How To Get An Obama Staff Job

An OTBKB reader has been sending me items related to a post a few weeks back about getting a job in the Barack Obama White House. Here's an excerpt about Jim Messina, director of personnel, and his deputy, Patrick Gaspard from a blog called the Politico.

Whatever you do, don’t expect Messina to be impressed with your fancy degree.

“I believe that politics is truly a merit-based world,” he told High Country News magazine in August. “If you work hard and you’re honest — and you keep winning — you’ll get to rise. [In my early political jobs,] I was the kid who was the first in the office and the last to leave. And it’s still kind of true. ... I’ve been chief of staff to three famous members of Congress and I work for a fourth, and when [each] hired me, I don’t think any of them even asked me where I went to school — they just asked me what I had done, and I love that.”

Says Barrett Kaiser, communications director for Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and a longtime colleague and friend of Messina’s: “He’s a brilliant guy who walks around with a pocketful of long knives for his enemies and big bearhugs for his friends.”

Which suggests that you might want to know Messina’s résumé as well as you know your own: A veteran of political campaigns from Alaska to New York and a former chief of staff to Baucus, Dorgan and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy of New York, Messina has been in Democratic politics since 1991. He was Obama’s campaign chief of staff, and he’ll be a White House deputy chief of staff.

McCarthy, who counts Messina as a friend, says there’s one “don’t” when dealing with him: Don’t oversell yourself. “Jim has terrific instincts, and if someone is trying to gloss over their qualifications, he will sense it.”

Kaiser puts it this way: “If you’re friends with Jim Messina, you have a friend for life. But if you cross him, God help you.”

(On second thought, cancel that pizza.)

As for Gaspard, he’s also a runner. But if you run with him, make sure you don’t tell a soul.

Those who know Gaspard say he’s an under-the-radar guy who doesn’t like name-droppers or showboaters. One former colleague describes him as “hardworking, loyal and very private” — with an emphasis on the private. 

Gaspard comes to the Obama team from Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, where he was executive vice president for politics and legislation. The “loves of his life are his family [and] his workers,” says Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of SEIU. So try talking about your kids, public schools or that time you were shop steward.

Or you might want to bone up on Haiti, from which Gaspard proudly hails, or Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he lives now.

How to impress him? Be like him: smart, committed, disciplined and low-profile.

“He is very discreet, very professional and all about results,” says Jennifer Cunningham, a New York lobbyist and political consultant who was Gaspard’s boss at 1199 for seven years. “He has an enormous work ethic.”