Barack Obama was elected America’s first black president promising hope and change — but he inherited an economy at risk of collapse and a military fighting two wars abroad.
So the 47-year-old president-elect turned to a deep bench of trusted Chicagoans to fill top jobs at the White House and positions in his Cabinet.
At least 16 Chicagoans had or have high-profile administration jobs, excluding junior staffers. In interviews with the Tribune, 12 of them reflected on their White House years and their relationships with the Obamas.
The “Obama people,” as they came to be called, had known him since he was Michelle’s boyfriend, or a fresh-faced Illinois state senator, or a candidate crushed in a 2000 campaign for the U.S. House.
Among friends and political allies he found his first two chiefs of staff, Rahm Emanuel and William Daley; two senior advisers, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod; and two Cabinet secretaries, Arne Duncan at the Education Department and Penny Pritzker, still at Commerce.
A top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, was a fellow professor at the University of Chicago.
Two chiefs of staff to the first lady were, like Michelle Obama, Chicago lawyers: Susan Sher and Tina Tchen.
In choosing so many who hailed from his adopted home, Obama trod a path earlier presidents had taken: JFK had his “Irish Mafia”; Jimmy Carter brought in Georgians; Bill Clinton, Arkansans; and George W. Bush, Texans.
With less than four months left in the Obama presidency, it’s a wistful time for the die-hard loyalists who will keep the 44th president’s legacy alive.
Most who served in the crucible of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have already moved on — most notably Emanuel, who has been mayor of Chicago since 2011.
Duncan, 51, who had the helm of the Education Department for seven years, cried the day of his 2015 farewell in the State Dining Room. A former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Duncan was a high school friend of Michelle Obama’s brother. He has known Barack Obama for years — first as “Michelle’s boyfriend.”
He said his long ties to Obama meant familiarity. There were no airs or facades and they could speak their minds freely.
“It’s the ultimate speak-truth-to-power,” he said of talking to the president. “Hopefully it made me more valuable to him, because he knew I was going to tell him the truth.”
Daley said the Obamas “were very comfortable with people that were heavily involved in (Barack Obama’s) campaign for a very long time, or involved with them personally before the campaign.”
No one exemplified that more than Jarrett, who will stay for the full eight years of Obama’s presidency. Daley called her “probably the most powerful senior adviser next to Bobby Kennedy, because of the closeness personally.”
The shared Chicago roots did not mean the group sang in harmony while putting in punishing hours to tamp down crises large and small.
“Everybody clashes inside the White House,” said Daley, 68. “I clashed with Valerie. She clashed with me. Axelrod clashed with Rahm. Rahm clashed with Axelrod. That’s the game. It’s been out there.”
Historically, many of the country’s chief executives have been criticized for encircling themselves with hometown advisers.
“When you hit troubled waters and it’s not working like a Swiss watch,” critics are quick to pounce on the staff, Emanuel said.
He said his former boss President Bill Clinton was derided for having too many people from Georgetown, where Clinton was an undergrad, or from the Renaissance Weekend, an ideas festival for high achievers that he and Hillary Clinton attended.
The people serving Obama “served him honorably,” Emanuel said. “Could there have been better, smarter people? I don’t know. But it was an incredible team that got incredible things done.
“Here’s the deal: Nobody in his administration had a financial, personal or ethical scandal, and a lot of work got done … in some very challenging times,” Emanuel said.
Along with the grind, there were pinch-me moments: flights on Air Force One, state dinners, celebrity visits and star-studded private parties at the Executive Mansion for the first couple’s milestone birthdays — her 50th in 2014, and his 55th in August.
“It was a layer of one intense, thrilling thing laid on top of the other,” said Michael Strautmanis, 47, a friend of Obama for 25 years. A lawyer, he worked in the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement.
Before the president’s 55th birthday blowout, Strautmanis found himself snapping as many White House photos as he could — before he was required to check his cellphone, along with other guests.
The Chicagoans fostered hometown traditions.
Strautmanis remembers the inner circle’s crosstown baseball rivalry, pitting him and other Cubs fans against the country’s most famous White Sox fan: the president.
Others remember when Eli’s cheesecakes turned up. Or Garrett popcorn.
“If (there) was one change we did not bring to D.C., we did not bring good pizza,” Strautmanis said.
West suburban La Grange native Ben LaBolt, 35, who worked in the White House press shop and both presidential campaigns, said he and other alumni have been nostalgic of late. They keep in touch professionally or via Facebook, a Listserv and social get-togethers.
“We’ll all look back at the end of such an unlikely success story that we poured our heart and soul into,” LaBolt said, “and are proud of the results.”
Goolsbee said that when Dan Balz, a Washington Post reporter, visited campaign headquarters in Chicago at the end of the 2008 election, he told staffers: “For the rest of your life, you guys are going to be the ‘Obama people.'”
Goolsbee, then 39, said Balz’s words puzzled the 20-something staffers who were working on their first presidential campaign. But the professor, who returned in 2011 to the Booth School of Business, said Balz was dead-on.
“That is what we’ll be known as,” he said, “and probably that was one of the biggest things in any of our lives.”
Rahm Emanuel
Bill Daley
David Axelrod
Desiree Rogers
Penny Pritzker
Arne Duncan
Austan Goolsbee
Sam Kass
Ben LaBolt
Katie McCormick Lelyveld
Susan Sher
Michael Strautmanis
Staffers: Obama changed as president, but never ‘went Washington’
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Rahm Emanuel
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Rahm Emanuel, then a Chicago congressman and Clinton White House veteran, wasn’t initially warm to the idea of becoming Barack Obama‘s chief of staff.
“F—, no,” he told David Axelrod when the campaign guru phoned Emanuel late in the 2008 campaign to sound him out about the post. The exchange is from Axelrod’s memoir, “Believer.”
“Absolutely not. I’m not f—— doing this, David,” Axelrod quoted Emanuel as saying. “Tell him not to call.”
Ray LaHood, a Republican who in the fall of ’08 was about to retire from Congress, wrote in his memoir, “Seeking Bipartisanship,” that Emanuel called him to discuss the feeler.
LaHood said he told Emanuel he could stay in Congress and become House speaker. LaHood warned that the White House job would mean 16-hour workdays and time away from his children.
“A terrible idea,” LaHood advised Emanuel.
Emanuel said there were many reasons for his initial hesitation: His House seat was safe; his wife and three kids would need to stay in Chicago at first; a major home renovation had just been completed; and the chief of staff’s work is 24/7.
But he wound up taking the job and holding it until October 2010, when he returned to Chicago to run for mayor. In an interview, Emanuel, 56, said he accepted after being reminded that his immigrant grandfather said that when a president asks for something, there are only two answers: “Yes” and “Yes, sir.”
Obama and Emanuel were both liberal Chicago Democrats but had temperaments of fire and ice.
Emanuel was so hard-knuckled that he earned the nickname “Rahmbo.” The incoming president was not easily ruffled and exuded cool.
Differences aside, both were doers.
They kept a list of the president’s goals and crossed them off once accomplished, Emanuel said. It was updated annually. “He’s the most disciplined checklist man,” the mayor said.
The list, written in Obama’s left-handed script, set out about 25 to 30 goals, by category: economic, domestic, foreign policy, legislative, administrative and “extras as we cleared up some of the other stuff,” Emanuel said.
Unforeseen crises would arise, as in 2010. “We didn’t have (on the list) the BP well would explode, so obviously things change,” Emanuel said.
“We met every day, multiple times, but privately, twice a day at minimum,” Emanuel said. “We used to go through the checklist every week.”
Emanuel and Obama had what they called a “wrap” every evening before the president left for dinner with his family. Emanuel and other staffers often remained at work. “I used to joke at the White House, we were a ‘family-friendly White House'” to the first family alone, he said.
When Obama took over, the economy was in a tailspin, and wars were being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A single issue of that magnitude could define a presidency, Emanuel said. He gave Obama plaudits for handling multiple, simultaneous crises.
The mayor highlighted the “incredible burst” of legislation in the first two years, including the stimulus, financial reform, the auto industry bailout and the health care overhaul. And he credited Obama with ending the recession.
Emanuel also takes pride for having identified, with Obama and the vice president, a need for the CIA to ratchet up the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
He said that when the CIA first briefed the three of them, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks “was like a footnote — a gloss-over.” To inject fresh urgency to the pursuit, it was decided that the CIA director would be required to travel to the White House monthly to brief the president directly on the hunt for bin Laden.
Emanuel, who was mayor when bin Laden was killed, remembered feeling a sense of “justice” and “catharsis.”
He kept the president’s checklist in the flap of a leather portfolio, the kind that holds a legal pad. When he left Obama’s service, the president gave him a photo of the two men from a “wrap” and a copy of the 2010 checklist, both framed.
The president also gave him a new portfolio. “You’re going to need this for your own to-do list,” Obama told him.
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Bill Daley
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In one of the most iconic photos of the Obama White House years, the president and his national security team huddle in the Situation Room, staring at a live feed of the daring mission to capture or kill 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
William Daley, from Chicago’s famous political dynasty, is among the dozen presidential aides in the enduring image.
Obama’s chief of staff at the time, Daley stands out for his suit and tie in a more casually dressed group. (He says then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates had worn a suit, too, but had taken off his jacket.)
As he dressed for work that day, Daley said he thought about his late mother, Eleanor “Sis” Daley. He knew she would have urged him to go to church and to wear a suit coat for what would be a big day at the White House. He attended Sunday Mass in St. Stephen Martyr Catholic Church on Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the White House.
“I wanted to pray because I figured one way or another, this is a huge day,” Daley said. “Obviously the safety of the SEAL teams and the individuals was something that I wanted to pray for — not to get Osama bin Laden — but to pray for the safety of the SEAL teams.”
Daley had joined Obama’s White House in January 2011, two months after the disastrous mid-term elections that saw the GOP retake the House and enlarge its minority in the Senate. Daley, who has held top jobs in banking and telecommunications, was commerce secretary for President Bill Clinton and chaired Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000.
He said Obama and his inner circle sought him as chief of staff for two primary reasons. One, he had Clinton-era chops working in a divided government. Second, it was thought he would be welcomed by a business community that is, in his words, “suspect of Democrats.”
Daley sat in with Obama in daily intelligence briefings each morning. In one of the first he attended, the president was told about a compound in Abbottabad where bin Laden might be hiding, he said.
“I was like, ‘Holy Jesus,’ ” Daley said. “This is a game changer.”
The case went “dead” for about a month. Then the hunt “became real hot and then it was like multiple, multiple meetings” a week, he said. “It was kind of hard to hide, the fact that the president was in the Situation Room a lot.”
The day bin Laden was killed, “there was a lot of joy that he had actually been taken off the battlefield,” Daley said. But there was no time to gloat.
The SEALs had to fly back to Afghanistan, where the mission originated. Decisions had to be made about how to dispose of bin Laden’s remains — he was buried at sea — and how to tell the world that he was dead. There were fears that U.S. embassies would be attacked in retaliation, Daley said.
In one sense, though, Daley said he could exhale. “I said to my wife ‘If the president fired me today, it would have been an incredible three months or four months,’ because it was a truly historic event. An incredible honor to be a participant.”
Daley had planned to stay on at the White House through the November 2012 re-election campaign, but left in a staff shake-up late in January 2012.
His tenure coincided with turbulence in the U.S. and abroad. The Arab Spring spawned unrest in the Middle East. The NATO-led military intervention in Libya led to the death of Moammar Gadhafi. At home, the country narrowly averted a debt default, and Democrats and Republicans could not reach a grand bargain on the budget or debt and deficit reduction.
As the son and brother of the two longest-serving Chicago mayors, Daley was no stranger to tough politics. But he recoiled at the divisiveness he saw after his 10-year absence from Washington. “There’s all this sort of personal, everybody-hates-everybody sort of thing,” he said. “And it’s crazy.”
He remembered phoning an old acquaintance, then-House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, early on. “I said, ‘Mr. Speaker, all right, let’s have dinner. You bring a guy, I’ll bring somebody. No agenda, just kind of reconnect.’ “
“Like the next day, (then-Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid was complaining — or his people were complaining — about me having dinner with Boehner before I had dinner with him or other Democrats,” Daley said.
“When Clinton was there — I was there in the late ’90s — they did impeach him, so it wasn’t like everybody just sat around and sang ‘Kumbaya’ and got along. They impeached the guy. Yet there was stuff done and there was a motivation to get stuff done. That’s been really not there, and I saw that pretty early.”
Daley, who in 2013 campaigned briefly for Illinois governor, now is managing partner and head of U.S. operations for Argentiere Capital AG in Chicago, a Swiss hedge fund.
He’s 68 and at this stage, he doesn’t imagine working for another president: “It’s just not in anybody’s cards — mine or theirs, I assume.”
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David Axelrod
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A president’s job, David Axelrod said, “is just enormous by definition.”
Axelrod, Obama’s longtime campaign guru and senior White House adviser, recalled one day that left him whipsawed: March 26, 2009.
“Axe,” the top political strategist for Obama since his U.S. Senate run in 2004, had an office adjacent to the Oval Office. The proximity underscored his importance in the White House in a way no organizational chart could. He was a top-ranking adviser who oversaw the speechwriting office, led the way on messaging and kept a close eye on polling.
That Thursday, nine weeks into Obama’s administration, the schedule was jampacked.
Obama started the day by examining some “menacing signs out of North Korea,” Axelrod said, then had a security briefing and a meeting of his auto task force to decide whether the government would bail out the domestic auto industry.
“There was a deadline associated with it,” Axelrod remembered, “because the auto companies were literally gasping for air.”
Axelrod said the auto briefing left Obama with “a lot more questions,” so the president told the group to reconvene that evening.
Later the same day, Obama stood before an audience in the East Room for a nationwide, online town hall meeting. And he had meetings on Iraq and Afghanistan.
When Team Obama met again that night, advisers were split on extending a lifeline to Detroit. Public attitudes were sour about another bailout to the auto sector. Some argued the government should let free-market forces prevail even if that meant GM and Chrysler were done.
According to Axelrod, Obama was told “some of the cities in Michigan were already depressed and that if the auto industry collapsed, many more would be.”
Obama made the call, saying: “I understand that the polling is not good on this, but we’re in the middle of a great recession here, and if the auto industry goes down, there will be a million jobs that go with it because of the supply chain,” according to Axelrod.
It was a close, tough call, Axelrod said. “He was more willing than most politicians I know to look past his own political well-being and pursue remedies to big problems.”
After the meeting, Axelrod went to his office and “collapsed” into a chair.
The phone rang. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was on the line telling Axelrod: “Get over here. Fargo is under water.”
“I thought to myself, by God, is this real life?” Axelrod remembered. “Or is this an episode of ‘The West Wing’?”
In late 2014, the U.S. Treasury said it had recovered $70.4 billion of the $79.7 billion it gave to GM, Chrysler and other firms through the Automotive Industry Financing Program.
“It now seems like a no-brainer,” Axelrod said, “but it was deeply unpopular when he did it.”
He left the White House after two years and later was a top strategist for Obama’s 2012 re-election.
Axelrod, 61, founded and now leads the University of Chicago’s nonpartisan Institute of Politics, has a podcast, “The Axe Files,” and is a CNN senior political commentator.
A former political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, he wrote about his life and the Obama years in a 2015 memoir, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.” He knows Obama’s fortunes have risen and fallen and is gratified that a slim majority of Americans give him a thumbs up.
“More and more people come up to me,” Axelrod said, “and say, ‘I wish he could stay.'”
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Desiree Rogers
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Desiree Rogers, the first social secretary for the Obamas, said the couple borrowed from President Andrew Jackson in wanting to open up the White House as the “People’s House.”
But two people who brazenly crashed a State Dinner for the prime minister of India in November 2009 helped put an early end to Rogers’ high-profile White House tenure.
Rogers acknowledges the breach hastened her departure a few months later but made a point to say her office was not responsible for “checking people in and out of the White House complex.” That fell to the Secret Service, said Rogers, who was taken to task for not stationing one of her own aides with a checklist of invited guests at the entrance.
“I don’t spend a lot of time looking back and going back over what’s done,” said Rogers, who returned to Chicago and is now CEO of Johnson Publishing. “I think that enough’s been written and said about this. I don’t need to add to it.”
What she prefers to talk about are the 300-plus events she and her staff arranged — and the hard work that followed the euphoria of Barack Obama’s first win.
She recalls when the Rockettes kicked up their heels for the Obamas’ first White House Christmas. When Earth, Wind & Fire fired up a ball in 2009 for the nation’s governors, who danced in a conga line. When Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans enlivened the South Lawn at a concert called “Fiesta Latina,” and saluted new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the high court’s first Hispanic jurist. Some guests wept, Rogers said.
There was camaraderie in the White House from Day One, since many staffers were old friends, campaign aides or volunteers, she said. And there was often physical evidence of the Chicago roots many of them shared — Chicago newspapers, Garrett popcorn and Eli’s cheesecake.
“It was a 24/7 job, that’s for sure,” Rogers said.
“It could have been something as simple as ‘What table is so and so sitting at?’ or ‘We need to ask somebody’ or ‘How are we going to move from this room to the next room?’ Or ‘We’d like something changed’ or ‘The time has to change’ or ‘A meeting is going over.’ ‘We’re going to have to cancel that.’ Or ‘The weather is bad, we have to cancel the whole thing.'”
She met the Obamas in the 1980s when dating investor John Rogers Jr., from whom she is now divorced.
“In my mind, it’s been an extraordinary time for America,” said Rogers, who has been in touch with the first family infrequently since leaving the White House in February 2010.
“Obviously, they’re the first African-Americans to be in those positions, and I don’t think we can underestimate the kind of hope and, I would say, clarity that that gives to others in terms of what they can accomplish,” she said. “We can never underestimate what that means to people that look like them.”
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Penny Pritzker
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In 2013, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, a late arrival to the Obama Cabinet, hung an old-fashioned sign on her office door that said “Open for Business.”
It signaled that the country’s top commercial diplomat, a Chicago billionaire charged with advocating for U.S. businesses in this country and overseas, was ready to get to work.
But in the offing was what she called one of her tenure’s “lowest points” — the 16-day federal government shutdown.
Roughly 30,000 of the nearly 47,000 employees at Commerce were furloughed, unsure whether they would be paid for the time they were not working. Ultimately they were.
Pritzker, having led businesses in the private sector, found it demoralizing to see staff deemed “nonessential” walk out the door indefinitely with the expectation they’d be happy once back. Meantime, remaining staff had to pick up the slack.
It was an affront to Pritzker, then attending an Asian summit on her first international trip as secretary, when a Thai official told the U.S. delegation: “We’re so sorry you’re shut down. I’m sure you can’t afford to buy your lunch. We’ll buy you lunch.”
Looking back, she views the shutdown as a “very bizarre” chapter of her Obama years, during which she visited 37 foreign countries, some more than once. One focus was Cuba after diplomatic ties were restored.
Almost two decades ago, she met Obama after his brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, taught her son and daughter to play basketball. Pritzker was Obama’s national finance chair during his first White House run.
A Hyatt hotels heiress, Pritzker has holdings that Forbes estimates are worth $2.4 billion. She has her own Gulfstream jet, which she said she sometimes uses on government trips.
Pritzker said she’s “never liked the Forbes thing.”
“First of all, I don’t know how they would know, and second is, I don’t think you should judge a person by some dollar figure.”
Pritzker, 57, said after Obama’s presidency it’s likely she will return to Chicago and do what she’s always done: “build businesses.”
“My working assumption is my husband and I are going back to Chicago, as we say, to get the band back together in one city, and we’ll figure it out from there.”
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Arne Duncan
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As a teenager, Arne Duncan became friends with Craig Robinson. The South Siders bonded on the basketball court playing in summer leagues and 3-on-3 tournaments. Duncan also got to know the teenage girl the boys called “Craig’s little sister” — Michelle Robinson, now the nation’s first lady.
Years later, Duncan and their pick-up basketball “crew” met a law student they all knew as “Michelle’s boyfriend.”
Fast forward to Oct. 2, 2015, when President Barack Obama bade farewell to Duncan, his long-standing U.S. education chief.
“I pushed Arne to stay,” Obama said, calling Duncan “one of the more consequential” education chiefs.. Duncan had been Chicago Public Schools chief for nearly eight years when president-elect Obama chose him to lead the Education Department. Duncan, 51, said he was reluctant to take the Cabinet job. He loved Chicago and was hoping to hit the 10-year mark at CPS.
But a life in sports — he co-captained Harvard’s team and spent four years as a pro in Australia — gave him an unwavering team spirit.
“To have a chance to be part of his team, you could say the ultimate team, it changed my life forever. It changed my family’s life forever.”
Inevitably, there were wins and losses in the capital.
He said he’s proud for saving “a couple hundred thousand” teachers’ jobs through the stimulus bill; investing more than $1 billon in early-learning programs; and putting $40 billion into Pell grants. High school graduation rates soared for whites, blacks, Latinos and Native Americans, according to Duncan, who said that success endures.
He ultimately left his Cabinet post for family reasons. His wife and two children moved to D.C. with him but returned to Chicago in June 2015. For Duncan, months of commuting, while in a job that over the years had him visit schools in all 50 states, didn’t cut it.
Obama “gets” the importance of family, Duncan said.
The educator recalled Election Day 2012. The Obamas’ old friends — the “crew” — hit the court in Chicago as voters decided whether to give the president a second term. Duncan was nervous but found Obama “absolutely at peace.” He remembered Obama saying yes, he wanted another four years but he already had what was important: “two healthy kids and a great wife.”
Duncan now is a managing partner in Chicago for Emerson Collective, formed by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs.
He’s trying to bring jobs and hope to areas rife with gunfire. Duncan pays regular visits to the Cook County Jail to better understand “shooters.”
“Chicago’s had more murders this year than New York and LA combined, which is both heartbreaking and absolutely crazy,” he said. “I’m just obsessed trying to reduce shootings.”
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Austan Goolsbee
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Six weeks after being elected president, Barack Obama gathered his top economic and political advisers in the Loop to hash out steps to rescue the dismal U.S. economy.
Before the president-elect entered, the gathered economists rattled off the bad news to bring the politicos — including campaign strategist David Axelrod and incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel — up to speed.
The stock market was plummeting, banks were at risk of being shuttered, millions of U.S. homes were under water and the faltering GDP was about to go epically negative, the economists warned.
“Each one is worse than the last — and they’re all catastrophic,” economist Austan Goolsbee remembered.
Goolsbee, 47, had known Barack and Michelle Obama for years through the University of Chicago. A Booth School of Business professor, Goolsbee had advised then-state Sen. Obama on economic issues since the 2004 U.S. Senate race, and was now tapped for Obama’s White House Council of Economic Advisers.
The recession had begun in December 2007 but Goolsbee said at the time of the meeting the public didn’t realize the depth of the economic crisis, thinking it was largely a matter of turmoil in the financial markets and Wall Street was getting its due.
At one point, Axelrod exclaimed : “You’re telling me that it’s going to be horrible, but America really has not had a ‘Holy s—‘ moment, so they don’t even know?”
The economists nodded.
Goolsbee said it fell to economist Christina Romer to give Obama the news.
“And she says explicitly: ‘Mr. President, America has yet to have its ‘Holy s—‘ moment, and they’re going to have it.’ “
“We’re about to have the worst recession in our lifetime,” he recalled Romer saying.
“Rahm is sitting there, I don’t know if it’s dawning on him how bad it’s going to be, or he’s just mad. He’s giving Christina the stink eye the whole time,” Goolsbee said.
She and the others pushed for a stimulus bigger than the New Deal. Obama listened intently and interrupted with questions as the meeting wore on for hours.
Goolsbee briefed on the battered housing sector. Tim Geithner, picked to run Treasury, talked about banks and the financial system. Romer, designated to chair the Council of Economic Advisers, gave a forecast on economic growth and the GDP.
The economists feared another Great Depression was looming. At one point, according to Goolsbee, Obama cut through the tension with a joke: “Is it too late to ask for a recount?”
After the session, Goolsbee told Obama that it had to have been the worst briefing an incoming president had gotten since FDR in 1932 or Lincoln in 1860.
“Goolsbee, that’s not even my worst briefing this week,” he quoted Obama in reply.
The professor’s move to D.C. just as the housing bubble burst brought so much anxiety that one friend labeled Goolsbee a “one-man, walking housing crisis.”
He and his wife had been living in Lincoln Park in 2007 when they bought an 1888 house in Hyde Park. In the dismal market, though, their first home didn’t sell; and after three months, renovation of the second home “metastasized” into a long, costly rehabilitation.
So they rented out the first home and, once repairs were complete, found tenants for the second. Now the owners of two homes had to find a rental in Washington.
“We were looking at a big abyss for a moment,” said Goolsbee, who unloaded the Lincoln Park home several months later.
As was the nation. The GDP in fourth-quarter of 2008 showed a decrease of 8.2 percent — worse even than the forecast that afternoon in Chicago.
Less than a month after Obama was sworn in, Congress approved his $787 billion stimulus plan and the government took steps, including a bailout of the auto industry, to save what had been a hemorrhaging economy.
Goolsbee recalled working 12-hour days in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where he caught naps on his office floor and at times ate a dinner of M&M’S and Tic Tacs.
There were 8.7 million U.S. jobs lost in the Great Recession — and it took until May 2014 to get them back.
Goolsbee breathed easier after several months when the jobless numbers started trending in the right direction and it was clear the financial system “wasn’t going to collapse.” When Romer returned to teaching in 2010, Goolsbee took over as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, a Cabinet-level spot.
Reflecting on the calamitous downturn, Goolsbee said historians will judge it a “monumental achievement” that the country did not plunge into another Great Depression.
“The fact that there wasn’t is testament partly to what the Fed did, partly some of what the Bush administration put in place but also due to the actions taken by Barack Obama.”
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Sam Kass
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The friendship between Sam Kass and the Obamas was forged in Kenwood, when he was personal chef to the presidential candidate and his wife.
Once a cook at Avec, a West Loop restaurant and Obama favorite, Kass entered the fishbowl of the White House with the first family. There he became as close as kin.
“I’ve known them for so long and been in the trenches of both the campaign in Chicago and then into White House,” the 36-year-old University of Chicago history graduate said. “You know, people lean on each other and stick together and really support each other.”
Kass came to the White House with the country’s “first foodies” as an assistant chef. He cooked their 6:30 p.m. family dinners and lent a hand at major galas.
He was named White House food initiatives coordinator when he arrived. By the time he left in 2014, he had become executive director of the first lady’s “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign.
Kass was like a big brother to Sasha and Malia and just as close to their parents. He often golfed or played billiards with Barack Obama. He vacationed with the Obamas in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii and dined out with them at trendy restaurants in D.C.
When Kass married journalist Alex Wagner in Westchester County, N.Y., in 2014, the Obamas were among the guests.
Kass was a force behind Michelle Obama’s White House garden. He helped select the crops, monitored the plants and foraged vegetables and herbs for the family’s dinners.
He knew the president had the world’s largest inbox. Yet the family’s evening meal remained sacrosanct. “The thing that I’d say was amazing was just the fact that every night, considering how busy they were, they made sitting down together and having dinner as a family a priority,” Kass said.
Kass said he took part in food policy meetings during the day, started cooking about 5 p.m. and went back to work into the “wee hours of the morning.”
“Every day and every week,” he said. “It is pretty brutal. And every weekend, without exception.”
After his marriage, Kass joined his wife in New York City. After a stint with NBC he founded Trove, which strategizes with startups at the crossroads of health, sustainability and climate change.
Kass also is writing a cookbook focused on the issues he champions: eating healthy food and respecting the planet.
Cooking on one of world’s biggest stages, and striving to transform America’s palate, made long hours behind the White House stoves worth it, as he tells it.
“It’s a real honor and privilege most people don’t get to have,” Kass said.
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Ben LaBolt
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On April 20, 2010, a “national incident report” alerted assistant White House press secretary Ben LaBolt to a problem on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
A deadly explosion had triggered the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
LaBolt, from La Grange in Chicago’s western suburbs and a graduate of Lyons Township High School, first worked for Obama in his U.S. Senate press office. In a nod to his surname, David Axelrod liked to call him “Lightning.”
The BP oil disaster blackened beaches, wiped out fish, birds and other wildlife, and sent tourism and commercial fishing into a tailspin, all as the crisis played out on the TV news.
Pundits had Obama, already knee-deep in the economic crisis, in their sights, LaBolt said. “The first thing reporters said was, ‘This could end Barack Obama’s presidency,'” he said. “They were saying all of his political capital could be gone by the end of this crisis.”
The crisis became LaBolt’s, too, because his portfolio in the White House press shop included climate change and energy.
“It was seven days a week — long, long, long days,” he said. “The frustrating part is it’s important to show that every effort was made to contain the spill, but until the problem is solved substantively, communications can only do so much.”
Five agonizing months later, the oil well was permanently sealed. “You’re too tired to feel satisfaction at the end of a crisis like that,” he said.
LaBolt said people have misconceptions about how the press office operates.
“I think people think that communications is about spin,” he said. “That it’s about cherry-picking facts and sand-dusting rough edges and it involves distortion.
“And it really doesn’t. It’s really about putting together a narrative about the president’s agenda that is compelling and persuasive to the people he will need to reach for that agenda to succeed.”
In the month after the blown-out well was sealed, LaBolt left the White House to work as the spokesman for Rahm Emanuel’s first mayoral race in 2011. Having worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign, LaBolt then became national press secretary for the 2012 effort.
In 2013 he co-founded The Incite Agency, a Washington-based strategic communications firm that boasted on its website: “We’ve defined and protected the Obama brand and managed communications for one of the most complex c-suites in the world — during historic opposition.”
Incite was recently acquired by Bully Pulpit Interactive, where LaBolt is a partner.
Now 35, LaBolt is not inclined to jump back into the political fray. “I did 12 years in politics,” he said, “and that was the right amount of time.”
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Katie McCormick Lelyveld
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Katie McCormick Lelyveld worked for Michelle Obama before she was one of the best-known women on the planet.
In the months leading up to the 2008 presidential campaign, she and the future first lady flew on Southwest Airlines, avoiding the “C” seats if they could. During flight delays, Lelyveld played Uno with Malia and Sasha Obama.
Lelyveld, who handled campaign communications and went on to become the first lady’s press secretary, remembers being grateful before the Iowa caucuses if a single news photographer showed up for a Michelle Obama appearance. That changed with Barack Obama‘s upset win in the caucuses.
After some early campaign miscues, Michelle Obama saw her poll ratings shoot up after her speech to the 2008 Democratic National Convention. And when her husband claimed the White House, interest in the woman who said she would be “Mom-in-Chief” soared, Lelyveld said. Malia then was 10 and Sasha 7.
Lelyveld, who grew up in the Lincoln Park neighborhood and attended the Latin School and St. Ignatius College Prep, said efforts to let people get to know the first family had to be balanced with keeping “what was very private to them private.”
She worked on everything from Michelle Obama’s policy initiatives to trips overseas. Ironically, Lelyveld said two events she handled that drew the most press were the arrival of the Obamas’ dog, Bo, and the unveiling of the daughters’ swing set on the South Lawn.
Highlights included flying on Air Force One for the first time to accompany Michelle Obama to a get-together in Strasbourg, France, with then-French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
Such experiences “are all blending together now,” Lelyveld said. “And now my mom would be yelling at me because I didn’t keep a journal.”
Today Lelyveld, 37, is vice president for communications and public affairs for Human Longevity Inc., a genetics-based medical research firm in La Jolla, Calif. She married a former Secret Service agent (they had met when both worked at the White House) and they have two young sons.
Lelyveld, like many ex-staffers, said she remains “fiercely loyal” to Michelle Obama.
“I am a better professional and person and daughter and mom because of what I learned from her,” she said. “My opportunity to watch how she parented and how she carried herself personally and professionally shaped me in ways I didn’t realize at the time.”
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Susan Sher
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At home in pajamas in her Georgetown apartment on a Sunday night, Susan Sher was scrolling through emails when one caught her attention.
It told White House staff on the health care team to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Sher lived across the hall from fellow Chicagoan Valerie Jarrett, a senior presidential adviser, so she knocked on her door to say: “We’re going back.”
Fourteen months into the Obama presidency, Sher had come to expect the unexpected.
It is rare for the House to cast votes on a Sunday night, but on March 21, 2010, Sher joined dozens of anxious staff huddled in front of TVs to watch the narrowly decided vote on President Barack Obama‘s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act.
It was almost 11 p.m. before the bill passed, 219-212, over the objections of all 178 Republicans in the House. The vote cemented congressional passage of the bill, and cheers erupted in the White House.
Obama invited his assembled aides to celebrate on the Truman Balcony on the early spring night. “And I mean secretaries to the highest level staffers,” Sher said.
Sher had joined the Obama administration at its start. First serving in the White House counsel’s office, she kept a title there after she moved to the East Wing and became chief of staff to Michelle Obama. The two women had been colleagues in then-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley‘s office and at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
In Washington, Sher had a role in the first lady’s policy initiatives, her foreign trips and blockbuster galas such as state dinners.
Today Sher, 68, is a senior adviser to University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer and spends most of her time working as the university’s liaison to the Obama Foundation. The nonprofit is building the Obama Presidential Center, expected to open in 2021.
She’s seen the first lady every few months since she left an adrenaline-fueled two years at the White House. “When you leave, it takes quite a while for that adrenaline to get back to a state of normalcy — six months, a year,” Sher said.
One regret: Sher wishes she had looked up more often from her BlackBerry during trips through the White House and taken it all in the way she did the night health-care reform passed. As she tells it, Champagne was uncorked. The ushers, scrounging for food for the revelers, ended up reheating frozen egg rolls.
An acquaintance of the president since 1991, Sher said she’d never seen Obama like this — “almost gleeful and thrilled. Just happy.”
The celebration lasted past midnight, when Nancy-Ann DeParle, who led the White House Office of Health Reform, told Obama that decorum meant no one would leave until he did.
“So then he left, and we all left.”
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Michael Strautmanis
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It was a springtime game of H-O-R-S-E, some backyard hoops to let President Barack Obama blow off steam.
Obama hit the South Lawn court that Sunday with two White House aides: “body man” Reggie Love and Michael Strautmanis, a protege for almost 20 years.
Ultracompetitive, Obama won the first game. Love carried the second.
Deputy chief of staff Jim Messina interrupted the play with some big news: It appeared enough votes were nailed down in the House to ensure congressional passage of the landmark Affordable Care Act.
The House roll call vote was hours away, so, as Strautmanis told it, the players opted for one last round. In the interest of time, they shortened the game to P-I-G.
This time “Straut” — a nickname Obama gave him — was victorious.
His winning streak, in a sense, had begun years earlier. A former bicycle messenger who grew up in the Uptown neighborhood, Strautmanis was toiling in a low-level job at the Sidley Austin law firm.
He knocked on the door of Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer at the firm, and found a mentor. Her relationship with Barack Obama gave him a second mentor.
A graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law, Strautmanis became the Washington-based legislative director for then-Rep. Rod Blagojevich and volunteered in 2000 for Obama’s disastrous run for Congress. He couldn’t even persuade his grandmother to vote for his friend.
After Obama’s fortunes rose, Strautmanis joined his U.S. Senate office as chief counsel. He worked for the 2008 presidential campaign and then under senior adviser Valerie Jarrett with the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement.
“I was working for mentors and friends,” he said of his time in the White House. “I had a tremendous amount of responsibility, and I took it very seriously. It was thrilling and frightening and intense and very emotional.”
He said he got misty-eyed at milestones like the bill signing in 2010 to let gays serve openly in the military, and in small moments like seeing young staffers get their first chance to brief the president.
He left in March 2013 to become a vice president at the Walt Disney Co. The 47-year-old is now back in Chicago as vice president of civic engagement for the foundation that is building the Obama library and museum.
He knows well the peaks and valleys in Obama’s years in office — and is “incredibly proud” of the president and first lady.
“It’s great,” he said, “to see them running through the tape.”
kskiba@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @KatherineSkiba
![The Ravinia Festival Association filed a motion to dismiss the complaint by Karen Ettelson, former member of the organization’s Women’s Board, who sued the musical festival nonprofit and it’s Board of Trustees for “defamatory conduct,” along with seven other counts, after the Board of Trustees expunged her from the working board for an alleged conduct violation. The motion from the music non-profit, which hosts an annual music festival of the same name each summer, argues the lawsuit should be dismissed because there is no justified reason for the courts to intervene with Ettelson’s volunteer status, board members are immune from […]](https://www.chicagotribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Lake-County-News-Sun.jpg?w=620 "The Ravinia Festival Association filed a motion to dismiss the complaint by Karen Ettelson, former member of the organization’s Women’s Board, who sued the musical festival nonprofit and it’s Board of Trustees for “defamatory conduct,” along with seven other counts, after the Board of Trustees expunged her from the working board for an alleged conduct violation. The motion from the music non-profit, which hosts an annual music festival of the same name each summer, argues the lawsuit should be dismissed because there is no justified reason for the courts to intervene with Ettelson’s volunteer status, board members are immune from […]")
