The New York Times has a magazine piece today on the Obama White House with emphasis on the 20 somethings, 30 somethings and 50 somethings that work there, including Reggie Love, Obama's personal aide; Jon Favreau, a speechwriter and my fave, Sam Kass, the 30-year-old assistant White House chef who often tends to the garden (pictured).
On Tuesdays, the secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar; the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Julius Genachowski; Senator Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania; and Senator Jon Tester of Montana used to have an early basketball game. Occasionally, Axelrod would join them. Once or twice, Casey and Tester stayed to play a game or two with the later-arriving junior staff members. Basketball is such an obsession that Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, has been known to jokingly admonish staff members to plan their travel around pickup games.Obama is calm even when angry:
Then there is Stotus — the softball team of the United States (a word play on Potus, the acronym for president of the United States). Stotus, a team made up of White House staff members, gathered on humid summer evenings last year to take on rivals like the Democratic National Committee and then would sometimes celebrate with snacks and drinks afterward at local restaurants and bars. Nonplayers often came out to cheer, thumbing their BlackBerrys as they watched the game. The sports are all in good fun — a chance to unwind after work and connect with friends — but an undercurrent of personal fitness runs throughout.
“People are commenting on it,” Ziskend teased Lesser at Café Dupont, referring to his housemate’s new and improved physique.
“Really?” Lesser asked, laughing. He looked up and added, a touch more seriously: “Really? Like who?”
THE OBAMAS ARE the first White House family in modern memory to treat Washington like an actual city. They moved from Chicago, another urban center with a large African-American population, and they invited inner-city children to help with the new garden and to trick-or-treat and hunt Easter eggs at the White House. According to the CBS Radio News correspondent Mark Knoller, the press corps’ unofficial White House historian, George W. Bush ate dinner or lunch at a restaurant anywhere in the country only 21 times during his eight years in office; the Obamas dined out nearly a dozen times in their first year alone. Read it all here.
Obama doesn’t yell, his aides say. He’s calm even when he’s angry. But his stern glance is far worse than any tirade. To many of his acolytes, the president is a role model. “This is a person who beat the odds to be a United States senator and who has offered you a job,” Reggie Love says. “This was a moment in time where things will only be this way for a little bit, and they were, and I was proud to take the opportunity.”Michelle Obama gives dating advice to the younger staffers:
More than anything, they repeat, over and over, they don’t want to embarrass the president.
Showing up to work each day at the most prestigious address in America can feel a bit like finals week in college. They are always on call, always working hard. To these mostly 20-something staff members, Obama is a strict father, one with high expectations, whom they don’t want to disappoint. Michelle Obama is more of a big sister, tapping her toes about when that boyfriend is ever going to propose or playing Cupid by suggesting a match. She gives young, single White House staff members the kind of dating tips she offered in Glamour magazine’s December issue, warning young women: “Cute’s good. But cute only lasts for so long.
