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Mischka and Alexander McQueen.
    It quickly became apparent to others who worked in the White House that Jarrett was at the top of the pecking order. She was more powerful than the president’s first chiefs of staff, Rahm Emanuel and William Daley.
    “Rahm thought he was running the White House, but he wasn’t,” said one of Emanuel’s close political associates. “His advice was sometimes taken and sometimes not. There were people who were much closer to the president than Rahm, especially David Axelrod, Michelle, and Valerie Jarrett, and Rahm didn’t get along with two of them—Michelle and Valerie. There was a lot of dysfunction around the president, and saying yes to Rahm was saying no to Michelle and Valerie. Eventually, Rahm was shoved out of the White House by those women.”
    The story was pretty much the same with Rahm’s replacement, Bill Daley. When Daley quit the White House in frustration after less than a year, he told friends how Jarrett had made his job impossible. Frequently, he said, he and the president would agree on a plan of action, such as the selection of a new domestic policy adviser. Then Jarrett would get into the elevator and go to the second-floor Residence, where she had dinner with the presidentand first lady. By the time she returned, the decision had been reversed.
    Jarrett had a staff of about forty people and her own Secret Service detail. She could pick and choose which White House meetings to attend, and her tentacles reached into the remotest corners of the federal government. When she spoke at a meeting, she made it clear that she was speaking for the president or first lady. If the meeting took place in the Oval Office, she stayed behind after everyone left and had the last word with the president. You had to reach back nearly seventy years, to the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and his alter ego, Harry Hopkins, to find a presidential adviser who possessed the kind of power exercised by Valerie Jarrett.
    “She moves the players around like chess pieces,” said a woman who used to work on Jarrett’s staff in the White House. “You can hate her, and most people in the White House do, but she is brilliant at a lot of things, from economics to politics to public administration. And she works staggering hours, seven days a week, probably fourteen hours a day. Sometimes she falls asleep at her desk.
    “Her capacity for juggling a dozen things at once is truly amazing,” this former Jarrett aide continued. “She never forgets a name or date or detail. That’s the only way it’s possible to control such a huge and unwieldy thing as the federal government.
    “She is obsessed with disloyalty and laziness, and she finds both everywhere. Valerie assumes that you are lazy and disloyal unless you prove otherwise over a long period. Even then, your performance doesn’t count if she decides that you are lazy and disloyal.”

CHAPTER SIX
    THE THIRD MEMBER IN THE MARRIAGE
    “A mong the narrative threads that course almost uninterrupted throughout the history of the American presidency,” observed Robert Draper in the New York Times Magazine , “is the inevitable presence in the White House of The One Who Gets the Boss. Karen Hughes got George W. Bush. Bruce Lindsey got Bill Clinton. Jim Baker got the elder Bush. And so on, back to William Seward’s evolving closeness with Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson’s lifelong reliance on the counsel of James Madison. Each such aide has served his or her president in a way that reveals the latter’s psychology.”
    Valerie Jarrett’s unique hold on Obama—and the ultimate source of her power—could only be understood by examining the role she played in Obama’s emotional life. By acting as his all-knowing, all-powerful guru, Jarrett made Obama feel that hewas under her protection. She watched over him and made him feel safe. He was her special charge, the Chosen One. She focused on him, doted on him, and devoted her entire