ROBERT GIBBS’S HEADY WASHINGTON RISE was certified on a humid day in June when a procession of media and political fancies gathered in tribute to Tim Russert, the “Meet the Press” host who died of a heart attack several days earlier. The memorial service was a sweet, solemn and star-struck occasion that, as these events often do, yielded a neat snapshot of the Celebrity Washington food chain — who was up, who was down, who was winning the week.
In a smiling stampede of congratulations, mourners were wearing out the red-carpeted aisles of the Kennedy Center to get to Gibbs, a journeyman campaign flack who had latched onto Barack Obama’s Senate race four years earlier and has been his chief spokesman ever since. By now a senior adviser to Obama, Gibbs was here, along with Obama’s chief strategist and message guru, David Axelrod, to represent the soon-to-be Democratic nominee.
“The new It guys,” declared Anne Schroeder Mullins, a gossip columnist for Politico.com, noting the shameless run on Gibbs and Axelrod. “I bet they’re being inundated with people trying to book Barack on their shows.”
The paradox of this scene was that the Obama campaign’s communications strategy was predicated in part on an aggressive indifference to this insider set. Staff members were encouraged to ignore new Web sites like The Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which had gained instant cachet among the Washington smarty-pants set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, “I saw someone on cable say this. . . .”
The campaign bragged that Obama never even visited with the editorial board of The Washington Post — a decision that would have been unheard of for any serious candidate in a previous presidential cycle. “You could go to Cedar Rapids and Waterloo and understand that people aren’t reading The Washington Post,” Gibbs told me last month in Chicago.
It was a source of great amusement to Obama’s staff that people thought they could use conventional schmoozing practices to win favor with them. “In part because we were in Chicago and in part because of our approach, we did not do ‘cocktail party’ interviews,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the campaign’s communications director, who will be the deputy communications director at the White House. “These are interviews that you agree to because you were always bumping into the reporter at cocktail parties, and they keep asking for the candidate’s time. We could laugh every time our opponents would do them.”
There was a sense among Obama’s communications team that not only did they have a gifted candidate to ride but also that they had figured out new ways to maximize their advantages. The campaign highlighted its mastery of new political media that included a vast database of e-mail addresses and an ability to quickly put up Web sites and use blogs, online video and text messaging. They viewed themselves as “game changers” (the 2008 cliché for innovators), avatars of a New Way organization that had more in common with a Silicon Valley start-up — think Google or YouTube — than with any traditional political campaign that came before it.
But Obama’s New Way organization was grounded largely on Old School codes — notions of loyalty, aggressiveness and discretion. Keep things in the family. “We all believe this isn’t about us, it’s about something bigger than us as individuals,” Gibbs told me. “And that governed our ability to keep information to ourselves.”
As much as the Obama communications philosophy was geared to attacking George W. Bush, the operation itself had a lot in common with Bush’s presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004, and the Bush White House. Like Bush’s, Obama’s campaign brain trust was unusually small and close-knit. This was especially true of the candidate’s traveling orbit — “the plane” or “the bubble,” as it is known in campaign shorthand. Gibbs was a relentless presence there, usually at Obama’s side. Along with Axelrod, they formed a trio at the front of the plane. (Plouffe rarely traveled after the primaries, nor did Anita Dunn, another top adviser.) This enabled the Obama team to maintain tight control of its information. They prided themselves on never leaking. If there was any turf-wrestling, power-grabbing or tantrum-throwing in the Obama campaign, it was never for press consumption — in contrast to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton or John McCain, both of which (God love ’em) dished out all-you-can-eat buffets.
Obama’s operatives spoke with a single voice and a precise message and only when they wanted to. They did it with a smile, not complaining — at least not publicly — about how the press was the enemy. And they did it using interactive tools that bred a feeling of real-time connectedness between campaign and voter.
At the forefront of Obama’s tightly held communications operation was Gibbs, an affable Alabaman with pit-bullish tendencies behind the scenes in defense of his boss. He bragged that he did not tell even his wife that Obama had picked Joseph Biden as his running mate until the campaign revealed it in a mass text message.
As he prepares to become the White House spokesman, Gibbs is acutely aware that it will be harder to enforce discipline from the seat of government than from the seat of the campaign plane. And sure enough, the incoming administration has endured a leaky few weeks. The names of several cabinet nominees appeared in the media before they were announced or even finalized in some cases.
When I spoke to Obama by phone earlier this month, he said he was not surprised by this. “The transition involves an awful lot of people who don’t actually work for me,” he said. “You’ve got a slew of volunteers in every agency in the vetting process. You’ve got F.B.I. folks involved when it comes to appointments. So we anticipated that we weren’t going to be able to march in lock step on our communications as effectively.” Still, Obama was said to be furious over the serial public airings about Hillary Clinton’s eventual nomination to be Secretary of State. He sent an explicit message that anyone caught leaking would be fired — and he sent it through his newly named chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who a couple of weeks earlier conducted a very public hand-wringing about whether he would take that job.
Obama’s advisers today convey some weary acknowledgment, if not shell shock, over how they no longer inhabit the contained decision-making cocoon of a few months ago. “The campaign is over,” Plouffe told me. “It’s never going to be the same. I think everyone is wistful.”
Obama said that it will be easier to replicate the leak-free environment of the campaign “once we get into the building,” meaning the White House. But he is also realistic: “This is Washington. Or it will be Washington. So I’m sure it will not be perfect.”
Since Election Day, Gibbs has been the picture of a man in transition. He worked from Obama’s former campaign office on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for a while, even after it was a dark, largely vacated and depressing shell of the former nerve center. “It’s like that hotel from ‘The Shining’ in here,” he said when I visited him there a few days after the election. After the old headquarters closed, Gibbs shuttled between the Chicago Federal Building (home to the Obama transition office), Hyde Park (still home of the president-elect), Washington (the other Obama transition office) and Alexandria, Va. (where he lives with his family). In recent weeks, he has been largely invisible to the public, other than the times he stood off to the side during Obama’s press conferences at the Hilton Chicago and shouted “last question” after the president-elect had taken anywhere from six to nine.
Gibbs is about to start a job that, like the presidency, seems to age its occupants disproportionately to the years they spend in the job. And it happens live and on C-Span. Known in Washington shorthand as “the podium job,” it has achieved a certain iconic stature — or thanklessness — in the ritual kabuki of Washington. White House press secretaries get a daily blistering from the press, nightly ridicule from comedians and are subjected to the widespread belief that they are unhelpful, obfuscating puppets — which, of course, they sometimes are.
The job also carries a distinct stature. Podium veterans are typically remembered for their work in the briefing room more than anything else. Gibbs has already become well accustomed to the odd celebrity that accompanies high-profile front men in the cable age: people recognizing him in airports, campaign volunteers asking for his autograph. One local driver told Gibbs she was as excited to meet him as she was to meet Obama.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I met Gibbs for lunch at a cafe near his home in Alexandria. He is 37 but has an ageless face — at once boyish and well worn — that could put him anywhere from 25 to 50. Gibbs gained considerable weight during the campaign that he is trying to shed, and he has a habit — maybe unconscious — of running his hands up and down his paunch while he speaks. (“The chronicle of his weight is a story unto itself,” Obama told me.)
Gibbs scrolled back a few days on his BlackBerry to show me a helpful reminder that the current White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, sent him. “Remember to unlist your phone number,” it said. “Your wife will thank you.” (His wife, Mary Catherine, had already thought of that.)
Podium alums share a bipartisan kinship, signified by the ceremonial flak jacket that hangs in the closet of the press secretary’s West Wing office. It was placed there originally by Gerald Ford’s podium man, Ron Nessen. Outgoing press secretaries write notes of advice for their successors and leave them in one pocket. Every previous note remains there, neatly arranged and tied together in a ribbon. “You can’t see the jacket,” Perino told me when I visited her office a few days before Thanksgiving. It’s reserved for club members, apparently.
Perino gave Gibbs a tour of her office shortly after Election Day. “Robert strikes me as a very calm person,” she said. “I try to be calm. People say I am calm. But I’m like a duck. Underneath, I’m paddling, paddling, paddling.”
Gibbs says he’s not nervous. “I don’t think nervous is the right word,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any preparation for it.”
OBAMA INSIDERS TEND TO SHUDDER at any parallels to George W. Bush, but many reporters and rivals have noted the “Bush-like” tendencies the Obama campaign demonstrated in its ability to control information. The comparison is generally meant as a compliment (albeit a grudging one) by members of the press and expressed enviously by veterans of other campaigns. Plouffe himself admitted to me that the Obama campaign subscribed to the “Bush model” of communications discipline. Asked if Obama himself spoke of the “Bush model,” Plouffe told me he did.
“We talked a lot about the Bush model, which is that there are a few people who really know everything,” Plouffe told me in early December. That helps ensure an airtight bubble of knowledge. “If there was leaking, we tried to find out who did it,” Plouffe said. “You didn’t have to worry about having a conference call and anything getting out. That’s the value of a small, continuitous group.”
Like the Bush model, the Obama model also clearly allowed for combat with the press, sometimes extending to punishment, which was usually doled out by Gibbs. In the course of the campaign, especially at the end, a smattering of reporters claimed that they were left off the Obama plane in retribution for negative reports they had filed or for the perceived sins of their news outlets (i.e. endorsing John McCain). Campaign officials denied ever taking such actions — usually citing “space reasons.”
I asked Gibbs if any journalists had been kept off the Obama plane for reasons other than space. “No,” he said at first, but then added, “on occasion yes.” It was rare, he added. “I mean, were there occasions? Sure.”
Gibbs, Obama told me, “is in some ways different than me. Robert is combative in a lot of ways. He can be pretty tough on folks at times. But there is a core integrity about Robert that is combined with a great strategic sense.”
Gibbs acknowledged that there were times in the campaign when he became overly aggressive with certain reporters, which he regrets. When he speaks of press relations, Gibbs tends to do so in metaphor. “Do you build a moat between the two, or do you build a drawbridge?” Gibbs said, the “two” being the press and presidency. He said he advocates the drawbridge approach.
“I might have tended in the campaign to have more of a sledgehammer in lieu of a fly swatter,” he told me. Overlooking that Gibbs was equating reporters with flies, I quibbled with the premise that a fly swatter is in fact a softer way to engage — the fly usually dies, after all.
“True,” Gibbs said, and tried another metaphor. “It’s more like, if you see every problem as a nail, then every time you use a hammer, so to speak.”
ONE WAY THAT THE OBAMA MODEL in the White House would diverge sharply from the Bush model is that Gibbs knows his principal intimately — Obama’s mind, his history, his rhythms. In addition to his podium duties, Gibbs said he plans to continue to spend a great deal of time advising Obama. “That’s part of the role that the president-elect wants me to be taking on,” he told me.
Obama praises Gibbs’s intuitive sense of “what is on the minds of the American people,” and his ear for “how things play” in the media. “He’s honest, sometimes to a fault,” Obama said. “And he’s passionate about folks getting a fair shake.” Gibbs, he added, is “invaluable in any discussion we’re having about policy or politics. And beyond that, I trust him completely.”
None of Bush’s press secretaries had that kind of relationship with the president — not Ari Fleischer, Scott McClellan, Tony Snow or Perino. Nor did Bush seem to want much revelatory information imparted from the podium.
In one semifamous vignette, Bush’s communications team was holding a quiet celebration in the Roosevelt Room a few days after his re-election in 2004. The president stopped by to thank everyone for their efforts and then singled out McClellan, his robotically on-message front man. “I want to especially thank Scotty,” the president said. “I want to thank Scotty for saying” — and he paused — “nothing.”
Having a White House spokesman who is close to the president has advantages. “When the you-know-what hits the fan, knowing of what you speak is an invaluable asset,” said Jody Powell, who served as President Carter’s press secretary for his entire term in office. “How can you expect someone getting thirdhand information to get any respect from the press or public?”
Dan Bartlett, the communications director for Bush from 2001 to 2005, says Gibbs will have access to a vast body of institutional and personal knowledge about Obama that will clearly bolster his authority from the podium. “The flip side of that,” Bartlett added, “is that you never want to get into a situation where the principal” — the president — “doesn’t want to burden the spokesman with information they can’t use.”
A former White House communications adviser who asked not to be named told me, “If you don’t handle it right, having a White House press secretary who is also a confidante can be radioactive.” Having an “open-door chain of command” between their two offices, the former adviser said, can lead to a spokesman feeling pressure to lie to protect the president. Gibbs will report to Emanuel but will have walk-in privileges in the Oval Office, about 25 feet from his own. As in the campaign, the Obama White House will be “very collegial” and “not excessively hierarchical,” Axelrod said.
But the president-elect is unequivocal in saying that he expects the podium to be Gibbs’s “singular” priority. “He will continue to be in our strategic meetings,” Obama said, “but his focus is going to be on making sure that, when speaking for me or the White House, he’s got it all buttoned down.”
In previous White Houses, there was a more formal chain of command that often places the podium job a few layers away from the president. The communications director typically oversees the press secretary and also spends time in the Oval Office, advising the president. George Stephanopoulos played that role in Bill Clinton’s administration and Bartlett did so during Bush’s first term. Stephanopoulos had a brief and somewhat disastrous stint as the White House spokesman at the start of the Clinton administration but quickly shed that role when it was clear that he could not do it in addition to running the communications shop and advising Clinton.
In the Obama communications operation, Axelrod will continue to oversee the media and message strategy. Emanuel will clearly have a pivotal role. And Pfeiffer, the deputy director of communications, and Ellen Moran, the new White House communications director, will try to offset Gibbs’s well-known allergy to things management-related. Gibbs is prone to being disorganized. He also has a frustrating and at times harmful knack for going dark for long periods of time, ignoring urgent e-mail messages from reporters or co-workers. Early in the campaign, Gibbs was essentially overseeing Obama’s communications strategy and operations — and the situation was charitably described as a mess by people within the campaign and journalists who dealt with it. Things improved immeasurably when Anita Dunn came on in February to run the communications team.
“Challenged,” is how Gibbs describes himself when asked how he is as a manager. “It’s not what I’m good at, not what I want to do,” he said.
One unknown is how Gibbs’s relationship with Obama will be affected by the new set of variables between them — the added layers of cabinet secretaries, the vice president and the new White House staff that is not steeped in the drama-free Obama culture. When I asked Gibbs who will yell at him when he messes up at the podium, he laughed and said, “My guess is, people will be lining up to yell at me.”
ON A TEAM known for its cerebral, even-tempered approach, Gibbs is something of a scrappy populist. “Because he has a Southern accent, I often think that he is underestimated by people,” Dunn said of Gibbs, who tends to be playfully chauvinistic about his Southern heritage. He counts himself a member of an organization called Rednecks for Obama, started by two old guys from Missouri operating out of a pick-up truck. He is a proud owner of a Rednecks for Obama T-shirt, button, bumper sticker and sign, all of which he says he will take to his office at the White House.
Called “Bobby” as a kid, Gibbs spent his formative years in the college town of Auburn, Ala. The son of two librarians, Gibbs hated to read as a child and, sure enough, grew up to make his living as a talker. His parents were liberal Democrats, part of the 10 percent of white Alabamans who voted for Obama over McCain, the lowest proportion in the country.
Gibbs said he did not grow up in the Alabama of George Wallace — at least the unrepentant Wallace — but he concedes that the state’s checkered racial history was never far away. He was friends with black kids and racists alike. “Did I grow up with friends who used the n-word?” he asked. “Sure.”
Gibbs volunteered on his first campaign — Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run — while attending North Carolina State University. It was the beginning of a career that landed Gibbs in a string of Democratic campaign jobs through his 20s and early 30s. He became friends with the Democratic strategist Jim Jordan, who would later go on to run John Kerry’s presidential campaign and hire Gibbs as Kerry’s national press secretary. The campaign ended badly for Jordan, who was fired by Kerry in November of 2003, and also for Gibbs, who quit in solidarity.
A few months later, Gibbs heard from Jordan that Plouffe and Axelrod — who were running Obama’s Senate campaign — were looking for a communications director.
Obama and Gibbs developed a fast rapport. I remember interviewing Obama in early 2005, a few months after he was elected to the Senate, in his temporary office in the basement of a Senate office building. He and Gibbs were sprawled out in virtually identical postures like a couple of frat brothers watching a football game — without the beer.
Clearly they were pushing the message that day that Obama was no prima donna. He was happy to be a team player, complete his freshman dirty work. Obama and Gibbs kept emphasizing that Obama had already sat through countless town meetings in Illinois and committee hearings on Capitol Hill. The article I wrote poked gentle fun at Obama for his and Gibbs’s zealous efforts to show how unzealous Obama was being about climbing the ladder. “Jeez, was it really that obvious?” Obama said to me when I ran into him and Gibbs on Capitol Hill a few weeks later. “Nice going there, Gibbs,” Obama said, pretending to smirk at his sidekick.
Less than two years later, Obama was running for president and Gibbs was still at his side. He served in a variety of roles at first — spokesman, overseer, strategist and, in Gibbs’s words, Obama’s “traveling buddy.” “It’s not quite that they finish each others’ sentences,” Dunn said. “But they do have that mind meld.”
Obama called Gibbs “a very good friend of mine” who, like himself, is a “well-informed sports fan” and appreciates “gallows humor.” When I asked him for an example of this gallows humor, Obama demurred. “I’m not sure all of it is clean,” he said.
Gibbs is not shy about nagging Obama or inflicting tough-love feedback. Early in the campaign, Obama was averse to making courtesy calls to local officials. He was not great about “calling the former state rep in Wapello County for the fourth time,” Plouffe said. So Gibbs took it upon himself to make sure a certain number of calls got done every day. He could be very insistent. “You said you were going to do 35 calls today,” Gibbs would tell Obama, according to Plouffe. “Eventually he just did them.”
Another recurring episode during the campaign was for Obama and his advisers to be debating something while Gibbs sat off to the side staring into his BlackBerry. Without looking up, Gibbs would utter some random thought that would stop the discussion cold.
“Well, there’s Gibbs’s one good idea for the day,” Obama would quip, according to Jim Margolis, a campaign ad man and media adviser.
Dunn tells the story of a tense practice session before the third debate in which Obama, sitting at a table, kept looking up intently at Gibbs across the room. They were sending urgent-looking BlackBerry messages back and forth, and Dunn became concerned that some crisis had arisen. When the session ended, the men ran over to each other. It was a Sunday afternoon, and they had been following the fortunes of Obama’s fantasy football team.
In spite of their closed-ranks tendencies, the Obama communications team’s buzzwords of choice are “transparency” and “openness.” These are notions few people would quibble with, although they tend to mean different things to different people — White House officials and reporters, for instance.
After the arrest of Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor, Obama was criticized by some reporters for dodging questions on contacts between his staff and the governor, using the familiar Washington phrase that it would be “inappropriate” for him to comment during “an ongoing investigation.”
When you press Obama aides on how they would define “transparency” and “openness,” they often invoke their willingness to make documents public during the campaign. “We had our donors online, we had our bundlers online, we had Obama’s birth certificate online,” Hari Sevugan, a senior spokesman who specialized in rapid response and opposition research, told me.
As with the Bush model, Obama’s view of transparency and openness did not include exposing internal discussions. “Sometimes the press corps thinks transparency and openness should be defined as carrying out all of our internal deliberations on the Web so they could watch,” Dunn said. “But in fact, transparency and openness is about the process of how government is run. It’s not necessarily about who might be mad at whom on a different day.”
In the course of the campaign, the Obama team showcased a number of new-media applications designed to project a sense of open-book communications to the public. They promoted the fact that the campaign made major announcements — like Obama’s selection of Biden — by communicating “directly” with voters who provided their e-mail and text addresses.
If Obama was attacked by a rival, the campaign would not just push back by traditional means (arguing their case with reporters) but also by putting up their own Web sites like fightthesmears.com. This allowed the campaign not only to defend itself but also to draw more coverage to how innovative and responsive it was. “You would get a press hit each time you’d roll out a Web site, which in itself became a narrative,” Sevugan said.
In recent weeks, the incoming president has begun delivering a weekly video address online — the Obama version of the traditional weekly radio address. Plouffe has initiated a kind of online suggestion box, where voters are invited to write in and discuss the issues they are most concerned about.
There has been much speculation about how the new administration might deploy the Obama campaign’s massive voter database. People have theorized that it could be a way for the White House to skirt the traditional media “filter,” just as Ronald Reagan — and in a different way, George W. Bush — would “go over the heads” of the Washington elite and speak directly to the people through televised news conferences or outlets like conservative talk radio. “The massive list of energized activists is the biggest stick Obama will carry in Washington,” the liberal blogger Ari Melber wrote on The Nation’s Web site. “It enables direct communication at a remarkable scale. . . . To put it another way, the list dwarfs the audience of all the nightly cable-news shows combined.”
Plouffe said the list could be used to invite grass-roots participation in government or to build support for the administration’s policies. “We’ll see whether it works or not,” he said. “It’s never been tried before.”
WHAT IS GENERALLY AGREED UPON is that the traditional media will turn harsher at some point. Both the Clinton and McCain campaigns charged repeatedly that Obama enjoyed an easy ride from the press, as have a smattering of post-election assessments from within the news media: Halperin said the media’s “extreme pro-Obama coverage” was “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war.” The Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz noted the spate of post-election comparisons of Obama to Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, and recently initiated an “Obama Adulation Watch.”
The idea that Obama has benefited from an extended journalistic valentine breeds great impatience from his advisers. They argue that good press follows naturally onto winning campaigns — and that the efforts of Clinton and McCain yielded deservedly bad press. “Part of our coverage ended up being better in both instances; we ended up running better campaigns,” Gibbs said. “We had a narrative that was probably better.”
In a few weeks, Gibbs’s personal narrative will move him into his stately new office. It has big windows, abundant natural light and three televisions. There is a fireplace, a big safe on the floor to store classified information and a long row of digital clocks on the wall that give the time in Washington, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Doha (Qatar), Baghdad, Moscow and Beijing.
Perino, who assumed this job under Bush in September 2007, wakes every morning at 4:15. She says she has found it increasingly hard to fall asleep the longer she stays in the job. After tough briefings, she is sometimes out of breath. “You don’t realize that you haven’t been breathing,” she said.
The podium job is all-consuming, especially in an age when daily briefings are televised. As Axelrod says, “You can send markets crashing and troops in motion by one slip of the tongue.”
Obama said he is not at all concerned. “One of the things that is underappreciated about Robert is his discipline,” he said. “He doesn’t color outside the lines.”
There is a certain exhilaration to this moment for Gibbs. And a great deal of flattery he must endure, or enjoy. On a Thursday night in early December, Gibbs and his wife were feted at a Capitol Hill tavern by many of the same people who were there to pay tribute to Russert (and Gibbs) that day in June. The invitation urged guests to “honor Robert and Mary Catherine Gibbs with drinks, laughs, some humiliating deference, respect and sucking up.”
“I’m happy for him,” Axelrod said of Gibbs. “Because we sort of picked him up for cheap four years ago. He was kind of out of work. I’m happy to see him do well. He belongs up on that podium.”
Before hanging up I asked Obama about his favorite movie, “The Godfather” — specifically, which character Gibbs most reminded him of. Obama mentioned the Robert Duvall consigliere, Tom Hagen. “And I’ve seen a little bit of Sonny in him once in a while,” he added.
Gibbs has been mostly good about referring to his “traveling buddy” as “the president-elect.” He’s trying to remember to stand whenever Obama enters a room. He has gotten résumés sent to his home and supportive notes from friends and from his podium predecessors. Gibbs told me that two of them — Jody Powell and the Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry — wrote essentially the same thing: “Congratulations. And condolences.”
Mark Leibovich is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times. He last wrote for the magazine about Chris Matthews.http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc
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