Pete Rouse, a 64-year-old single man, whose children are his cats, is strictly a behind-the-scenes player.  He rarely talks to reporters, and never on the record.  In most White House photographs,all you see is his backside.  Washington Insiders are already calling him the “Anti-Rahm”.

Rouse has often been called “the 101st Senator,” possessing over 30 years of Capitol Hill experience.  He served as Tom Daschle’s powerful chief of staff. When Daschle got booted from the Senate by the voters, he hoped Rouse would work with him in the private sector.  But Rouse received an expected call from Cassandra Butts, the policy director on Dick Gephardt’s 2004 presidential campaign and an old law school chum of Obama’s. Butts asked Rouse to meet with the newly elected Obama. Not really wanting to, Rouse had lunch with the young senator. Obama asked him to sign on as his chief of staff,a demotion of sorts, dropping Rouse from the office of the most powerful Senate Democrat to that of the most junior member of the body.  Rouse politely declined.  Obama, in his usual unrelenting way, kept asking.  Eventually, Rouse accepted.

This was not an unusual move.  Most outsider candidates for the presidency recruit an outsider team to make their dream happen.  Bill Clinton’s go-to guys in 1992 were the little-known pit bulls Paul Begala and James Carville.  His first chief of staff was Mack McLarty, a childhood friend who had risen to become chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party. It was a team untainted by Washington but also naive in knowing how Washington worked.

But Scooter’s campaign and Senate staff, by contrast, were full of Daschle and Gephardt veterans, and the staff’s were unexpectedly driven by the power bases and reputations of two politicians who had long been thrown on the trash heap . Obama’s chief of staff was Pete Rouse. His deputy campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, managed Daschle’s 2004 campaign. His director for battleground states, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and his director of communications, Dan Pfeiffer,both worked as deputy campaign managers for Daschle in 2004. Obama’s foreign-policy director, Denis McDonough, was Daschle’s foreign-policy adviser, and his finance director, Julianna Smoot, was head of Daschle’s PAC. Many of those who didn’t come from the Senate minority leader’s office came from the House minority leader’s office. Obama’s campaign manager and now WH Insider, David Plouffe, was Gephardt’s deputy campaign manager in 2004. His head of delegate operations, Jeff Berman, played the same role for Gephardt. His national press secretary, Bill Burton, was Gephardt’s Iowa press secretary. Dozens of others come from related arms of the party, in particular the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

During the months between Barack Hussein Obama’s (peace be unto him) election and his ascension to the Throne, Pete Rouse was known as the transition team’s “keeper of the list”:   the list of who was supposed to get jobs and who was owed favors.

It was a surprisingly effective operation for a first-term senator who hadn’t worked a day in Washington before 2004.  But it’s exactly the team you’d expect a former chief of staff to the Senate minority leader to put together.

According to Tom Daschle:

The person most responsible for this was Pete Rouse.

It turns out that Obama’s presidential campaign was in part based on plans Rouse had prepared for Daschle in 2004, before Daschle decided to sit out the presidential race. 

There were only two Democratic power centers capable of running a national campaign in 2008: the veterans of the Clinton campaign, and the staff around the congressional leadership. Since the Clinton staffers were helping Hillary, Scooter grabbed those Washington Insiders that were left behind when both Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt left office, and then he had the good fortune to land Rouse, who knew how to work with all those staffers.

This gave Obama’s campaign, and, eventually, his White House, a congressional character.  Rahm Emanuel came aboard, out of the House leadership, and legislative liaison Phil Schiliro, who is one of the leading candidates to replace Emanuel if the Rouse pick proves temporary, was taken from Rep. Henry Waxman’s office.

The Obama administration has caught a lot of heat for adopting an snotty approach to dealing with Congress, but it’s staffed by longtime congressional hands who strongly believe that you have to be snotty with Congress if you actually want to get anything done in it.   With Rouse taking over as Interim Chief of Staff, the way that Obama and his Administration deals with Congress is not going to change .