For the first four years of President Obama’s tenure,Brian Deese worked in a hallway on the West Wing’s second floor — not exactly the exurbs of Washington power but not at the center of it either.
The 37-year old’s view got a lot better earlier this year when he became a senior adviser to the president. In February, Deese moved into an office on the first floor across the hall from White House chief of staff Denis McDonough — the easiest commute to the Oval Office in Washington.
Deese is one of several top White House aides who started working on Obama’s first presidential bid in their late 20s or early 30s, joined the administration at its outset and pretty much never left. Now these staffers — including deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, White House press secretary Josh Earnest and, as of Wednesday, communications director Jen Psaki — remain as the ones who will help shape the president’s legacy before he leaves in January 2017.
Their new prominence is an object lesson in how Washington works, how power here is acquired and transferred, and the enduring importance of loyalty in high-stakes politics. And for a president who spent little time in Washington before taking office, this is especially true.
These once-young acolytes will leave Obama’s mark on a Democratic Party with whom he has had a complicated relationship. Once he exits the political stage, the men and women who have devoted a fifth of their lives working for him will continue to influence the party Obama no longer leads.
“They’re all grown up,” White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said in a phone interview.
This feature of the administration is not limited tothe West Wing, although many of the most prominent longtime loyalists work there.
White House deputy chief of staff Anita Decker Breckenridge, 36, has worked for Obama since 2003, when he was serving in the Illinois state senate. Chief speechwriter Cody Keenanstarted as a 26-year old intern on Obama’s presidential campaign in June 2007, while deputy communications director Amy Brundage, 33, started in his Senate office two months later.
Both Deputy Secretary of State Heather Higginbottom and the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, Mark Lippert, began working for the president in their early 30s.
Heather Zichal, who over six years working for Obama rose to be his top climate and energy adviser before leaving in October 2013, described the relationship as “a two-way street.”
“We delivered for him, but we’re all fiercely loyal,” Zichal said. “You see it in his personnel decisions. He has his people who he’s comfortable with and oftentimes, those are the people who you’ve known the longest.”
University of Minnesota political science professor Lawrence Jacobs said the staff evolution within Obama’s White House reflects the natural cycle of a presidency. Most “come into office with a lot of political capital but very little know-how,” he said, only to watch those characteristics flip places over time.
“You’ve kind of figured out the job, as well as the key staff,” Jacobs said, adding that both the president and his aides have to guard against “the risk of arrogance.”
“He’s got some huge agenda items up, including trade and Iran,” he added. “Is there someone who can tell the president effectively, ‘No, this is a bad direction?’ ”
Rhodes, who started advising Obama in January 2007 and moved to Chicago to work on the campaign full-time seven months later, said decision-making within the administration “is not a groupthink exercise.”
“Part of what he wants from us is to get him different views — from even outside the government — of, ‘What are the best criticisms of what we’re doing?’ ” Rhodes said.
McDonough, who began with Obama in 2007 and has served in the White House since the day the president took office, noted that the administration has in recent months managed to recruit several senior advisers with experience at Silicon Valley behemoths Google and Twitter — the White House’s first chief digital officer Jason Goldman, its chief technology officer Megan Smith and deputy chief technology officer Alex Macgillivray.
“We’re always looking to add talent,” McDonough said,adding that regardless of where people come from, “competence is king.”
Over time, these staff changes have remade the president’s inner circle.
With few exceptions, most of the veterans of Bill Clinton’s administration who helped steer Obama’s White House in its early days left long ago.
And even most of the original team that helped Obama secure the presidency have departed — either to the private sector or, in some instances, to Hillary Rodham Clinton’ssoon-t0-be launched presidential campaign.
“My entire thirties were working for Barack Obama,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who stepped down as one of the president’s senior advisers in March. “That’s why I had to get out at 39.”
For the Obama hands who remain, the next year-and-a-half provides their best chance to work on the most important elements of what the president set out to do when he first took office and to help consolidate a lasting legacy around them.
Deese, who started his White House career working on the auto bailout, is now in charge of the president’s climate-change agenda. Psaki — who has worked for Obama in one capacity or another since February 2007 with the exception of a nine-month stint in the private sector — just left the State Department to join Earnest in steering the White House’s communications strategy.
And Rhodes, who started out writing speeches on farm policy and foreign affairs, helped broker a historic rapprochement with Cuba last year.
At the outset of the second term, Rhodes asked if he could oversee Cuba policy. He and one other National Security Council staffer, Ricardo Zúñiga, ended up negotiating the secret deal that ended a Cold War legacy still dividing the Western Hemisphere.
“I kind of took it on myself to do Cuba because I thought that was really what we were all about in the 2008 campaign,” Rhodes said, an allusion to Obama’s “hope and change” election message.
The role has made for some surreal moments, including when Rhodes walked outside the Vatican’s gates in September after helping finalize several documents in one of its ceremonial rooms.
“On the streets of Rome, I thought, ‘We just agreed to normalize relations with Cuba.’ When I was living in a tiny studio apartment in Chicago, wearing jeans to work and trying to win the Iowa caucuses, I never would have imagined this,” he recalled.
Less than a decade ago, they were subject to the inevitable indignities that come from working as low-level staffers on an upstart campaign.
Rhodes had to hustle out of an Indiana hotel room in the middle of the night after Psaki inadvertently gave him the keys to a room she had already assigned to journalist Jonathan Alter. Earnest — known for his steadfast Midwestern cheeriness — spent a solid month in Austin not only sharing a hotel with fellow press staffer Nick Shapiro, but also chauffeuring multiple Obama aides in his rental car to the office every day.
Deese, known for his tendency to pace while on the phone, sometimes in his socks, would walk circles around the room in Chicago where he worked cheek by jowl with other policy wonks.
And as they have moved up the federal hierarchy, their lives have intersected as they’ve marked life’s major milestones.
Rhodes and Keenan shared toasts with Psaki in Bermuda as her sister Stephanie married their fellow speechwriter Adam Frankel. Zichal was in the hospital as Higginbottom was preparing to give birth to her second child. And she remained by her side while Higginbottom was dealing with the Ebola crisis, talking by phone with senior U.S. and foreign government officials — including the head of the World Health Organization.
Both Earnest and Rhodes became new fathers within the last year; Deese has a 2 1/2 -year-old daughter; and Psaki is expecting her first child in July and plans to take maternity leave for three months. Under a new White House policy, all staff now enjoy 12 weeks of paid leave when taking off time under the Family and Medical Leave Act.
In discussions about her return, it was Obama who broached the issue that Psaki would expect a different work schedule than the one she had during the first term. Katie McCormick Lelyveld, who served as Michelle Obama’s press secretary, said during Psaki’s last White House stint “there was no end to her day in sight,” and that was no longer feasible.
“She understands the window she’s about to look out of,” Lelyveld said.