Robert Gibbs: Face of Obama White House

by John McCormick

On one of his last nights on the campaign trail, Barack Obama was agitated. He was backstage and face-to-face with a traveling aide after giving a speech to an overflow crowd at a football field.

Like a referee inserting his body between two fighting players, Robert Gibbs quickly stepped in and ushered Obama away from the ashen aide. Later, Gibbs said the flare up was over a teleprompter malfunction.

There are few Obama advisers with the clout to defuse such a squabble. And in recent years none has spent as much time around the future president as Gibbs, who is expected to soon be formally named White House press secretary.

Past occupants of the job have rarely had such intimate knowledge of the thoughts, habits and deep secrets of the Oval Office's inhabitant.

Theoretically, that could allow Gibbs to give highly informed responses from the White House podium. But it will also make it more difficult for him to say he does not know the answer to a question.

The Alabama native will bring his slight southern drawl and Deep South roots to the most visible post in the administration of the nation's first black president.

Gibbs, 37, also brings a taste for a good fight. He can have a foul mouth and is not shy about mocking reporters, sometimes over relatively minor points.

His favorite lines have been dubbed "Gibbs-isms" by colleagues, including one about feeling like a "one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest." The son of two librarians, Gibbs can seem pretty disorganized. He often ends trips with notes on cards, napkins and borrowed scraps of paper.

Before there was a media pack, Gibbs spent much of 2005 and 2006 traveling with Obama on commercial planes and small private jets as the future president built his national political network and raised money.

When it came time to start campaigning, Gibbs was often the highest-ranking adviser on the plane as the candidate and traveling press corps crisscrossed the nation.

He was part of the small group of men who formed something of a traveling locker room around Obama. Watching and debating sports and players was often the topic of choice.

"It gives us something to talk about that isn't always so serious," Gibbs said Friday. "Not to say sports isn't pretty serious."

When talking to Obama, Gibbs often called the candidate "Boss." Aides say Obama likes having Gibbs around because he eases the tension and is ferociously loyal.

Because of his long history with Obama, Gibbs is one of the few people viewed as being able to "speak the truth" to the president-elect.

"I've always wanted to be in a position where as a staffer I could always speak freely and in an unvarnished way with whoever I was working for," Gibbs said. "I don't think you serve somebody well if you don't feel like you can."

Reporter relations with Gibbs, however, have not always been so warm. He is a master of trickling out compelling details to select reporters, while offering others limited information and zero access to the candidate.

Gibbs was zealous about protecting Obama from reporters who wanted to pull him off message. The media could easily approach Obama to ask questions during the early days of campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, but that stopped when Gibbs started traveling full-time.

News media relations grew especially tense in June, when Obama's campaign plane took off from Washington with many reporters but with no candidate. Obama was secretly meeting with Sen. Hillary Clinton.

When the plane landed in Chicago, Gibbs confessed Obama had been visiting with his defeated rival and a possible running mate. The incident came to be known as "the kidnapping."

Gibbs was first hired in 2004 for Obama's U.S. Senate bid, after being introduced by campaign strategist David Axelrod. He has remained a top adviser ever since, whether in Obama's Senate office, fundraising committee or presidential campaign.

Those who have watched the relationship between message man and candidate say it has changed little.

"Robert was a loyal and trusted adviser during the Senate race, which was obviously long before there was ever a thought that he could be working for the next president," said Tommy Vietor, who has also worked for Obama since 2004.

Before joining Obama, Gibbs had faced brief unemployment when he left the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry in 2003. He had previously worked on congressional campaigns, on Capitol Hill and for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Between Kerry and Obama, Gibbs worked for a third-party political group that threw sharp elbows in the 2004 Iowa caucuses--including a television ad that used a picture of Osama bin Laden to criticize Howard Dean's foreign policy credentials.

His work on the Kerry campaign introduced him to a crop of young talent he would later help hire, including Obama's speechwriter, Jon Favreau.

On the night of what is arguably Obama's most famous speech, his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the then-U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois was wearing a tie that belonged to Gibbs.

The one Obama had worn that day was not quite right for television. So Axelrod looked over an array of options Gibbs had packed for Boston, eventually picking a light blue one.

"It was requisitioned for a higher purpose," Gibbs said. "I have never gotten that back, and I never had the illusion that I would."