Valerie Jarrett was the longest serving senior adviser to President Barack Obama. Her new book is Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward.From her Q&A with Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker:
How did your idea of political power change between when you arrived at the White House, in 2009, and when you finished serving, eight years later?--Marshal Zeringue
Let’s begin with some fundamentals that I think are the same. The power doesn’t come from the top down—it comes from the bottom up. One of the reasons why I’m glad that I started in local government is that you are very proximate to the people you serve. It’s not about you—it’s about them, and they remind you of that all the time. One of the many reasons why I was attracted to joining President Obama’s Administration is that he had that same perspective he had when he was a community organizer.
What I was unprepared for when I arrived in Washington—and it took me a good while to figure out—is that the Republicans were willing, in the middle of the worst economic crisis of our lifetime, to put their short-term political interests ahead of what was good for the country. When President Obama was a senator in Springfield, even a junior senator, he had this ability to work across the aisle. That was a strategy that he employed and that we all followed when we first arrived in Washington, and we hit a wall. I was not prepared for that, and that took some getting used to. He tried a thousand different ways to get them to come around.
If this had been clear to you and everyone in the Administration on January 20, 2009, what do you think you could have done differently?
I think we would have...[read on]