11/14/2023 0 Comments Was valerie jarrett reading a prompterWhen he was elected, he implored her to go with him to Washington. When he sought the Democratic nomination for President, she had the singularly thankless task of fundraising, particularly from Wall Street, and, once he won the nomination, of winning over Hillary Rodham Clinton’s supporters. Other advocates say she could have stood up to the Daley administration in order to ensure that low income housing was a larger part of the mix in those same new developments.Īs a political insider with extensive business connections, Jarrett was able to introduce Obama to many of his first donors. Some public housing advocates credit Jarrett with preserving affordable housing in an era when there was political pressure for wholesale market-rate residential development on former public housing land. In 1987, following the failure of the Chicago Housing Authority to build scattered-site public housing, a federal judge had made Habitat responsible for the construction of all new public housing in Chicago. Daley then appointed her to chair the Chicago Transit Authority-a position she held from 1995 to 2003, and where she fought to preserve transit service to the city’s minority-dominated South and West Sides.įrom 1995 through 2008, Jarrett was vice president and then chief executive of Habitat Co., a Chicago-based real estate firm. In that role she worked to revitalize the historic Bronzeville and other distressed neighborhoods as mixed income communities before running afoul, in 1995, of white real estate developers whose insider deals she had disrupted. Daley, rising to the position of commissioner of planning and development. She then went on to work for Mayor Richard M. The scion of a prominent South Side family, she got her start in Chicago politics in 1987 as deputy corporation counsel for finance and development in Mayor Harold Washington’s administration. Impressed by both of them, Jarrett worked to make sure that the right people shared that impression, connecting Obama to his early supporters. Jarrett met Obama in 1991, when she hired his then-fiancée Michelle Robinson for a job at Chicago’s City Hall. Jarrett’s role in the early advancement of Barack Obama is well known. The drive to delegitimize Jarrett speaks to some of the more profound fractures within the Democratic Party - and an ongoing battle about what the progressive movement stands for and where it is headed. “fat cats” and a more nuanced, realistic understanding of race, class, gender and sexuality as intersecting factors in how power is constructed and shared. And, for that matter, between a simple, vaguely defined idea of progressivism as “little guys” vs. She’s also a lightning rod for a fight that is ongoing within the Democratic Party between centrists and progressives. She is credited with “strongly encouraging” Obama, during the Jeremiah Wright brouhaha, to give his landmark 2008 campaign speech about race, and she worked personally with Michelle Obama on countering the racist “angry black woman” caricatures concocted by the GOP.īut then, Jarrett - by dint of her politics, her identity and her mere presence in the White House - was always going to be more than a simple advisor. Jarrett is considered as the best White House ally of the gay community and a major force behind that decision. President Obama is the first president in American history to take a stand in favor of equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. So it is unsurprising that since she came to Washington, rivals for the president’s ear have slotted Jarrett into several archetypal roles - the Bad Boss, the Devoted Wife, the Ominous Foreigner - all of which seem designed, pretty explicitly, to avoid acknowledging that she might be very good at her job: advising Barack Obama.īut a dispassionate look at the record indicates that Jarrett has given the president some very valuable advice. And she is free to involve herself in and comment on all things. What she represents is what the future looks like, and where the Democratic Party, as well as the nation, is going.Īfter he was elected in 2008, Obama named Jarrett a “senior advisor.” As such, she travels with the president at will.
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