ROUSE
The Outsider’s Insider
By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 27, 2007
Pete Rouse is the Outsider’s Insider, a fixer steeped in the ways of a Washington that Obama has been both eager to learn and quick to publicly condemn. The meticulous workaholic rose through three decades of unglamorous legislating to become arguably the most influential Democratic aide in the Senate when he worked for then-Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.).
“His familiarity with Washington makes him somebody whose judgment I trust,” Obama said. And yet this is the Washington of “cheap political points” and “petty” partisanship that figures prominently in Obama’s public speeches these days. “I know I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington,” Obama tells his audiences. “But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.”
That has made Rouse’s job of introducing Obama to Capitol Hill a complicated balancing act: He seeks to burnish Obama’s still-modest credentials as a freshman senator while preventing the talented but inexperienced politician from making the kind of mistakes that have denied every senator since John F. Kennedy the presidency. “My role,” he said with classic staffer discretion, is simply “to help him accomplish his priorities.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/26/AR2007082601446.html