seems to be more of a lightning rod for complaints of White House insularity and a thin-skinned response to detractors.
She is widely blamed for the president's soured relationship with the business concern community. (To judge by donations, Wall Street has switched its allegiance to Hand Romney.) But Ms. Jarrett'south White Firm defenders say that the criticism is fundamentally misplaced and that she is merely an bachelor target for the financial community's acrimony over administration policies it dislikes. Behind the scenes, they say, Ms. Jarrett has advocated pro-business policy changes like a regular review of existing regulations.
Less well known is her testy relationship with certain elements of the president'south base.
She serves as the front door to the donors who helped elect the president, reviewing invitee lists to White House parties and candidates for patronage positions. Just she has snubbed some early supporters, among them the financier George Soros, ignoring his pleas for a substantive meeting on the economy with the president. The message she delivered, according to one person familiar with the exchanges, was that she felt Mr. Soros was "already on the team, and that while he might want to talk to the captain, the captain was very decorated."
Mr. Soros, who has spent tens of millions of dollars on Democratic candidates and causes, is largely sitting on the sidelines this presidential election.
With Ms. Jarrett'due south unquestioning belief in the president has come a tendency to accept political criticism personally, "even when information technology would be more useful non to," said Marilyn Katz, a Chicago friend of both Ms. Jarrett and the president. Some other friend compared her to a mother whose son can do no wrong: "Even when the neighbors telephone call, she says, 'No, no, that tin't be.' "
So when the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, publicly criticized some of the president'south antiterrorism policies, she swiftly shoved back. "Corking harm has been done," she warned in an e-mail he shared with colleagues. "There has been a material alienation of trust."
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A White Firm spokeswoman said Ms. Jarrett does respond aggressively when she feels that the president has been attacked.
But in an interview, Mr. Romero said that "she needs to empathise that we don't work for the White Firm, and our task is to criticize any president who is not doing the right affair."
Ms. Jarrett was similarly "livid," 1 former White Firm official said, with members of the Congressional Black Caucus who defendant the president of paying insufficient attention to the particular economic woes of blacks. When the writer and academic Cornel West joined in, calling Mr. Obama the "black mascot of Wall Street," Ms. Jarrett's response was "ruthless," Dr. W said.
He recalled a phone phone call in which she dismissed his criticism as sour grapes for not receiving a ticket to the inauguration, and said he after heard from friends that she was putting out the word that "1, I was crazy, and two, I was un-American."
"It was a thing of letting me know that I was, in her view, way out of line and that I needed to make it line," he said in an interview. "I conveyed to her: 'I'1000 not that kind of Negro. I'm a Jesus-loving black man who tells the truth, in the White House, in the crack firm or in whatever other house.' She got real serenity. It was clear that she was non used to being spoken to that way."
Driving the Agenda
When a seat on the Supreme Court opened upwards just months into Mr. Obama'south term, he immediately idea of Sonia Sotomayor. It would be a historic choice, making her the first Hispanic justice. But some advisers were worried by reports about her judicial temperament. Given the tough Senate votes coming up on health care and the economy, why not become with a safer pick?
Ms. Jarrett, dismissing the reports equally sexist, argued that appointing Ms. Sotomayor would ship an of import signal, recalled Anita Dunn, who was then the president'due south communications director.
Information technology was quintessential Valerie Jarrett, according to Ms. Dunn. Information technology is non and so much that she is Mr. Obama's liberal id. Rather, her vocalization is often the i at the table reminding anybody of the president's aspirational "beginning principles," that he "didn't just come to the White Business firm to hold the office, but to make alter," Ms. Dunn said.
That has been specially truthful when information technology comes to variety and bug she considers matters of civil rights.
Gay rights advocates say they considered Ms. Jarrett their "hush-hush weapon" in the White Business firm on bug like repealing the military's policy of "don't enquire, don't tell." And while aides said Mr. Obama constitute his ain way toward supporting same-sex spousal relationship, Ms. Jarrett "reinforced his instincts," Mr. Axelrod said. This is consistent with who you lot are, she told the president.
On immigration, Ms. Jarrett successfully urged the president to stop deporting certain illegal residents who arrived as children. And while some of his directorate worried virtually the political perils of legally challenging Arizona'southward tough immigration law, Ms. Jarrett argued that its primal provision — requiring the police to check the immigration status of people taken into custody — amounted to racial profiling, a civil rights issue "correct in the president's wheelhouse," recalled Pete Rouse, another senior Obama adviser. (Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld that provision, but struck downwardly most of the law.)
Perhaps no policy area better shows how Ms. Jarrett tin bulldoze the White Business firm agenda than the contraception mandate. Ms. Jarrett has a fiercely loyal following among those she backed for key positions throughout government, drawn mainly from a White House women's network she helped build and nurture. The managing director of the Domestic Policy Council, for instance, previously worked for her, and she counts Ms. Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, among her expert friends.
Through that network, Ms. Jarrett made clear her position that a broad exemption for religious employers like hospitals and universities could leave as many as i 1000000 women without the benefit. Ms. Sebelius was of like mind, announcing last August that but churches themselves would become a pass.
The resulting outcry prompted Mr. Daley to face Ms. Sebelius. (Through a spokeswoman, she said she recalled a chat with Mr. Daley but not the particulars he described.)
Catholics, a group Mr. Obama won in 2008, make up more than than a quarter of the electorate. Though almost personally back up birth control, Mr. Daley and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. worried virtually how forcing church-affiliated organizations to pay for it would play.
Moreover, they felt that the dominion put important Cosmic allies in the health care fight in a tough position, and potentially violated a law banning regulations that impose a substantial burden on religious expression.
Mr. Biden arranged for Cardinal Timothy 1000. Dolan of New York to meet with the president and limited the church's view. With the support of some of the president's political advisers, Ms. Jarrett pushed back in her own coming together with Mr. Obama, aides said. And she signaled Ms. Sebelius to "keep fighting — I'm with you on this," said one sometime official with noesis of the matter.
Merely by January, even friendly voices were accusing the president of throwing "his progressive Catholic allies nether the bus." Autonomous members of Congress were fielding calls from constituents who felt, in the words of 1, that this was a "big corrigendum." In a senior advisers meeting, the president, exasperated, ordered his senior staff to "figure it out," one participant said.
Merely if some expected meaning backtracking, they were mistaken. In telephone calls the next week, the president outlined his compromise: the burden for the coverage would shift from employers to insurers, but women who worked for religious organizations could even so avail themselves of the benefit.
"When the president called me," said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, "I could practically hear Valerie'due south influence."
Today, many of the issues Ms. Jarrett championed are existence replayed in the entrada. In recent ads, for instance, Mr. Romney has accused the president of using "his health care programme to declare state of war on religion." The president, for his function, has accused Mr. Romney of wanting to have women "back to the 1950s."
And Ms. Jarrett has added another office to her portfolio, traveling to swing states to campaign, sometimes at Mr. Obama's side.
"Homestretch," she keeps telling him.
"Homestretch?" he'll reply.
"Yes, well-nigh in that location," she says. "We've merely got the convention, then three debates."
Does Valerie Jarrett Get Secret Service Protection,
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/us/politics/valerie-jarrett-is-the-other-power-in-the-west-wing.html
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