Meet Pete Rouse, Possibly Obama’s Next Chief Of Staff

With Rahm Emanuel reportedly announcing Friday that he's leaving the White House to run for mayor of Chicago, President Obama is expected to name his senior adviser, Pete Rouse, to serve as acting (and perhaps permanent) White House chief of staff.

In choosing Rouse, Obama would be tapping a near-opposite of his outgoing chief of staff. Rouse eschews the spotlight, preferring to operate as a self-described "behind-the-scenes" manager. "I fix things," Rouse told NBC last year, in one of his only recent interviews. He has rarely been photographed, much less with his boss. And while he knows many reporters, Rouse infrequently speaks to the media -- unlike Emanuel, who has been known to e-mail and phone White House beat reporters at all hours.

Yet like Emanuel, Rouse is a consummate insider. He enjoys a close relationship to the president dating back long before Emanuel was invited into the Obama inner circle. His name is well known around Washington, thanks in large part to his nearly three-decade-long resume as a Capitol Hill staffer.A Connecticut native who graduated from Harvard, Rouse got his first job in Washington in the early '70s as a clerk in the Senate mailroom. He worked his way up, working mostly for Democrats — though in 1979 he moved to Anchorage (his mother was from Alaska) to work for GOP Lt. Gov. Terry Miller. In 1982, he returned to Washington, where he managed the office of then-Rep. Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Four years later, Rouse went to work for his longtime friend and former staff colleague Tom Daschle. For 18 years, Rouse served as chief of staff to Daschle, a South Dakota senator and onetime Democratic majority leader. When Daschle lost his bid for re-election, Rouse planned to leave the Hill, but instead went to work for Obama, then a rising-star freshman senator.

Advisers such as David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs are more widely credited with crafting Obama's successful presidential run -- but Rouse was the actual steward of Obama's presidential ambitions, assembling a strategy document that put the senator on the path to his 2008 presidential bid. "There would be no Obama without Pete," says a Democratic strategist who has worked closely with the Obama team.

It was Rouse who famously urged Obama to vote against John Roberts' nomination to the Supreme Court in 2005, reminding him that a vote for Roberts could derail his future political ambitions. It was also Rouse who encouraged Obama to develop relationships with GOP senators, including Indiana's Richard Lugar, then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Chuck Hagel, a moderate from Nebraska who ultimately endorsed Obama in '08. Obama also formed a friendship with Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who worked with the senator on spending issues and still speaks frequently to the president today.