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“I believe it was Valerie Jarrett who said ‘we are ready to rule on day one’. She meant it.”

PING and FLASHBACK:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/us/politics/14friends.html

Obama’s Friends Form Strategy to Stay Close
By JODI KANTOR
Published: December 13, 2008

Last Sunday night, President-elect Barack Obama’s three closest friends — Valerie Jarrett, Martin Nesbitt and Dr. Eric Whitaker — sat down in the study of Mr. Nesbitt’s house in Chicago for one of their increasingly frequent heart-to-hearts.

They were puzzling over a new question: how the Obamas, who hope to remain close to their Chicago friends, will spend time with them while living in the isolation chamber of the White House. Over Diet Cokes, the three drafted the beginnings of an elaborate visiting schedule that will bring Hyde Park to Washington, so the nation’s new first family can have a little taste of home.

“O.K, Eric, you need to plan to be in D.C. the first six weekends of the presidency,” Ms. Jarrett, soon to be a senior White House adviser, instructed Dr. Whitaker, he recalled.

In the presidential campaign, the Obamas had a “no new friends” rule, surrounding themselves with a coterie of familiar faces. Even if the Obamas lift that rule in Washington, newcomers are unlikely to replicate the intensity of this group’s ties, formed over more than a decade by births and deaths, Scrabble games, barbecues and vacations, but also by shared beliefs about race, success and responsibility.

Back when the Obamas were hardly the most prominent members of the group, the doctors, lawyers and businessmen from Chicago became not just one another’s friends but also one another’s supporters, forming a network that eventually helped the politician among them on his way to a Senate seat and then the presidency. Their bonds grew only tighter in the long slog of the campaign.

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The Obama social universe is large, multiracial and far-flung, spanning law school buddies, political allies and friends who kept Mrs. Obama company during her husband’s long absences. But the Obamas’ closest friends are the tight bunch from the South Side of Chicago, who never expected to find themselves in this situation.

Like Mrs. Obama, whose father worked for the city water department, most are from modest backgrounds. (When Mrs. Obama directed a student-volunteerism program at the University of Chicago in the mid-1990s, she was employed by the same office for which her mother had once worked as a secretary.) Mr. Nesbitt, now a real estate executive, is the son of a steel mill worker and a nurse; Mr. Whitaker’s mother was also a nurse, his father a bus driver. Like Mr. Obama, they attended private schools on scholarship.

When they arrived at elite universities, they often found they were among the only blacks in their classrooms. In medical school in Chicago, Dr. Whitaker and Mr. Nesbitt’s wife were taken under the wing of Dr. James Bowman, Ms. Jarrett’s father and the first black tenured professor in his department. (Dr. Whitaker also earned a public health degree at Harvard, where he played basketball with a certain lanky law review president with a funny last name.)

“How many African-Americans are there going to be at the University of Chicago?” Mr. Nesbitt said, explaining how he and Craig Robinson, Mrs. Obama’s brother, now a college basketball coach, became close at business school there, years after meeting on a basketball recruiting trip.

Initially, the Obamas were nowhere near the most successful members of the group. “Michelle was always Craig’s little sister, and Barack was the little sister’s boyfriend,” said John W. Rogers Jr., founder of the first black-owned money management firm in the nation.

When Mr. Obama was a state senator and Mrs. Obama ran a leadership training nonprofit organization, they lived in a building full of academics, unlike the wealthier members of the group, who lived in sprawling apartments or large homes.

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Before they became involved in national politics, they became involved in school politics. Mrs. Obama, Mr. Nesbitt, Mr. Rogers, Ms. Jarrett and another close friend, Susan Sher, all sat on the board of the Laboratory Schools, private elementary and secondary schools at the University of Chicago, and lobbied for admitting more students from lower-income families.

“We were all too young to be in the civil rights movement,” Mr. Rogers said. Instead they grappled with the questions of first-generation success: how to ensure that others had the same opportunities they did, and more personally, how to give their children the best of everything and yet teach them what had come before.

Dr. Whitaker founded a South Side medical clinic with a barbershop that offered free haircuts to lure black men to get health care; Ms. Jarrett, as city planning commissioner and then a real estate executive, championed mixed-income development to replace housing projects; and Mr. Rogers founded a charter school that focuses on financial literacy.

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