Gibbs gives bit of a drawl to administration message
Tom Baxter
Editor, Southern Political Report
January 23, 2009 —
When questions were being raised in the media recently about the lack of Southerners in the Obama cabinet, a point not widely mentioned was that the voice which, other than that of the president himself, will do most of the talking for this administration has a bit of a drawl. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs held his first briefing with a White House press corps eager to prove it isn’t in the tank for his boss Thursday afternoon, and got the predictable grilling. For more than an hour, he fielded questions about the botched swearing-in, the closing of the Guantanamo detention center, the president’s BlackBerry and the interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual. This was the first of many grueling sessions. If the job doesn’t rise to cabinet level, the presidential press secretary plays a critical role, as the first person in most situations to answer for what the administration has done. And as a recent Sunday New York Times Magazine profile details, Gibbs is closer to the president he serves than most press secretaries. In a Washington Post story last year, campaign spokeswoman Linda Douglass called him “the Barack whisperer.” The 37-year-old spokesman for the administration grew up in Auburn, Ala., and attended North Carolina State University, where he was a volunteer for Bill Clinton in 1992. He worked his way up from an internship to a staff position with former Democratic U.S. Rep. Glen Browder, and later for U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina. He’d worked his way up to the job of presidential campaign press secretary for U.S. Sen. John Kerry when Gibbs had what at first may have seemed a setback. In solidary with campaign manager Jim Jordan, who’d been sacked and who had brought him into the Kerry campaign, Gibbs resigned in 2003, with no steady job in sight. The setback turned into the opportunity of a lifetime when the Democratic operative got a call from the freshly minted U.S. Senate campaign of Barack Obama, looking for an experienced press hand. The two bonded quickly, and Gibbs quickly became one of Obama’s closest advisors. Gibbs may be best known to Democrats for the clip of him handing Sean Hannity his hat in a post-debate dust-up. He’s said to be combatively loyal to his boss, and as the clip of the Hannity encounter clearly shows, he goes at the political game as a contact sport. As any true son of Auburn should.
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