From the Huffington PostCBS' Katie Couric interviews Valerie Jarrett, Barack Obama's senior adviser:When Karl Rove worked for President Bush, he had so much influence that some called him "Bush's Brain." Valerie Jarrett is the woman known as the other side of Barack Obama's brain. Jarrett, a 51-year-old business leader and single mother, just may be the most powerful woman in Chicago besides Oprah. And she's earned the complete confidence of Barack and Michelle Obama.___________________________________________________________________________Many have wondered how ANYONE AS EXTREME AS Obama’S “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones – a self-described “Communist” obsessed with racial conspiracy theories – could have been named to head a federal agency. David Horowitz described the radicalization of the Democratic Party as the appointment’s subtext. Closer to the fore, Jones owed his elevation to another new factor: the unparalleled influence of Valerie Jarrett. To call Jarrett a presidential adviser, even a close adviser, is misleading. She is an alter ego, an inner conscience, a touchstone of clarity for both President Obama and first lady Michelle. In the frenzy of the presidency, she reminds both Obamas of their identity and deepest-held beliefs. In exchange, the president makes no decision without her and has said she can “speak for me.” Unfortunately, she is also a racially polarizing elitist. She obtained her first foothold in Chicago politics through the patronage of a former SDS radical who regrets “nothing” about her role in the Days of Rage and ventured in 2003 that she “would probably reject violence as a useful form of revolution.” The same radical tried to persuade Rod Blagojevich to name Jarrett to Obama’s empty senate seat. Instead, Jarrett has served as a conduit of far-leftists into the administration.“We Have Kind of a Mind Meld”One thing is beyond question: Jarrett’s unprecedented sway over the president. An Obama 2008 campaign official told the New York Times, “If you want him to do something, there are two people he’s not going to say no to: Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama.” Susan Sher, who helped Jarrett recruit Michelle Obama to the Chicago mayor’s office before Michelle married the president, said, “I don’t think either of them [the Obamas] made major decisions without talking to her,” adding that Jarrett failed to appreciate “how incredibly instrumental she’ll be in virtually everything” in the White House.The president confirms Jarrett’s tremendous cache with him, personally and politically. In July, Obama told New York Times reporter Robert Draper, “I trust her completely…She is family.” Obama trusts Jarrett “to speak for me, particularly when we’re dealing with delicate issues.” When asked, he admitted he runs every decision by her.If Jarrett failed to anticipate her power, she acknowledges her closeness to the leader of the free world. “We have kind of a mind meld,” Jarrett said about Obama. “And chances are, what he wants to do is what I’d want to do.” Chicago tycoon Martin Nesbitt identified the source of Jarrett’s power in the fact that she establishes both Michelle and Barack’s “whole notion of authenticity.” Nesbitt relates she channels the Obamas’ inner voice, telling them: “That’s not you. You wouldn’t say that. Somebody else is saying that. Barack Obama wouldn’t say that.” Jarrett admitted to Vogue, “I kind of know what makes them who they are.”Part of who Jarrett is can be seen in her obsession with racial issues. After the Jeremiah Wright tapes threatened to sink his campaign, it was Jarrett who encouraged Barack to give his “race speech” at Constitution Hall (the speech that sent the infamous thrill up Chris Matthews’ leg). African-American administration staffers have said without her patronage “their opinions and the often-legitimate concerns voiced by black leaders like [Al] Sharpton would have been thoroughly disregarded by the white-dominated senior staff.” (Emphasis added.) A black staffer claimed “there’s a cultural nuance” white Obama officials “just didn’t get.” If so, it’s not for Jarrett’s lack of hectoring. When Robert Gibbs tried to downplay Obama’s statement that Republicans were emphasizing that Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills,” Jarrett instructed white staffers, “You guys, you’re not getting this issue right.” After Jarrett’s intervention, the allegedly post-racial candidate Obama brought the white staff into line, telling them they were too “gun-shy on race issues.” A campaign source revealed, “moving forward, the candidate made it very clear to us that we were just a bunch of white people who didn’t get it – which, by the way, was true.”After the inauguration, Jarrett successfully pushed to loosen restrictions barring officials from meeting with lobbyists, a rule enshrined in Obama’s executive memo on the Recovery Act, for fear other “legitimate” concerns – raised by “civil rights organizations whose directors happen to be registered lobbyists – will not be heard.”Without her patronage, it seems Van Jones would not be heard. A White House official told Politico Jones “did not go through the traditional vetting process”; instead, Jarrett interviewed Jones, a signal she bucked for his appointment. Jarrett gushed to the Netroots Nation conference: “We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him…for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that, and we have all that energy in the White House.”Jarrett lobbied Obama to create the office of Chief Diversity Officer within the FCC, a position filled by Mark Lloyd, an Alinskyite and former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, who appears fixated on silencing conservative talk radio. Her intent, according to some, was to change policy by altering the structure of the FCC. Jarrett also helped recruit Cass Sunstein, who believes in the Fairness Doctrine, has argued we should “celebrate tax day,” and believes animals should have legal standing to sue humans. (This is a growing movement on the Green Left. As I note in chapter seven of my book Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Radical Gifts, the Heinz Endowments gave $25,000 to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which complains that “trees and forests and streams and cougars and bears – they have no rights under our structure of governance.”) As David Horowitz has noted, Saul Alinsky wrote, “From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.” Part of that motion involves burrowing into existing structures and changing them from the inside out – as has been done in academia, the major tax-exempt foundations, the Democratic Party, and now the U.S. government.Who is Valerie Jarrett?Part of Jarrett’s identification with the president is her international childhood and experience as an African-American growing up abroad. She was born in Shriaz, Iran, to a renowned physician father and spent the first five years of her life in Iran. There, she said, she was treated as an American, not an African-American. Her family lived in London for one year before settling in Chicago’s elite neighborhood, Hyde Park, where she was teased for both her race and British accent. Chicago-based journalist Lynn Sweet reports, “In the manner of privileged Hyde Park-Kenwood children from smart families, Jarrett went to the exclusive University of Chicago Lab School before transferring to her mother’s alma mater, Northfield Mt. Hermon, in western Massachusetts for the last two years of high school.” After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, she went to work for Chicago’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, whose election many Sixties radicals attributed to themselves. After Washington’s death in 1987, she stayed on under his successor, Richard Daley. In City Hall, she and her colleague Susan Sher recruited Michelle Robinson, then engaged to Barack Obama, and Jarrett quickly melded her way into their lives.After Daley administration in-fighting, Jarrett continued to serve Daley in a different capacity and found a job at Habitat, a real estate firm headed by Daniel Levin. (Daniel is the cousin of Sen. Carl Levin and Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan.) Michelle Malkin has noted the tracts of public housing – including that bearing the name of her grandfather – have deteriorated after being run by Habitat. Although the New York Times lists the stint as “baggage,” it proved profitable, and she has gone on to sit on numerous corporate, civic, and academic boards.Sweet noted to whom Jarrett owed much of her success: “Activist public affairs consultant with close ties to City Hall Marilyn Katz introduced Jarrett to Levin.”With a Little Help from my (Radical) FriendsWho is this person to whom Jarrett is so indebted – and who, we shall see, she calls a personal friend? Marilyn Katz provided “security” for Students for a Democratic Society at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Undercover Chicago policeman William Frapolly told prosecutors that during the Days of Rage, Katz showed protesters a new weapon to use against the police: “a cluster of nails that were sharpened at both ends, and they were fastened in the center.” Police later reported being hit by golf balls with nails through them, as well as excrement. Years later, Katz would insist her “guerrilla nails” were merely “a defensive weapon” to prevent “possible bad behavior by the police.”The SDS soon imploded. Bill Ayers – whom Katz has known since he was 17 – helped create the terrorist Weather Underground from its ranks. In 1971-2, Katz would lead another remnant to form the New American Movement (NAM), a combined Old Left-New Left organization that included Communist Party USA members from the 1930s. Rabbi Michael Lerner was among its early founders, though he left to start his own organization. (His reaction when David Horowitz rebuffed his recruitment efforts is described in Radical Son, p. 274.) NAM’s primary political text, entitled Basic Marxism: What It Is & How to Use It, revealed the group’s devotion to Gramsci. For most of the Seventies, the organization’s local chapters ran socialist “schools” open to the public with little national structure. The L.A. school listed as the first point in NAM’s “basic perspective”: its belief “that a socialist revolution will be necessary to solve the problems of the U.S.” NAM declared its “solidarity with the Third World grew out of a correct reaction to United States chauvinism.” A 1973 NAM manifesto declared: “We admire, and draw inspiration from, many accomplishments from the Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions…as representing, on balance, very positive steps forward in human history…we deeply value Lenin’s contributions to revolutionary theory and practice…We identify with Lenin’s revolutionary spirit and determination; we agree with his critique of mechanistic determinism and economism, his writings on the nature of the state, his approach to creating a ‘revolutionary alliance of the oppressed,’ and his treatment of nationalism and imperialism.” Katz, through NAM, founded the Reproductive Rights National Network in 1977-8. A sympathetic author summed up R2N2’s motivation: “The long-term goal was to develop an ‘offensive movement’ [against the pro-life movement] that could fight for a more comprehensive set of demands as the conditions for ‘free choice,’ including child care, national health-care, high-quality education, and guaranteed income.” Sound familiar?NAM’s local chapters merged with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) in 1983 to form the Democratic Socialists of America.That year, Katz became an organizational entrepreneur herself, founding MK Communications, Inc., a public relations firm. Its clients include the ACLU, Amnesty International, Chicagoans Against War & Injustice, Harold Washington 1983-1987 Mayoral Campaign, Lloyd Doggett’s senate campaign, Human Rights Watch, Illinois Campaign for Choice, Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty, the socialist publication In These Times, the MacArthur Foundation, Mother Jones, National Community Development Initiative (for the Rockefeller Foundation), UAW Local 719, and numerous City of Chicago accounts. Katz did spin for the developers of the “Presidential Towers,” a HUD-financed yuppie-heaven which moved homeless out of Skid Row in hopes of moving the upper middle class into their place. The new Mayor Daley’s rapprochement with SDS nail-throwers became most conspicuous in 1996, when he, Katz, and the Chicago Seven did PR for the 1996 Democratic National Convention, which returned to Chicago. The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass reported, even as he laid off 1,000 city workers, he gave “Katz and other public relations firms five-year contracts that could pay them as much as $5 million each.” As part of Katz’s work for the city, she wrote press releases for the Chicago Transit Authority, then headed by Jarrett.Katz had a few other noteworthy clients: Project Vote, the ACORN-affiliated voter registry that first brought Barack Obama to Chicago as a “communist organizer”; the Habitat Company; The Joyce Foundation, on whose board Obama sat; and History Makers, which interviewed Valerie Jarrett, her mother, and her father-in-law.Katz called on her radical rolodex in 2002, when she and former national secretary Carl Davidson started Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq. (He and and Tom Hayden founded the Venceremos Brigades, a joint triumph of Cuban intelligence and the KGB. In 1992, he joined the Committees of Correspondence, now known as Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He has also been active nationally with United for Peace and Justice. In December 2008, Katz was also elected to UFPJ’s national steering committee.) Katz and Bettylu Saltzman organized the 2002 antiwar demonstration where the little-known state senator Obama gave his famous speech opposing the Iraq war, calling it a “stupid” war, and a conspiracy by Karl Rove to “distract” from the (by then recovering) economy. This speech made Obama the choice of his party’s left-wing in 2008.Katz knew of Obama politically and through Valerie Jarrett. Davidson, too, knew of Obama, writing on the Marxism Mailing List he had “known Obama from the time he came to the New Party to get our endorsement for his first race ever. I've been in his home, and as an IL legislator, he's helped or community technology movement a number of times.” He later assessed an Obama economic speech, finding, “I probably couldn't written a better one myself.” Together, he and Katz wrote the book Stopping War, Seeking Justice: Essays in a Time of Empire.Now a longtime beneficiary of Democratic spoils, Katz put her new organization to work for the party. CAWI – which lists “allies” like MoveOn.org, Code Pink, International ANSWER, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and the World Can’t Wait – trained 200 people to register voters in 2003. Katz and Davidson wrote an article, “From Protest to Politics,” urging radicals to support Democrat John Kerry. Four years later, in a blog entry adorned with a picture of Barack Obama, Davidson urged readers of the CAWI homepage to “[b]reak decisively with the ultraleft mindset, in order to deepen and broaden left-progressive unity.” Davidson later attempted to defend Obama, writing:Obama is a decent liberal out of the Alinksky [sic.] tradition of community organizers. Everyone knows there's nothing Marxist about Alinsky. I’m simply an acquaintance of Obama, meeting him three times for a few minutes over 15 years…Harold Washington's movement, for instance, was launched by Black nationalists and independent Black Democrats, hardly “connected” to the socialist left. Obama really does have mentors, but certainly not me…It’s two very tough, accomplished, influential and smart Black liberal women, Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice.If Katz’s tactics have changed, her underlying ideology has not. In the article, Katz and Davidson agreed: “it is true that the next president of the U.S. will represent one or another imperialist grouping…We should do this without illusions. The day after Bush’s defeat, the U.S. will still be an imperialist power.” (Emphasis added.)Last August, Katz and her old SDS comrade Don Rose (who mentored David Axelrod, another friend of Katz) met with In These Times to discuss the 40th anniversary of the Days of Rage. When asked if they learned anything from the violence, she first charged the FBI with having 28 Black Panthers “assassinated,” calling the mythical murders “a wakeup call where we saw the underbelly of our own country.” She then offered her takeaway from 40 years’ reflection on the rebellion she led: “I would have to say for me permanently, I would probably reject violence as a useful form of revolution.”Probably.Asked whether she regretted her actions “in this age of terrorism,” she replied, “I regret nothing.”Katz: Obamas’ Friend, Blagojevich’s SuppliantKatz is not merely a friend of Jarrett’s but also both Obamas. The president met Katz through his first job at a law firm run by Judd Miner. The New York Times reports Katz “gave him entry into another activist network: the foot soldiers of the white student and black power movements that helped define Chicago in the 1960s.” Michelle Obama has close social ties with her, as well. Biographer Liza Mundy quotes Katz as saying the moment Jarrett introduced Michelle Obama to her friends, Michelle “was recognized as brilliant and beautiful, and immediately accepted into a very sophisticated social circle.” Mundy writes Michelle “and Barack…enjoyed a range of relations with people who shared their lifestyle, as well as their progressive views and political involvement. ‘These are folks,’ says Marilyn Katz, a member of their social circle, ‘who talk to their friends a number of times a day.” Mundy describes a May 2008 fundraiser for DSA member Rep. Jan Schakowsky, which Katz attended and Michelle Obama addressed.From their common social circle, Katz was welcomed into the Obama campaign. Like Code Pink radical Jodie Evans, Marilyn Katz became a bundler for Obama, as well as a member of his national finance committee. According to Public Citizen, Katz raised at least $50,000 for Obama ‘08.After seeing one friend elevated to power, the graying radical tried to convince disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to appoint Valerie Jarrett to Obama’s open U.S. Senate seat. The Times describes Katz as “a friend” of Jarrett’s who encouraged Jarrett to step out of Obama’s shadow and “be the sun.” Katz tried to schedule lunch with the governor’s wife, Patti, to advocate for her friend’s appointment. When that failed to materialize, Rod Blagojevich writes in his new book, Katz contacted the governor and “indicated that if I appointed Valerie Jarrett to the U.S. Senate, the Obama people would help me raise money from their network of contributors across the country.” Federal investigators allege an unnamed individual suggested a three-way deal for Blagojevich to appoint Jarrett to the seat, take a position with the SEIU-affiliated “Change to Win” labor coalition, and then have President Obama bolster the organization.Ultimately, nothing came of Katz’s overture. Jarrett opted to stay in the White House. (Why would she want a demotion?) In late July, Katz joined Jarrett and Sher in Washington at the Obama administration’s celebration of the 37th anniversary of Title IX. Katz, the unrepentant ‘60s nail-tosser, now has a well-placed patron and a history as part of the first family’s inner circle. All three are indebted to her, literally or figuratively, and she enjoys their affections. Though she is the most disturbing to come to light, she is hardly Jarrett’s only extremist influence.It Runs in the FamilyHer late father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was a pioneering black journalist in “negro” newspapers, After graduating from Knoxville College, Vernon Jarrett started at The Chicago Defender in 1946, where he wrote columns extolling Communist poet Langston Hughes and lifelong Stalinists W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. (Obama would write in Dreams of My Father that “I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm [X], DuBois and Mandela.”) A contemporary writer at Kansas City Star asserts by 1948 Jarrett “had been forced out [of journalism] by the Cold War, the Red scare and racism.” He freelanced at Kansas City’s The Call from 1954-58, then returned to Chicago to become the first nationally syndicated black columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and still later wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times. Valerie married his son, William Robert Jarrett, who preceded his father in death. Together, they had a daughter, who now attends Harvard. The elder Jarrett may have been part of his daughter-in-law’s rise through Chicago’s political ranks. The Washington Post called Jarrett “a key influence in [Harold] Washington's decision to run for the Chicago mayoralty.”Vernon Jarrett later wrote of another up-and-coming political figure in the Chicago Sun-Times:Good news! Good news! Project Vote, a collectivity of 10 church-based community organizations dedicated to black voter registration, is off and running. Project Vote is increasing its rolls at a 7,000-per-week clip. Just last Saturday it registered 2,000 during the Chicago Defender's annual Bud Billiken Parade. But now, the not-so-good news: If Project Vote is to reach its goal of registering 150,000 out of an estimated 400,000 unregistered blacks statewide, “it must average 10,000 rather than 7,000 every week,” says Barack Obama, the program's executive director…”There's a lot of talk about `black power' among the young but so little action.”When Vernon died in 2004, he was saluted in the pages of People’s Weekly Worker, the house organ of the Communist Party USA. A final point of confluence, perhaps more fortuitous than anything: Vernon Jarrett once sat on a union publicity committee with Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist poet who occasionally counseled…the young Barack Obama.Valerie Jarrett had more immediate radical ties. Her mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, co-founded Her mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, co-founded the Erickson Institute in Chicago and still serves on its Board of Trustees. Tom Ayers, the father of Bill Ayers, was a one-time fellow trustee. According to WorldNet Daily’s Brad O’Leary, the Erickson board also included Bill Ayers’ wife, Bernadine Dohrn. For his part, Bill Ayers called Bowman “a neighbor and friend” in his book A Kind and Just Parent, noting his neighbors include Louis Farrakhan (whose guard, The Fruit of Islam, patrols the neighborhood and “has an eye on things twenty-four hours a day”), and “writer Barack Obama.”Mr. Obama’s NeighborhoodPerhaps this last reference is the key to understanding Jarrett and the Obamas: their common formation by Chicago’s elite Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago essentially created the neighborhood from scratch, driving out its poor (and middle class) residents, of all races, and creating a chic atmosphere of cultural elitism. This bubble reflected the far-Left bubble of modern academia – though it would not hurt Obama’s political fortunes. Katz would tell In These Times, “I believe that Barack Obama could only have emerged in Chicago,” because of its longtime confluence of radical organizations, culminating in Washington’s mayoralty.One of Obama’s neighbors, the late, left-wing Rabbi Arnold Wolf – a Democratic Socialist who once invited the Chicago 7 to address his synagogue – described the Hyde Park environment and Obama’s place in it to The Weekly Standard. “We had a party for him at our house when he was just starting, back in the Nineties. I said right away: ‘Here’s a guy who could sell our product, and sell it with splendor!’” And what is the Hyde Park “product,” the reporter asked? “It’s a rational, progressive philosophy based on experience. You see it here. This neighborhood is genuinely integrated. We did it here, we really did it! Not just talk about it. Look around. And Barack and his family fit right in. This is their neighborhood.” He then referred to Bill Ayers as “an aging, toothless radical, a *****cat,” and Dohrn as “thoroughly conventional, just very nice.”That’s Jarrett’s product, and Obama’s. An international, rootless wanderer abandoned by his father, and occasionally his mother, in search of authenticity, he never felt at home until he found his roots, and himself, in the milieu of Hyde Park – a neighborhood big enough to encompass everyone from Marilyn Katz to Bill Ayers, from Tony Rezko’s vacant adjoining property to Louis Farrakhan’s wandering “security” force.And Valerie Jarrett.Is this what Jarrett reminds the Obamas of: the neighborhood that has been the president’s only true home and shaped or reinforced their values and identity? An elitist sanctuary of pampered radicals, racists, and terrorists, liberated of working class stiffs who bitterly cling to their guns and religion?Increasingly, it seems as though this is what “makes them who they are,” and is becoming the atmosphere Obama, with Jarrett’s help, is recreating in his administration.__________________http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2009/09/obama-file-84-why-was-obamas-brain.html
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You may not recognise her face, or her name. Yet Valerie Jarrett is arguably the most powerful person in the White House apart from the President. Robert Draper meets her
On 25 January 2008, the day before the South Carolina Democratic primary, Barack Obama endured a gruelling succession of campaign events across the state. When his staff informed him the evening would conclude with a brief show-up at the Pink Ice Ball, a gala for the African-American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, Obama flatly refused to attend. "We're not gonna change anybody's mind," he said.
Rick Wade, a senior adviser, Stacey Brayboy, the state campaign manager, and Anton Gunn, the state political director, took turns to beseech their boss. The gala, they told Obama, would be attended by more than 2,000 college-educated African-American women, a constituent group that was originally sceptical of the candidate's "blackness". They would be in and out in five minutes. Obama's irritation grew. "Man, it's late, I'm tired," he snapped. The three knew what their only option was at this point. "If you want him to do something," Gunn would later tell me, "there are two people he's not going to say no to: Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama."
At the day's penultimate event, a rally in Columbia, Gunn, Brayboy and Wade pleaded their case to Jarrett, the Obamas' long-time friend and consigliere. Jarrett informed Michelle of the situation and when the candidate stepped offstage from the rally, Obama's wife told him he had one last stop to make before they called it a night.
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"I told Anton I'm not going to any Pink Ice Ball!" Obama barked. Then Jarrett glided over to the fuming candidate. Her voice was very quiet and very direct.
"Barack," she insisted, "you want to win, don't you?"
Scowling, Obama affirmed that he did.
"Well then. You need to go to Pink Ice."
"And he shuts up," Gunn recalls, "and gets on the bus."
Among the narrative threads that are weaved, almost uninterrupted, throughout the history of the American presidency, is the inevitable presence in the White House of The One Who Gets the Boss. Karen Hughes got George W Bush. Bruce Lindsey got Bill Clinton. And so on, back to Thomas Jefferson's lifelong reliance on the counsel of James Madison.
Valerie Jarrett is a Washington outsider with a Washingtonian's mind-deadening job title: senior adviser and assistant to the President for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement. Roughly translated, she is Obama's intermediary to the outside world. But the 52-year-old Jarrett is also the President's closest friend in the White House, and it is not lost on her colleagues that when senior staff meetings in the Oval Office break up, she often stays behind with the boss.
Over a four-month period of reporting, I struggled to understand Jarrett's ineffable raison d'être in the Obama White House. Perhaps proving that nothing succeeds like failure, my plaintive queries were unexpectedly rewarded one afternoon by a telephone call from the President himself.
"Well, Valerie is one of my oldest friends," Obama began. "Over time, I think our relationship evolved to the point where she's like a sibling to me ... I trust her completely." As his surrogate, Jarrett is trusted "to speak for me, particularly when we're dealing with delicate issues".
After our conversation, I began to reflect on Jarrett's portfolio. Broadly speaking, it consists of "outreach" – endless meetings, conferences and speeches. She functions as Obama's de facto conduit to the business community. Among the President's economic team, only Jarrett, the former president of a Chicago real estate development firm, has actually run a multimillion-dollar business. Her street cred with the private sector is an obvious asset to a president confronting a major recession.
Jarrett also serves as the White House's unofficial champion of minority issues. This may seem superfluous, given that a black man inhabits the Oval Office – until it's noted that Obama's inner circle consists largely of white males, same as it ever was.
Jarrett's shared experience with Obama is about race – and on a deeper level, about the coexistence, in the post-King African-American psyche, of conscience and ambition, activism and accommodation. Their identity rests on that fulcrum; it is, as Barack Obama would say, who they are.
Authenticity has a lot to do with place, of course. The Obamas and Valerie Jarrett experienced first-hand the hard-won progress of a Chicago beset with racial and class divisions during the administrations of Harold Washington, who was the city's first black mayor, and Richard M Daley. "There was a certain sense we all shared that people can change, communities can change, cities can change," Jarrett said when I asked her to talk about what Chicago means to her and the Obamas.
Still, she told me, what Chicago provided Obama with most of all was family – beginning, of course, with Michelle Robinson. "My guess is that Michelle's childhood was his idea of perfection," Jarrett said. "It allowed him to anchor himself with her and with her family. To me, that's the most special thing about Chicago for him." It didn't take long for Jarrett to become part of Obama's patchwork family. As Daley's deputy chief of staff, Jarrett was already one of the city's power brokers in 1991 when her friend and co-worker, Susan Sher, suggested that she take a look at the resumé of a promising young African-American lawyer named Michelle Robinson. The applicant made an impression on Jarrett and vice versa.
In less than a year, Michelle's fiancé began to confide in Valerie Jarrett. He showed her pages from a book he was writing. That book, Dreams From My Father, explored Barack Obama's inner struggle. "He talked about how hard it was – things he hadn't dealt with yet," she recalled. "'It isn't just a matter of writing a simple story,' I told him. 'You've got to deal with the fact that your father left you at a very young age. And you lived in a variety of different settings at an age where it could've been discombobulating. Your grandparents are white and you look black. Your friends in Hawaii all are different-looking and that's great – but you come to the mainland, and things are much more black and white, literally.'"
***
Jarrett was born of African-American parents in Shiraz, Iran, where her physician father was running a hospital as part of an American aid programme. Obama's fabled "exoticism" was therefore comprehensible to her, the President told me. "She and I both are constantly looking for links and bridges between cultures and peoples," he said.
Obama, as his memoir would reveal, sought connection to the heroes of the civil rights movement. Jarrett's struggle had been of a different sort: how to measure up to the role models that filled her life. Her father, Dr James Bowman, was an eminent pathologist. Equally influential was her mother, Barbara, a childhood-development expert.
The fast track laid out for Valerie Bowman – a Massachusetts boarding school, then Stanford, then a law degree at Michigan, then marriage and work at a corporate law firm – was one she pursued with neither resistance nor zeal, "kind of like an automaton", she told me.
Eventually she quit both her marriage and her job, and in 1987, as the mother of a two- year-old daughter, she went to work for Mayor Washington's corporation counsel, Chicago's chief legal officer handling civil claims.
Over the next 15 years, her upward trajectory would outpace even Obama's. Jarrett's unhappy years as a real estate lawyer now paid off in a city law department responsible for maintaining Chicago's business base. Washington died of a heart attack in 1987, but her work ethic and supple intelligence distinguished Jarrett in the eyes of Richard M Daley, who took office two years later. The new mayor promoted her to deputy chief of staff – and later to the post of planning commissioner, thereby baptising Jarrett in the racially-charged torrent of urban affairs.
From 1991 until 1995, she presided over a rancorous but largely-successful makeover of the city's landscape. Meanwhile, she was raising her daughter and developing a social life that revolved around an intimate community of like-minded black urban professionals who, like Jarrett, sought advancement not only for themselves but for the local African-American community. Chief among them were the Obamas. Jarrett brought Michelle into the Daley administration, attended their wedding, threw a book-signing party for the Dreams From My Father author and generally assumed a big-sisterly presence in the young couple's lives such that "I don't think either of them made major decisions without talking to her", according to Susan Sher.
As Obama told me: "We've seen each other through ups and downs." For Jarrett, one such low point came in 1995, when she began to lose the mayor's support. Wounded, Jarrett bolted for the property development firm Habitat – only to have Daley ask her to keep a foot in the public sector by offering her the post of chairwoman at the Chicago Transit Board. She accepted. Soon other boards beckoned, including the University of Chicago Medical Center and the Chicago Stock Exchange. Habitat made her an executive vice president. By 2002, it was as if the city had awakened one morning to find that Valerie Jarrett had taken over.
Over the ensuing five years, the role Jarrett played in Obama's political ascent was important but also confined. For his senatorial campaign, she made key introductions to the donor community. She was among the handful of close advisers who met at the close of 2006 to carry on a rolling discussion of the risks entailed in a presidential run. And during the first six months of Obama's presidential campaign, Jarrett remained in constant contact with him but otherwise stayed in Chicago to run Habitat – she had become chief executive in January – and the Chicago Stock Exchange.
That arrangement began to change on the evening of July 17 2007, when Obama convened a meeting at Jarrett's Chicago town house. The presidential campaign was not gaining traction in the national polls. "Lots of things were bubbling up, and no one was really handling issues that would arise, either in Chicago (at headquarters) or on the road," says Penny Pritzker, who was one of the meeting's participants and the finance chairwoman of the campaign. "You needed another smart, capable, really close adviser involved who could play a bridging role. Valerie was the perfect solution."
Not everyone agrees with Pritzker. She never actually moved into headquarters, "and that was good and that was bad", says the White House senior adviser, Pete Rouse, who at that time was Senator Obama's chief of staff. Jarrett's ambiguous role particularly annoyed the campaign manager, David Plouffe. Jarrett and Plouffe tangled over issues ranging from where the campaign should be spending its money to where the candidate should be spending his time.
Today Plouffe offers unqualified praise for Jarrett's work as a campaign surrogate but says, "She wasn't terribly involved in strategic issues." This is probably true – but only because the campaign did not consider the matter of race to be a "strategic issue". On this subject, Jarrett consistently and forcibly weighed in.
It was Jarrett, several aides say, who helped convince otherwise sceptical senior staff that Michelle Obama should go to South Carolina in November 2007 and give a speech addressing fears in the African-American community that harm might come to the black candidate. It was Jarrett who strongly encouraged Barack Obama to give his race speech. Numerous campaign officials credit Jarrett, along with the communications director Anita Dunn and Stephanie Cutter, Michelle Obama's chief of staff, for helping to rehabilitate Mrs Obama's "angry black woman" image.
A few days after the election, the president-elect told his new chief of staff Rahm Emanuel: "I want her inside the White House."
When the subject is Valerie Jarrett, it's fair to say that Emanuel's words fall short of effusive. Their opposing qualities – deliberateness and sensitivity in Jarrett; speed and brutal practicality in Emanuel – may reside harmonically in Barack Obama. But what the two aides represent isn't simply a function of velocity or decibel level. While both of them obviously want the President to succeed, Emanuel's criteria for "success" are straightforward. Jarrett, according to Cecilia Munoz, Jarrett's director of intergovernmental affairs, is "very focused on why he ran in the first place" – a psychological calculation that only Jarrett would presume to undertake and which therefore is bound to drive others nuts.
***
"Where's my picture?" Valerie Jarrett exclaimed, addressing no one in particular. She stood up from the conference-room table in her office and walked over to the bookshelf. "They brought these to me today."
The image was odd. It featured five figures seated on the couches and chairs of the Oval Office: the President; Jarrett; the Reverend Al Sharpton; the former Republican House speaker, Newt Gingrich; and the New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Standing over me, Jarrett said: "I love that photo."
That unlikely meeting had been arranged by Jarrett. Sharpton, Gingrich and Bloomberg were part of a group convening in Washington to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the landmark Brown v Board of Education school desegregation decision by promulgating education as a civil right.
"I liked the idea of getting this odd quartet together to come around an issue," Jarrett told me. "Because it would show the American people that this is what the President is about, getting unlikely combinations together."
I asked: "If you hadn't suggested that this meeting take place, do you think anyone else would have suggested it?"
Jarrett looked across the table at her friend, the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, who had dropped in on the interview. Dunn stopped taking notes and flashed Jarrett a look of abiding doubt.
"Probably not," Jarrett then murmured.
"Probably not?" exclaimed Dunn, who had been virtually silent until now. "Absolutely not!"
Dunn's outburst was delivered with a depth of appreciation that I had not picked up on elsewhere in the West Wing. Though Dunn is white, her words reminded me of the interviews I conducted with several African-Americans who had served at high levels in the Obama campaign. To them, Valerie Jarrett was something of a heroine.
Without Jarrett, these officials said they believed, their opinions and the often-legitimate concerns voiced by black leaders like Sharpton would have been thoroughly disregarded by the white-dominated senior staff. "There's a cultural nuance that they just didn't get," one such African-American staff member told me. "And the landscape of our campaign is littered with hundreds of stories where she intervened and voices got heard and decisions got made that might've gone a different way."
As to just how much difference Valerie Jarrett's various interventions had made, the staff member admitted he couldn't say. It wasn't for him to judge, anyway. That was between Obama and Jarrett.
Close friend and adviser of President Barack Obama
Valerie Jarrett was born in November 1956 to American parents in Shiraz, Iran, where her father -- a renowned physician -- ran a children’s hospital. When Valerie was five, her family relocated to London for one year before settling in Chicago’s elite Hyde Park neighborhood in 1963.
Valerie Jarrett's mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, co-founded the Erickson Institute in Chicago and still serves on its Board of Trustees. Tom Ayers, the father of Bill Ayers, was a one-time fellow trustee of the Institute. According to WorldNet Daily’s Brad O’Leary, the Erickson board also included Bill Ayers’ wife, Bernadine Dohrn. For his part, Bill Ayers called Bowman “a neighbor and friend” in his 1997 book A Kind and Just Parent, noting that his neighbors also included Louis Farrakhan and “writer Barack Obama.”
Jarrett earned a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University in 1978, and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981. In 1983 she married Dr. William Robert Jarrett, son of the Chicago Sun-Times reporter Vernon Jarrett. Vernon Jarrett was a pioneering black journalist who wrote columns for The Chicago Defender extolling Communist poet Langston Hughes and lifelong Stalinists W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. He freelanced at Kansas City’s The Call from 1954-58, then returned to Chicago to become the first nationally syndicated black columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and still later wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times. Mr. Jarrett once sat on a union publicity committee with Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist poet who occasionally counseled the young Barack Obama. When Vernon Jarrett died in 2004, he was saluted in the pages of People’s Weekly Worker, the house organ of the Communist Party USA.
Valerie Jarrett entered Chicago politics in 1987 as Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development in the administration of Harold Washington, the city's first African-American mayor. Jarrett's father-in-law, whom The Washington Post called “a key influence in [Harold] Washington's decision to run for the Chicago mayoralty,” may have facilitated Valerie's rise through Chicago’s political ranks.
After Washington’s death in 1987, Valerie Jarrett worked for his successor, Richard M. Daley, whom she served as Deputy Chief of Staff. In 1991 Jarrett and her colleague Susan Sher recruited to City Hall Michelle Robinson (the future Michelle Obama), who at the time was engaged to Barack Obama.
From 1992 through 1995, Jarrett served the Daley administration as Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development; from 1995 to 2005, she chaired the Chicago Transit Board. From 1995 to 2008, she was CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate firm headed by Daniel Levin (cousin of Senator Carl Levin and Representative Sander Levin of Michigan). Marilyn Katz, an activist/public-affairs consultant with close ties to City Hall (and a former Students for a Democratic Society radical) introduced Jarrett to Daniel Levin.
From 2000 to 2007, Jarrett was a board member of the Chicago Stock Exchange. She currently serves as Chairman of the University of Chicago Medical Center's Board of Trustees; Vice Chairman of the University of Chicago's Board of Trustees; a Trustee of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry; and a Board of Directors member of USG Corporation, a Chicago-based building-materials company.
In 2008 Jarrett co-chaired the Obama-Biden Transition Project. After that, she was appointed to a prominent position in the Obama administration: Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs.
Jarrett became one of President Obama’s (and Mrs. Obama’s) closest and most trusted advisers. An Obama 2008 campaign official told the New York Times, “If you want [Barack Obama] to do something, there are two people [he's] not going to say no to: Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama.” Also in 2008, the aforementioned Susan Sher, who had helped Jarrett recruit Michelle Obama to the Chicago mayor’s office in 1991, emphasized “how incredibly instrumental [Jarrett will] be in virtually everything” in the White House.
Barack Obama confirms Jarrett’s tremendous cache with him, personally and politically. In July 2009, Obama told New York Times reporter Robert Draper, “I trust her completely … She is family.” Obama trusts Jarrett “to speak for me, particularly when we’re dealing with delicate issues.” When asked, the President admitted that he runs every decision by her.
“We have kind of a mind meld,” Jarrett said of herself and the President. “And chances are, what he wants to do is what I’d want to do.”
Chicago tycoon Martin Nesbitt identified the source of Jarrett’s power in the fact that she establishes both Michelle and Barack Obama's “whole notion of authenticity.” According to Nesbitt, Jarrett channels the Obamas’ inner voice, telling them, for instance: “That’s not you. You wouldn’t say that. Somebody else is saying that. Barack Obama wouldn’t say that.” Jarrett told Vogue magazine, “I kind of know what makes them [the Obamas] who they are.”
Jarrett is deeply concerned with racial issues. After the Jeremiah Wright tapes threatened to sink Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, it was Jarrett who encouraged Obama to give his “race speech” at Constitution Hall. African-American administration staffers have said that without Jarrett's patronage, “their opinions and the often-legitimate concerns voiced by black leaders like [Al] Sharpton would have been thoroughly disregarded by the white-dominated senior staff.” (Emphasis added.)
When White House press secretary Robert Gibbs tried to downplay Obama’s assertion (during the 2008 campaign) that Republicans were emphasizing the fact that Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills,” Jarrett instructed white staffers: “You guys, you’re not getting this issue right.” After Jarrett’s intervention, candidate Obama told his white staffers that they were too “gun-shy on race issues.” A campaign source revealed, “moving forward, the candidate made it very clear to us that we were just a bunch of white people who didn’t get it – which, by the way, was true.”
After Obama's inauguration in January 2009, Jarrett successfully pushed to loosen restrictions barring government officials from meeting with lobbyists, a rule enshrined in Obama’s executive memo on the Recovery Act, for fear that other “legitimate” concerns – raised by “civil rights organizations whose directors happen to be registered lobbyists – will not be heard.”
Without Jarrett’s patronage, the self-identified communist revolutionary Van Jones would not have gotten his appointment as the Obama administration's Green Jobs Czar in March 2009. A White House official told Politico that Jones “did not go through the traditional vetting process”; instead, Jarrett interviewed Jones, a signal that she pushed for his appointment. Jarrett gushed to the Netroots Nation conference:
“We were so delighted to be able to recruit him [Van Jones] into the White House. We were watching him…for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that, and we have all that energy in the White House.”
In early 2009 Jarrett lobbied President Obama to create the office of Chief Diversity Officer within the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a position filled soon thereafter by Mark Lloyd, an Alinskyite and a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Jarrett also helped recruit Obama's Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, who supports the Fairness Doctrine, has argued that Americans should “celebrate tax day,” and believes that animals should have legal standing to sue humans.
Moreover, Jarrett's office approved the September 2009 invitation of Jameel Jaffer to a White House Ramadan dinner. Jaffer runs the ACLU's "national security project." According to The American Spectator:
"Jaffer is a cause célèbre to the far left for his career of litigating against the United States in support of terrorists and radical Islamists, and has proudly touted his awards from groups like CAIR.
"'We had other names on the list for invitations, but Jarrett's office wanted Jaffer in the room. We were told it was important,' says a White House source. 'It was made clear that his presence was something senior folks here wanted to happen.'
"Jaffer has filed lawsuits challenging the FBI's 'national security letter' authority [and] the constitutionality of warrantless wiretaps. [He] has been a leader in pushing for the shut down of Guantánamo Bay, and providing legal rights to terrorists held by the United States overseas in such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan. His efforts enabled the leaking of 'torture photos' out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and some sources inside the Central Intelligence Agency believe he was one of the lawyers who provided legal advice to the Department of Justice to pursue an investigation into enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA."
Most of this profile is adapted from the article, "Valerie Jarrett: The Next Van Jones," written by Ben Johnson and published by FrontPageMag.com on September 14, 2009.
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You may not recognise her face, or her name. Yet Valerie Jarrett is arguably the most powerful person in the White House apart from the President. Robert Draper meets her
On 25 January 2008, the day before the South Carolina Democratic primary, Barack Obama endured a gruelling succession of campaign events across the state. When his staff informed him the evening would conclude with a brief show-up at the Pink Ice Ball, a gala for the African-American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, Obama flatly refused to attend. "We're not gonna change anybody's mind," he said.
Rick Wade, a senior adviser, Stacey Brayboy, the state campaign manager, and Anton Gunn, the state political director, took turns to beseech their boss. The gala, they told Obama, would be attended by more than 2,000 college-educated African-American women, a constituent group that was originally sceptical of the candidate's "blackness". They would be in and out in five minutes. Obama's irritation grew. "Man, it's late, I'm tired," he snapped. The three knew what their only option was at this point. "If you want him to do something," Gunn would later tell me, "there are two people he's not going to say no to: Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama."
At the day's penultimate event, a rally in Columbia, Gunn, Brayboy and Wade pleaded their case to Jarrett, the Obamas' long-time friend and consigliere. Jarrett informed Michelle of the situation and when the candidate stepped offstage from the rally, Obama's wife told him he had one last stop to make before they called it a night.
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"I told Anton I'm not going to any Pink Ice Ball!" Obama barked. Then Jarrett glided over to the fuming candidate. Her voice was very quiet and very direct.
"Barack," she insisted, "you want to win, don't you?"
Scowling, Obama affirmed that he did.
"Well then. You need to go to Pink Ice."
"And he shuts up," Gunn recalls, "and gets on the bus."
Among the narrative threads that are weaved, almost uninterrupted, throughout the history of the American presidency, is the inevitable presence in the White House of The One Who Gets the Boss. Karen Hughes got George W Bush. Bruce Lindsey got Bill Clinton. And so on, back to Thomas Jefferson's lifelong reliance on the counsel of James Madison.
Valerie Jarrett is a Washington outsider with a Washingtonian's mind-deadening job title: senior adviser and assistant to the President for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement. Roughly translated, she is Obama's intermediary to the outside world. But the 52-year-old Jarrett is also the President's closest friend in the White House, and it is not lost on her colleagues that when senior staff meetings in the Oval Office break up, she often stays behind with the boss.
Over a four-month period of reporting, I struggled to understand Jarrett's ineffable raison d'être in the Obama White House. Perhaps proving that nothing succeeds like failure, my plaintive queries were unexpectedly rewarded one afternoon by a telephone call from the President himself.
"Well, Valerie is one of my oldest friends," Obama began. "Over time, I think our relationship evolved to the point where she's like a sibling to me ... I trust her completely." As his surrogate, Jarrett is trusted "to speak for me, particularly when we're dealing with delicate issues".
After our conversation, I began to reflect on Jarrett's portfolio. Broadly speaking, it consists of "outreach" – endless meetings, conferences and speeches. She functions as Obama's de facto conduit to the business community. Among the President's economic team, only Jarrett, the former president of a Chicago real estate development firm, has actually run a multimillion-dollar business. Her street cred with the private sector is an obvious asset to a president confronting a major recession.
Jarrett also serves as the White House's unofficial champion of minority issues. This may seem superfluous, given that a black man inhabits the Oval Office – until it's noted that Obama's inner circle consists largely of white males, same as it ever was.
Jarrett's shared experience with Obama is about race – and on a deeper level, about the coexistence, in the post-King African-American psyche, of conscience and ambition, activism and accommodation. Their identity rests on that fulcrum; it is, as Barack Obama would say, who they are.
Authenticity has a lot to do with place, of course. The Obamas and Valerie Jarrett experienced first-hand the hard-won progress of a Chicago beset with racial and class divisions during the administrations of Harold Washington, who was the city's first black mayor, and Richard M Daley. "There was a certain sense we all shared that people can change, communities can change, cities can change," Jarrett said when I asked her to talk about what Chicago means to her and the Obamas.
Still, she told me, what Chicago provided Obama with most of all was family – beginning, of course, with Michelle Robinson. "My guess is that Michelle's childhood was his idea of perfection," Jarrett said. "It allowed him to anchor himself with her and with her family. To me, that's the most special thing about Chicago for him." It didn't take long for Jarrett to become part of Obama's patchwork family. As Daley's deputy chief of staff, Jarrett was already one of the city's power brokers in 1991 when her friend and co-worker, Susan Sher, suggested that she take a look at the resumé of a promising young African-American lawyer named Michelle Robinson. The applicant made an impression on Jarrett and vice versa.
In less than a year, Michelle's fiancé began to confide in Valerie Jarrett. He showed her pages from a book he was writing. That book, Dreams From My Father, explored Barack Obama's inner struggle. "He talked about how hard it was – things he hadn't dealt with yet," she recalled. "'It isn't just a matter of writing a simple story,' I told him. 'You've got to deal with the fact that your father left you at a very young age. And you lived in a variety of different settings at an age where it could've been discombobulating. Your grandparents are white and you look black. Your friends in Hawaii all are different-looking and that's great – but you come to the mainland, and things are much more black and white, literally.'"
***
Jarrett was born of African-American parents in Shiraz, Iran, where her physician father was running a hospital as part of an American aid programme. Obama's fabled "exoticism" was therefore comprehensible to her, the President told me. "She and I both are constantly looking for links and bridges between cultures and peoples," he said.
Obama, as his memoir would reveal, sought connection to the heroes of the civil rights movement. Jarrett's struggle had been of a different sort: how to measure up to the role models that filled her life. Her father, Dr James Bowman, was an eminent pathologist. Equally influential was her mother, Barbara, a childhood-development expert.
The fast track laid out for Valerie Bowman – a Massachusetts boarding school, then Stanford, then a law degree at Michigan, then marriage and work at a corporate law firm – was one she pursued with neither resistance nor zeal, "kind of like an automaton", she told me.
Eventually she quit both her marriage and her job, and in 1987, as the mother of a two- year-old daughter, she went to work for Mayor Washington's corporation counsel, Chicago's chief legal officer handling civil claims.
Over the next 15 years, her upward trajectory would outpace even Obama's. Jarrett's unhappy years as a real estate lawyer now paid off in a city law department responsible for maintaining Chicago's business base. Washington died of a heart attack in 1987, but her work ethic and supple intelligence distinguished Jarrett in the eyes of Richard M Daley, who took office two years later. The new mayor promoted her to deputy chief of staff – and later to the post of planning commissioner, thereby baptising Jarrett in the racially-charged torrent of urban affairs.
From 1991 until 1995, she presided over a rancorous but largely-successful makeover of the city's landscape. Meanwhile, she was raising her daughter and developing a social life that revolved around an intimate community of like-minded black urban professionals who, like Jarrett, sought advancement not only for themselves but for the local African-American community. Chief among them were the Obamas. Jarrett brought Michelle into the Daley administration, attended their wedding, threw a book-signing party for the Dreams From My Father author and generally assumed a big-sisterly presence in the young couple's lives such that "I don't think either of them made major decisions without talking to her", according to Susan Sher.
As Obama told me: "We've seen each other through ups and downs." For Jarrett, one such low point came in 1995, when she began to lose the mayor's support. Wounded, Jarrett bolted for the property development firm Habitat – only to have Daley ask her to keep a foot in the public sector by offering her the post of chairwoman at the Chicago Transit Board. She accepted. Soon other boards beckoned, including the University of Chicago Medical Center and the Chicago Stock Exchange. Habitat made her an executive vice president. By 2002, it was as if the city had awakened one morning to find that Valerie Jarrett had taken over.
Over the ensuing five years, the role Jarrett played in Obama's political ascent was important but also confined. For his senatorial campaign, she made key introductions to the donor community. She was among the handful of close advisers who met at the close of 2006 to carry on a rolling discussion of the risks entailed in a presidential run. And during the first six months of Obama's presidential campaign, Jarrett remained in constant contact with him but otherwise stayed in Chicago to run Habitat – she had become chief executive in January – and the Chicago Stock Exchange.
That arrangement began to change on the evening of July 17 2007, when Obama convened a meeting at Jarrett's Chicago town house. The presidential campaign was not gaining traction in the national polls. "Lots of things were bubbling up, and no one was really handling issues that would arise, either in Chicago (at headquarters) or on the road," says Penny Pritzker, who was one of the meeting's participants and the finance chairwoman of the campaign. "You needed another smart, capable, really close adviser involved who could play a bridging role. Valerie was the perfect solution."
Not everyone agrees with Pritzker. She never actually moved into headquarters, "and that was good and that was bad", says the White House senior adviser, Pete Rouse, who at that time was Senator Obama's chief of staff. Jarrett's ambiguous role particularly annoyed the campaign manager, David Plouffe. Jarrett and Plouffe tangled over issues ranging from where the campaign should be spending its money to where the candidate should be spending his time.
Today Plouffe offers unqualified praise for Jarrett's work as a campaign surrogate but says, "She wasn't terribly involved in strategic issues." This is probably true – but only because the campaign did not consider the matter of race to be a "strategic issue". On this subject, Jarrett consistently and forcibly weighed in.
It was Jarrett, several aides say, who helped convince otherwise sceptical senior staff that Michelle Obama should go to South Carolina in November 2007 and give a speech addressing fears in the African-American community that harm might come to the black candidate. It was Jarrett who strongly encouraged Barack Obama to give his race speech. Numerous campaign officials credit Jarrett, along with the communications director Anita Dunn and Stephanie Cutter, Michelle Obama's chief of staff, for helping to rehabilitate Mrs Obama's "angry black woman" image.
A few days after the election, the president-elect told his new chief of staff Rahm Emanuel: "I want her inside the White House."
When the subject is Valerie Jarrett, it's fair to say that Emanuel's words fall short of effusive. Their opposing qualities – deliberateness and sensitivity in Jarrett; speed and brutal practicality in Emanuel – may reside harmonically in Barack Obama. But what the two aides represent isn't simply a function of velocity or decibel level. While both of them obviously want the President to succeed, Emanuel's criteria for "success" are straightforward. Jarrett, according to Cecilia Munoz, Jarrett's director of intergovernmental affairs, is "very focused on why he ran in the first place" – a psychological calculation that only Jarrett would presume to undertake and which therefore is bound to drive others nuts.
***
"Where's my picture?" Valerie Jarrett exclaimed, addressing no one in particular. She stood up from the conference-room table in her office and walked over to the bookshelf. "They brought these to me today."
The image was odd. It featured five figures seated on the couches and chairs of the Oval Office: the President; Jarrett; the Reverend Al Sharpton; the former Republican House speaker, Newt Gingrich; and the New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Standing over me, Jarrett said: "I love that photo."
That unlikely meeting had been arranged by Jarrett. Sharpton, Gingrich and Bloomberg were part of a group convening in Washington to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the landmark Brown v Board of Education school desegregation decision by promulgating education as a civil right.
"I liked the idea of getting this odd quartet together to come around an issue," Jarrett told me. "Because it would show the American people that this is what the President is about, getting unlikely combinations together."
I asked: "If you hadn't suggested that this meeting take place, do you think anyone else would have suggested it?"
Jarrett looked across the table at her friend, the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, who had dropped in on the interview. Dunn stopped taking notes and flashed Jarrett a look of abiding doubt.
"Probably not," Jarrett then murmured.
"Probably not?" exclaimed Dunn, who had been virtually silent until now. "Absolutely not!"
Dunn's outburst was delivered with a depth of appreciation that I had not picked up on elsewhere in the West Wing. Though Dunn is white, her words reminded me of the interviews I conducted with several African-Americans who had served at high levels in the Obama campaign. To them, Valerie Jarrett was something of a heroine.
Without Jarrett, these officials said they believed, their opinions and the often-legitimate concerns voiced by black leaders like Sharpton would have been thoroughly disregarded by the white-dominated senior staff. "There's a cultural nuance that they just didn't get," one such African-American staff member told me. "And the landscape of our campaign is littered with hundreds of stories where she intervened and voices got heard and decisions got made that might've gone a different way."
As to just how much difference Valerie Jarrett's various interventions had made, the staff member admitted he couldn't say. It wasn't for him to judge, anyway. That was between Obama and Jarrett.
Valerie Jarrett was born in November 1956 to American parents in Shiraz, Iran, where her father -- a renowned physician -- ran a children’s hospital. When Valerie was five, her family relocated to London for one year before settling in Chicago’s elite Hyde Park neighborhood in 1963.
Valerie Jarrett's mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, co-founded the Erickson Institute in Chicago and still serves on its Board of Trustees. Tom Ayers, the father of Bill Ayers, was a one-time fellow trustee of the Institute. According to WorldNet Daily’s Brad O’Leary, the Erickson board also included Bill Ayers’ wife, Bernadine Dohrn. For his part, Bill Ayers called Bowman “a neighbor and friend” in his 1997 book A Kind and Just Parent, noting that his neighbors also included Louis Farrakhan and “writer Barack Obama.”
Jarrett earned a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University in 1978, and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981. In 1983 she married Dr. William Robert Jarrett, son of the Chicago Sun-Times reporter Vernon Jarrett. Vernon Jarrett was a pioneering black journalist who wrote columns for The Chicago Defender extolling Communist poet Langston Hughes and lifelong Stalinists W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. He freelanced at Kansas City’s The Call from 1954-58, then returned to Chicago to become the first nationally syndicated black columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and still later wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times. Mr. Jarrett once sat on a union publicity committee with Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist poet who occasionally counseled the young Barack Obama. When Vernon Jarrett died in 2004, he was saluted in the pages of People’s Weekly Worker, the house organ of the Communist Party USA.
Valerie Jarrett entered Chicago politics in 1987 as Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development in the administration of Harold Washington, the city's first African-American mayor. Jarrett's father-in-law, whom The Washington Post called “a key influence in [Harold] Washington's decision to run for the Chicago mayoralty,” may have facilitated Valerie's rise through Chicago’s political ranks.
After Washington’s death in 1987, Valerie Jarrett worked for his successor, Richard M. Daley, whom she served as Deputy Chief of Staff. In 1991 Jarrett and her colleague Susan Sher recruited to City Hall Michelle Robinson (the future Michelle Obama), who at the time was engaged to Barack Obama.
From 1992 through 1995, Jarrett served the Daley administration as Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development; from 1995 to 2005, she chaired the Chicago Transit Board. From 1995 to 2008, she was CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate firm headed by Daniel Levin (cousin of Senator Carl Levin and Representative Sander Levin of Michigan). Marilyn Katz, an activist/public-affairs consultant with close ties to City Hall (and a former Students for a Democratic Society radical) introduced Jarrett to Daniel Levin.
From 2000 to 2007, Jarrett was a board member of the Chicago Stock Exchange. She currently serves as Chairman of the University of Chicago Medical Center's Board of Trustees; Vice Chairman of the University of Chicago's Board of Trustees; a Trustee of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry; and a Board of Directors member of USG Corporation, a Chicago-based building-materials company.
In 2008 Jarrett co-chaired the Obama-Biden Transition Project. After that, she was appointed to a prominent position in the Obama administration: Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs.
Jarrett became one of President Obama’s (and Mrs. Obama’s) closest and most trusted advisers. An Obama 2008 campaign official told the New York Times, “If you want [Barack Obama] to do something, there are two people [he's] not going to say no to: Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama.” Also in 2008, the aforementioned Susan Sher, who had helped Jarrett recruit Michelle Obama to the Chicago mayor’s office in 1991, emphasized “how incredibly instrumental [Jarrett will] be in virtually everything” in the White House.
Barack Obama confirms Jarrett’s tremendous cache with him, personally and politically. In July 2009, Obama told New York Times reporter Robert Draper, “I trust her completely … She is family.” Obama trusts Jarrett “to speak for me, particularly when we’re dealing with delicate issues.” When asked, the President admitted that he runs every decision by her.
“We have kind of a mind meld,” Jarrett said of herself and the President. “And chances are, what he wants to do is what I’d want to do.”
Chicago tycoon Martin Nesbitt identified the source of Jarrett’s power in the fact that she establishes both Michelle and Barack Obama's “whole notion of authenticity.” According to Nesbitt, Jarrett channels the Obamas’ inner voice, telling them, for instance: “That’s not you. You wouldn’t say that. Somebody else is saying that. Barack Obama wouldn’t say that.” Jarrett told Vogue magazine, “I kind of know what makes them [the Obamas] who they are.”
Jarrett is deeply concerned with racial issues. After the Jeremiah Wright tapes threatened to sink Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, it was Jarrett who encouraged Obama to give his “race speech” at Constitution Hall. African-American administration staffers have said that without Jarrett's patronage, “their opinions and the often-legitimate concerns voiced by black leaders like [Al] Sharpton would have been thoroughly disregarded by the white-dominated senior staff.” (Emphasis added.)
When White House press secretary Robert Gibbs tried to downplay Obama’s assertion (during the 2008 campaign) that Republicans were emphasizing the fact that Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills,” Jarrett instructed white staffers: “You guys, you’re not getting this issue right.” After Jarrett’s intervention, candidate Obama told his white staffers that they were too “gun-shy on race issues.” A campaign source revealed, “moving forward, the candidate made it very clear to us that we were just a bunch of white people who didn’t get it – which, by the way, was true.”
After Obama's inauguration in January 2009, Jarrett successfully pushed to loosen restrictions barring government officials from meeting with lobbyists, a rule enshrined in Obama’s executive memo on the Recovery Act, for fear that other “legitimate” concerns – raised by “civil rights organizations whose directors happen to be registered lobbyists – will not be heard.”
Without Jarrett’s patronage, the self-identified communist revolutionary Van Jones would not have gotten his appointment as the Obama administration's Green Jobs Czar in March 2009. A White House official told Politico that Jones “did not go through the traditional vetting process”; instead, Jarrett interviewed Jones, a signal that she pushed for his appointment. Jarrett gushed to the Netroots Nation conference:
“We were so delighted to be able to recruit him [Van Jones] into the White House. We were watching him…for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that, and we have all that energy in the White House.”
In early 2009 Jarrett lobbied President Obama to create the office of Chief Diversity Officer within the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a position filled soon thereafter by Mark Lloyd, an Alinskyite and a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Jarrett also helped recruit Obama's Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, who supports the Fairness Doctrine, has argued that Americans should “celebrate tax day,” and believes that animals should have legal standing to sue humans.
Moreover, Jarrett's office approved the September 2009 invitation of Jameel Jaffer to a White House Ramadan dinner. Jaffer runs the ACLU's "national security project." According to The American Spectator:
"Jaffer is a cause célèbre to the far left for his career of litigating against the United States in support of terrorists and radical Islamists, and has proudly touted his awards from groups like CAIR.
"'We had other names on the list for invitations, but Jarrett's office wanted Jaffer in the room. We were told it was important,' says a White House source. 'It was made clear that his presence was something senior folks here wanted to happen.'
"Jaffer has filed lawsuits challenging the FBI's 'national security letter' authority [and] the constitutionality of warrantless wiretaps. [He] has been a leader in pushing for the shut down of Guantánamo Bay, and providing legal rights to terrorists held by the United States overseas in such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan. His efforts enabled the leaking of 'torture photos' out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and some sources inside the Central Intelligence Agency believe he was one of the lawyers who provided legal advice to the Department of Justice to pursue an investigation into enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA."
Most of this profile is adapted from the article, "Valerie Jarrett: The Next Van Jones," written by Ben Johnson and published by FrontPageMag.com on September 14, 2009.