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"FacebookPinterest\n\n If to some the beltway resembles a high school for bright but hopelessly status-fixated souls, then the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room is its detention hall, where the caste system is both starkly defined and trumped by a prevailing atmosphere of shared misery. The basement-level room\u2014fittingly named after the victim of a madman\u2014is, despite a makeover three years ago, cramped, colorless, and harshly illuminated. Its forty-nine seats remain empty most weekdays until sometime after noon, when a stern female voice announces over the intercom, \"This is a two-minute warning for the start of the press briefing. Two minutes...\"\n\nThe reporters shuffle in and take their assigned seats. Journalists from little-known organizations such as Salem Radio, the Washington Examiner, and the Christian Broadcasting Network are relegated to the two back rows. A muddle of the emergent (Politico) and the endangered (Newsweek) inhabits the middle three. The stalwarts of print and radio sit in the second. And in the front, we find (along with AP and Reuters) the five TV-network correspondents\u2014your Chip Reids (CBS), your Chuck Todds (NBC), your Ed Henrys (CNN)\u2014who, in the way of cool kids everywhere, tend to make their entrance well after the two minutes have elapsed. Everyone gazes at the door just to the left of the podium as if willing it to swing open. Eventually it does. From an upstairs office, a few steps away from the one occupied by President Barack Obama, press secretary Robert Gibbs descends for his near-daily encounter with the White House press corps.\n\nOn this afternoon\u2014Friday the thirteenth of August\u2014Gibbs is accompanied by Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano to tout a rare bipartisan victory for the White House: a bill that will secure the Mexican-American border with up to 1,200 National Guardsmen and two unmanned aircraft. Half of the questions Napolitano fields relate to the content of the bill. The other half are about process\u2014the choreography of modern politics: \"getting Republicans to the table,\" the \"timetable for the next step,\" Congress saying that \"leadership in the White House is needed.\" Gibbs hates these kinds of questions, which seem to imply that the ends are less important than the means and the motives. But he maintains his placid Buddha-Bubba countenance throughout Napolitano's expert retorts. Forty minutes later, the secretary steps back, and it is Gibbs's turn behind the podium.\n\nThe reporters first rattle off a few questions about the progress of the oil-spill cleanup. Then about the economic recovery, then: \"On the president's trip [to the Gulf Coast] this weekend...any plans to get in the water?\"\n\nGibbs smirks. \"I doubt that will go out specifically on the guidance\"\u2014the president's daily schedule\u2014\"but stay tuned.\"\n\nThey persist, from each row. \"Will we get in the water, and will there be pictures?\" \"Are the waters clean enough to get into?\" \"Would that say something, if he takes a walk down the beach but doesn't put his feet in the water?\"\n\n\"Guys,\" Gibbs sighs, clearly exasperated, \"why don't we all worry about what happens on Saturday.\"\n\nA couple of hours after the briefing, the press secretary is in his office, sitting behind a semicircular desk that is itself a disaster site: teetering jumbles of paper, a spent tea bag, randomly affid Post-it scribbles from his 7-year-old son, a computer screen endlessly hiccuping with newly received e-mails, and a small TV split four ways to reveal four little heads, none of whom seem to be talking about Napolitano's briefing. Gibbs is probably tired, but it's hard to say for sure. His 39-year-old face is more like a shield, with an immense forehead and tiny eyes that scarcely radiate. The smile, affable and empty, could be that of a small-town gas-station attendant or a hired assassin.\n\nGibbs is about to surf the Internet to read what, if anything, has been written about the border bill. \"Few issues have been covered with as much emotion as immigration has over the past two months,\" he says. \"It'll be interesting to see if something on the affirmative side of the ledger can garner any attention.\" Still, he's clearly chapped about all of the \"what does this mean politically\" questions. \"Lord knows, we have proved fairly adroitly over the previous eighteen months that the decisions we make are not predicated on the polls,\" he says. \"Because if they were, we'd have new want ads for pollsters, right?\" And that probing line of inquiry about whether the president will brave the tainted Gulf waters strikes him as fairly \"pointless\"\u2014though as one of the correspondents had said to me right after the briefing, \"Why does he have to be testy about it? If he just gave a straightforward answer, that would've been the end of it.\"\n\nIn any event, none of this really matters. Despite Gibbs's efforts, the big news of the day won't be the successful passage of the border-security bill. Nor will it be whether Obama will go swimming tomorrow. That evening, at a White House gathering of Muslims, the president will declare that he supports the right of the Cordoba House planners to build an Islamic center just two blocks northeast of Ground Zero\u2014a story to swamp all stories. Later, I asked White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer why Obama decided to step all over Napolitano's message. Pfeiffer patiently explained that \"there are an exponential number of news cycles per day,\" that \"there's an infinite amount of time between the briefing and what he said that night,\" and that the mosque matter \"is something the president wanted to weigh in on, and [the Muslim event] had been on the calendar for months.\"\n\nSo even as Gibbs sat at his desk ruminating over whether the media was willing to cover something \"on the affirmative side of the ledger,\" he knew it was a long shot. No matter how many border briefings he held that day, only one message would dominate the next several news cycles. And like so many stories about the White House lately, it was not an altogether affirmative one.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n President Obama, the finest orator-politician since Ronald Reagan, has a communications problem. In less than two years in office, the man who talked himself out of obscurity and into the White House has managed to alienate both Wall Street and Main Street. Health care reform, initially hailed as a blockbuster legislative achievement, is now universally considered a political liability. Even his persona, once so crisp and inspiring, now comes off as murky, professorial, and insular\u2014a foil for the fusillade of rage being broadcast daily from the far right.\n\nIndeed, six years after convincing millions of rapt convention-watchers that \"my story is part of the larger American story,\" Obama is seen by many as playing for some team other than America's. It may be true that, as Robert Gibbs told me, \"it's hard to message 9.5 percent unemployment,\" but here's another verity: When an activist president is seemingly credited for nothing and blamed for everything, he's doing a lousy job of selling himself.\n\nPanic-stricken Democrats, fearful of losing both the House and the Senate in this month's elections, can console themselves with a perspective check. \"Every president has a communications problem,\" says former Clinton senior adviser Joel Johnson, who points out that at this point in their respective presidencies, Obama's approval rating of 44 eclipses those of Clinton and Reagan. Adds former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart, \"Honestly, the guy could walk on water and there'd be expos\u00E9s on 'What's in the water?' I think they've taken the proper view, which is that they're going to get judged once, and that's in November 2012.\"\n\nThen again, do they have any other choice? The selling of a president\u2014any president\u2014has become an increasingly Sisyphean undertaking since the days when Michael Deaver achieved genius status simply for making Reagan camera-ready. Dan Pfeiffer points out what's obvious to anyone who watches a few minutes of cable news, that political communications today are a frantic, Hieronymus Bosch\u2013like dystopia: \"The basic philosophy is, the beast is either feeding on you or feeding on someone else. The media is more combative an enterprise than ever before\u2014combative with the White House, newspapers literally fighting for their economic lives every day. You have outlets of ideological agendas in the briefing room on both sides who ask questions that fuel the debate. Every reporter sitting in that room, whether they admit it or not, wants to ask something that'll lead the Huffington Post. So it's incredibly provocative.\"\n\nInto this breach wades Robert Lane Gibbs, the person best suited to sell Barack Obama to the rest of us. That's according to Gibbs himself, \"because of my knowledge of how he thinks and how he reacts.\" Gibbs occupies the West Wing's innermost circle, which at press time included chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior advisers David Alrod and Valerie Jarrett. Gibbs knows Washington better than Jarrett and Alrod do, and he knows Obama better than Emanuel does. The Auburn, Alabama, native with the sorghum drawl also knows Middle America better than all of them. According to former communications director Anita Dunn, Obama relies on Gibbs to \"bring a blue-collar political perspective to issues.\" Consequently, he has become the White House's primary stopgap for one of Obama's biggest shortcomings: his populist deficit. As Obama's tendency is to deliberate, then triangulate, then orate, then stay above the fray as his decisions slowly play out, it falls on Gibbs and, occasionally, Vice President Joe Biden\u00AD to fight their boss's battles and to project evidence that our president gives a damn about us and knows what he's doing.\n\nWhen I asked Gibbs if it was true that no press secretary in recent memory has enjoyed the kind of interaction he has with the president, I figured that he would demur modestly. Instead, he replied, \"I don't think I disagree.\" The pair's bond, rooted in Realpolitik and swaddled in masculine affect\u2014\"Oh, my God, on the guy level it's unbelievable, I mean it's real guy stuff,\" says one female associate\u2014is especially manifest inside the White House, where Gibbs's portfolio extends far beyond the Brady briefing room.\n\nIt was Gibbs, for example, who was sitting in the press office one Monday evening in June when he remembers calling Obama to tell him, \"Hey, I've got this article from Rolling Stone about General McChrystal that I think you need to see. Can you meet me at the elevator in the Residence?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I heard about this,\" replied the president, who had been tipped off about the story by Vice President Biden. \"How bad is it?\"\n\n\"You're going to want to read it,\" he said.\n\nThe two men met at the Residence, and Gibbs handed him the article. Obama thumbed through it while the press secretary rattled off its highlights. \"Let's go back to the Oval Office,\" the president said, then asked Gibbs to summon a few other advisers. Together, they conferenced in the Oval to discuss the options. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates initially recommended that the general be reprimanded. Gibbs and others argued that McChrystal had undermined the commander in chief and therefore must go. Obama sided with Gibbs's faction.\n\nNo sooner had Obama publicly beheaded McChrystal that Wednesday than a fresh catastrophe crossed Gibbs's desk: An undersea robotic vehicle in the Gulf had dislodged the containment cap on the BP well. Until the lid was reattached eleven hours later, a new torrent of oil spilled into the sea. Gibbs went back into the Oval to give Obama the news.\n\nThe president stared at Gibbs, stunned. \"Well, why did it do that?\" he demanded.\n\n\"Sir, we're trying to find that out.\"\n\n\"Gibbs,\" Obama said, \"your job the rest of the day is to make sure that one of those vehicles doesn't do that again.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Gibbs was present at the creation, the spring of 2004, when Barack Obama was a senatorial aspirant with a campaign staff of nine and a memoir that maybe nine people had read. Thirty-three at the time, Gibbs possessed exactly the middle-American sensibility Obama, with his singular Hawaii-to-Indonesia upbringing, lacked. The son of two librarians, Gibbs was a soccer jock who had attended only public schools, graduated from North Carolina State, and labored for a series of congressmen and senators. He was a loyalist, having quit John Kerry's presidential campaign in November 2003 after Kerry fired Gibbs's boss and friend Jim Jordan. A few years later, Jordan returned the favor, suggesting that Alrod\u2014who was then running Obama's Senate campaign\u2014hire Gibbs as the team's communications director.\n\nDuring the summer of 2004, Gibbs accompanied Obama to diners and town halls throughout Illinois. Together they would hash out what lines worked and which ones didn't. Particularly downstate\u2014which, as Gibbs points out, \"is closer to Little Rock than it is to Chicago\"\u2014the southerner's working-class antenna was a useful thing to have around. \"Look, I want you to be able to tell me whatever you need to tell me,\" Gibbs remembers the senator-elect saying right after the election.\n\nIn the episodic years that followed, Obama and Gibbs spent countless hours on the road together, and along the way the latter became a reliable barometer of the former's moods and a counterbalance to his disposition. As the Obama presidential campaign's traveling press secretary\u2014or \"point of the spear,\" as he aptly puts it\u2014Gibbs provided brute force to Obama's gauzy \"change\" theme. In one postdebate exchange, for example, Gibbs challenged Fox host Sean Hannity's claim that Obama was guilty by his association with William Ayers\u2014pointing out that Hannity had featured Andy Martin, an influential hatemonger, on a special edition of his show. \"Are you anti-Semitic?\" Gibbs pressed his inquisitor. The showdown got a lot of YouTube attention, but it wasn't Gibbs's only dustup that election. According to one of the veteran correspondents of the campaign, Gibbs seemed to \"wake up every morning relishing ripping apart his opponents.\"\n\nGibbs was already destined to become (along with Alrod, Jarrett, and Pete Rouse) a White House senior adviser. The question was whether he would also serve as the Obama administration's press secretary. Few besides Gibbs seemed to think that it was such a hot idea. According to multiple sources, a number of his colleagues from the campaign attempted to dissuade the fiery southerner. At least three former White House press secretaries\u2014Lockhart, Mike McCurry, and George Stephanopoulos, all from the Clinton administration\u2014separately warned him that the two positions were too demanding for one person. \"I did both jobs at the same time,\" Stephanopoulos told him, \"and ended up not doing very well at either of them.\" Additionally, Joel Johnson remembers cautioning Gibbs that \"where as senior adviser you're the advocate to the president, as press secretary you have a dual advocacy role.\" To several in Obama World, the notion of Robert Gibbs as \"press advocate\" was laughable\u2014and Obama himself, when he first offered the job to Gibbs, instructed his new press secretary not to play the role of the bad cop.\n\nBut by most objective standards, Gibbs has proved himself more than worthy of the podium. Each morning he spends about three hours poring over the media reports and attending policy briefings. As one veteran White House correspondent told me, \"His deputies don't have to spend the whole afternoon cleaning up after him the way Tony Snow's deputies did.\" And unlike his predecessors, who stuck largely to the script because Bush preferred to break news himself, Gibbs can be quite expansive. \"Everyone says Robert's a completely different press secretary,\" says Pfeiffer. \"But it's a completely different job. Siloing doesn't work anymore, because everything has a million implications. Congressional, political, press\u2014it all feeds on each other. So Gibbs is expected to know more than the average press secretary.\"\n\nHis abilities notwithstanding, Gibbs seems especially gifted at offending fellow Democrats. One veteran Democratic communications strategist finds Gibbs's conduct \"snarky\" and \"arrogant,\" pointing to an incident last February when Gibbs gratuitously mocked Sarah Palin by showing up to a briefing with handwriting on his left palm. (\"I wrote down 'hope' and 'change' just in case I forgot.\") Perhaps more troubling to the left was Gibbs's remark in July that Republicans might very well take back the House. This may have seemed like a case of stating the obvious. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the comment \"unfortunate,\" and Gibbs refused to walk it back.\n\nIn general, however, the left's criticisms of Gibbs tend to fall into two categories. The first is that the press secretary can be overly protective of the president. While several current and former White House officials told me that Gibbs often brings uncomfortable truths into the Oval Office\u2014as economic adviser Larry Summers recently told a reporter, \"The only person from the campaign who'll speak bluntly to the president is Gibbs\"\u2014his impulse nonetheless is to insulate Obama from political fallout. A prime example occurred this summer when the White House backed the USDA's decision to fire Shirley Sherrod after a Web video showed the federal employee giving a seemingly racist speech. Initially, Gibbs failed to investigate the origins of the clip. Instead, while Sherrod was telling reporters that the snippet grossly misrepresented her overall message, Gibbs was on the phone encouraging USDA chief Tom Vilsack to issue a statement emphasizing that the decision to fire her was solely his. It was Gibbs's impulse to insulate Obama that ultimately backfired: An administration employee with a glowing civil rights backstory had been smeared by right-wing scalp-hunter Andrew Breitbart and the White House appeared to sacrifice one of their own. According to an individual who is close to both the president and his senior team, \"The problem is that in attempting to cauterize the wound, you stab yourself deeply.\" (The same source says the racial subtext of Sherrod's firing may also have contributed to Gibbs's squeamishness: \"Gibbs sees himself as the voice of the average guy. And so he tends to be aggressive in not having that sort of conversation [about race].\")\n\nGibbs's zealous engagement with foes\u2014both real and imagined\u2014leads to the second major criticism of the press secretary: that he too often directs his ire at progressives instead of at the administration's many opponents on the right. A memorable instance occurred on August 10, when Gibbs was out sick and his deputy, Bill Burton, replaced him in the briefing room. The day's major talking point was supposed to be the bill Obama would sign a few hours later that would save 160,000 teachers' jobs. Instead, most of the questions focused on sarcastic comments Gibbs had made the previous day to Sam Youngman of The Hill concerning liberal pundits who drive ratings by criticizing the president. Gibbs dubbed the talking heads the \"professional left,\" adding that \"they ought to be drug tested\" and \"they wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.\"\n\nUnsurprisingly, Gibbs has a ready explanation for what some see as his heightened states of protectiveness toward his boss and his aggressiveness toward his boss's critics. \"I think that the role of press secretary has forever changed,\" he says. \"Those that are opposed to the president are more vocal and more organized and more prevalent than against any administration at any point in any time in our history.\" And because attacks by a Sarah Palin, Rick Santelli, or liberal pundits occur almost daily and can immediately engulf the blogosphere, Gibbs says, he feels compelled to counterattack, swiftly and forcefully so that Obama himself\u2014known for his cool above-it-allness\u2014doesn't get caught in the crossfire. \"I'm sure that there are people that say, 'Oh, gosh, the White House press secretary shouldn't do that,'\" he says. \"But at the same time, if the White House press secretary doesn't do it, who does\u2014and gets on the news?\"\n\nOf course, to many on the left\u2014including former president Bill Clinton\u2014the Obama White House picks too few battles with the right, evincing a dismaying passivity to the rest. Gibbs has a far different view of things\u2014which is that most of these provocations are utterly baseless, unworthy of anyone's attention...except that the media gives them undue airtime. Which leads us to one other rap on Obama's press secretary: Apparently Gibbs can't stand the press.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nThe day after his inauguration, Barack Obama summoned his entire communications team to the Oval Office. Though the gathering was intended as a photo op, the president had something to tell them, according to one who was present\u2014namely, that he wanted his administration to have a good relationship with the media. This was a somewhat surprising statement, given that Obama\u2014unlike, say, John McCain\u2014had never devoted much of his time to hanging out with reporters. \"My theory of Obama,\" says one White House correspondent, \"is that he looks at the press and says, 'You people are reasonably smart, reasonably well educated\u2014why aren't you doing something good with your life like I am?'\" According to David Mendell's seminal biography, Obama: From Promise to Power, during his 2006 trip to Kenya the senator at one point found himself surrounded by the traveling press and called out for Gibbs, saying, \"Where is the animal trainer? Where is the whip and chair?\" Mendell reported that Obama's remark \"did not go over well with several reporters.\"\n\nRelations, in any event, are not good. Obama incessantly refers to \"the cable chatter\" with palpable disdain, and he frequently grumbles to his aides about the media's coverage of his presidency. His press conferences are fewer than Clinton's (though more than Bush's) at the same stage of their presidencies\u2014and, says Clinton's former press secretary Mike McCurry, \"I feel sometimes when I watch Obama do these that he looks like he'd rather be having a root canal.\" Obama does reserve a certain respect for opinion writers such as Tom Friedman and David Brooks of The New York Times, Jerry Seib of The Wall Street Journal, E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post, and Joe Klein of Time. \"My impression is that he reads a lot of columnists,\" says Brooks, \"and therefore he sort of cares about what they say.\"\n\nThe press corps itself is another matter. \"When people ask me what it's like to cover the Obama White House after covering the Bush White House,\" one correspondent told me, \"I say that there is no difference. The level of control is great or greater. The access to officials is maybe greater, but the information it produces is less.\" Gibbs's press shop readily refutes such sentiments. They point out that at various junctures of his still-young presidency, Obama has been accused of overexposure. Besides the press, says McCurry, \"no one else in the country thinks we probably haven't seen enough of Barack Obama.\" The White House's hostility toward the press corps extends far beyond Obama and Gibbs. Alrod calls the daily briefing \"part of the theater of the absurd that is the media frenzy of Washington.\" While another official said of the media, \"They feel like [Gibbs] doesn't give them access to the president. And in many ways he doesn't. In many ways they don't deserve it.\" But make no mistake: Gibbs's operation is Ground Zero for reporter loathing. It's where, according to a source close to the administration, certain White House correspondents are sometimes said to be referred to as \"terrorists.\"\n\nGibbs's casual contempt for journalists seems to be one of those unpleasant facts of life the White House media have come to expect. In Prague earlier this year, Gibbs told the traveling press to meet him for a goodwill dinner, then never showed up\u2014and never bothered to respond to their where-are-you messages. The reporters were annoyed but not terribly surprised, as Gibbs is notoriously unresponsive. The press corps has become so accustomed to this behavior that they barely seemed to notice when the press secretary finished off a recent briefing by saying with a straight face, \"I'll do one more, and then I'll go back to work.\"\n\nIt would be unfair to paint Gibbs as callous. His subordinates seem to love him, and even those who regard him as a bully tell stories of him offering to show a journalist's relative around the White House or extending sympathies when personal misfortune has befallen a reporter. He does not seem to take the bruising give-and-take personally. If anything, says Dan Pfeiffer, Gibbs recognizes that \"a lot of the forces that make his job harder than previous press secretaries' make reporters' jobs harder.\"\n\nIf Gibbs possesses such empathy, he does not use it to the White House's advantage. Says a prominent Democratic communications strategist who is critical of Gibbs, \"Part of your job as press secretary is to defuse rather than aggravate tensions with the press.\" Adds Mike McCurry, who counts himself as a Gibbs fan, \"You can try to circumvent them and say they're not as important as they used to be, but having those folks who cover you day in, day out, saying what you're about, still does matter. I still fall on the side that says amicable is better.\"\n\nIn his office, I ask Gibbs if the administration's view of the press has changed at all over the past year. He starts out hesitantly. \"No. I mean\u2014\"\n\nOh, come on, I say.\n\n\"Look, I will say this. We still joke that if we watched cable for the hour before he made his decision to run for president, we'd still be sitting in the Senate. You know, I don't doubt that [the president] has day-to-day frustrations\u2014like when somebody says, 'We don't know what's in the health care bill. Didn't the president do a poor job of explaining what's in it?'... I mean, Pew did that study of news coverage around health care, and I think 10 percent of it was on the legislation and 40 percent was on tactics and strategy and process. And then, you know, the day after the bill was signed, you walk into the briefing room and they say, 'How come nobody knows what's in it?' Or they'll say, 'What are the politics of nobody knowing what's in this bill?'\"\n\nGibbs's characterization of the Pew Research Center's findings is accurate; of the press's questions following the bill signing, not accurate. Still, statements like these illustrate a seething exasperation that is mutually felt\u2014and which reached a boiling point in the aftermath of the BP oil spill.\n\nGibbs and others in the press shop are understandably annoyed by the suggestion by some in the press that the spill was \"Obama's Katrina.\" True to the president's deliberative style, the White House was slow to assume ownership of the response to the disaster. But the emblematic feature of Katrina\u2014that the media were broadcasting the fiasco days before President Bush seemed aware of it\u2014does not apply to this case. As Gibbs correctly points out, the press initially flocked to a single issue: the politics of oil exploration. \"Up until the point where I had a big briefing [on April 29, nine days after the oil-rig explosion],\" he says, \"all of the questions I got were about the politics of drilling for oil.\"\n\nHad the press focused instead on the real issue\u2014the efforts to plug the well\u2014Gibbs says he would have been able to better deliver vital information. According to several administration officials, a week after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Gibbs stepped into the BP communications void\u2014not simply as a mouthpiece of talking points but as a source of at times highly technical minutiae. \"I spent as much time on that issue as I have spent on any issue, probably, in fifteen years in politics,\" Gibbs says. \"For probably two months, it was virtually everything I did. We were joking the other day, after the well got sealed, and somebody said, 'Gibbs, what are you going to do with all that stuff you know about oil?' And the president said, 'You should go be a consultant [for an oil company] right now.'\"\n\nBut on May 21, the leak was still gushing, and several reporters pummeled the press secretary with questions about the federal government's seeming helplessness on the matter. Gibbs grew infuriated by the insinuations, particularly by CBS's Chip Reid, that the administration was not doing all that it could do to improve BP's floundering response. After the briefing, he met individually with several reporters in his office and heatedly dressed them down. To one of them he asked, \"What's the point of me spending two hours every morning getting briefed on all of this if you're just going to be asking me the same questions over and over?\"\n\nGibbs had a point, but not as much of one as he believed. Some of that day's questions\u2014\"Is the president satisfied with BP?\" \"If they're not getting the job done, does the government just stand there as a spectator and hope for the best?\"\u2014did come off as inane. On the other hand, says one of the correspondents present, \"It was necessary to press them on the who's-in-charge point, because while they'd been giving replies, they were neither making sense nor squaring with the facts at the time, so they didn't count as answers. So too bad for them that they had to keep dealing with the same line of questioning.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nOne day, perhaps as soon as the end of this year, Robert Gibbs will step back from the podium, away from the food fight that is his daily bread, and assume the more ethereal climes of big-picture strategist. On rare occasions, he has been given a glimpse of what it will be like to float above the mosh pit. This summer, he accompanied the president to a Chrysler factory in Detroit. Obama was there to extol the improved fortunes of the automaker as a result of the federal bailout.\n\n\"I was in the Roosevelt Room when the final decisions were made on the two auto companies,\" Gibbs recalls. \"And I remember Chrysler was the one we discussed last. I'd asked someone before the meeting to pull together stuff on where the Chrysler plants were. And I spoke up at the meeting toward the end and said, 'These communities where the plants are, they're already at 17 to 19 percent unemployment.' The policy folks had said, 'Even with the money, it's 51\u201349 whether Chrysler ever makes it.'\n\n\"But at that Chrysler plant in Detroit, I remember standing next to Brian [Deese, the White House's auto-recovery czar] and listening to those workers cheer. And I looked at Brian and I said, 'You know what? It's nice, a year and a half after sitting in that room and arguing like you and I did that this made a lot of sense, to watch the people in Detroit at that plant who can raise their families with the hope of living the dream that their parents and their grandparents who worked in those same plants did.'\"\n\nFrom behind his cluttered desk, Gibbs's small eyes seem to shimmer a bit. \"And so,\" he says, \"as many days as you come in here and you roll that boulder up the hill, and maybe more often than not it rolls back on you\u2014it's a day like that where you say, 'You know what? If you roll the boulder up the hill, it makes a difference.'\"\n\nAlas, the headlines following the Chrysler-factory visit were not about the folks in Detroit whose jobs were saved. Instead, the media focused on the Commerce Department's discouraging economic report, the worsening conditions in Afghanistan, and Chelsea Clinton's wedding. So for Robert Gibbs and the White House, it was not a good news day. Just a good day.\n\nRobert Draper is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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