Obama's Brain Trust

For nearly 20 years, Rouse served as chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a position that earned him the nickname "the 101st Senator." "His office inside the Daschle suite was the epicenter of the Democratic caucus," says Jim Jordan, who managed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee under Daschle and Rouse before leaving to run John Kerry's presidential campaign. "It was a superb organization, and Tom's a rare political talent. But Pete was the skeleton over which it was all built."

Ironically, Rouse would never have been available to Obama if it hadn't been for Karl Rove. In the same election that brought Obama to Washington, Daschle became the first minority leader ever unseated — by 4,000 votes — in a campaign masterminded by Rove. But in defeating Daschle, he gave an unwitting assist to the man whose candidacy threatens to destroy the cynical politics that Rove perfected.

"Barack arrived at a point of transition for the party, in that Senator Daschle was leaving the Hill and Dick Gephardt had decided to leave politics," says Cassandra Butts, a top Gephardt policy adviser and close friend of Obama's from Harvard who helped lead his D.C. transition team in 2004. "There was this wealth of talent that was looking for a place to land."

In Rouse, Obama identified a senior partner who could guide his dizzying ascent through the ranks of the Senate — and beyond. Butts arranged a meeting at the restaurant of the Mandarin Oriental. "It was very much us selling Pete on why he'd want to work for a freshman senator who was, like, 99th in seniority," she recalls. Initially, Rouse declined the offer. Crestfallen over Daschle's defeat, he was leaning toward leaving the Hill. "But Barack went back at him," says Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, for whom Rouse also once served as chief of staff. "He told him, 'I really want you to do this.' And Pete reconsidered."

With Rouse as his wingman, Obama suddenly had the juice to make his move legislatively. In conjunction with David Axelrod, Rouse drew up a "strategic plan" for Obama to bring to Congress the kind of bipartisan legislation that had been his hallmark as a state legislator. Drawing on the across-the-aisle relationships he had cultivated under Daschle, Rouse enabled Obama to partner with Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, to increase funding to round up and scrap more Soviet-era arms, and even with Sen. Tom Coburn, the archconservative from Oklahoma, in passing a bill that makes all federal earmarks and contracts searchable. In less than two years, Obama built a substantive track record. "That's just indescribably hard on the Hill," says Jordan. "Pete understood how important this kind of post-partisan legislation was for fleshing out Barack."

In the fall of 2006, when Obama began to flirt with a presidential run, Rouse already had a plan in place that he had worked out during Daschle's own abortive run in 2004, and he quietly set about recruiting all the old hands. "The Daschle team came in to work with Obama through Pete Rouse," says Durbin. For starters, Rouse brought Daschle's campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, into the fold. The unflappable, buzz-cut South Dakota consultant, habitually decked out in jeans and cowboy boots, became the architect of Obama's masterful field campaign, rising through the ranks to become deputy campaign manager. Hildebrand's partner, Paul Tewes, ran Obama's Iowa campaign and is now charged with reshaping the Democratic National Committee in Obama's image.

But Rouse's most important "get" was the friend with whom he had first started out in politics as fellow legislative assistants in the early 1970s. "Tom Daschle — in no small part because of Pete's urging — was one of the first to endorse Senator Obama," says Durbin. By persuading Daschle to join the Obama bandwagon a year before Iowa, Rouse secured the establishment credibility needed to undermine Clinton's aura of inevitability. (That Daschle chose Obama over four other former Senate colleagues is a testament not only to Rouse but to Obama, who endeared himself to Daschle in 2004 by contributing $85,000 from his Senate war chest to the South Dakotan's re-election battle.) In turn, Daschle brought with him a network of 85,000 proven donors. The woman charged with asking them to part with their money was another Rouse hire, former Daschle finance chief Juliana Smoot. In all, some 25 members of the Daschle team hold key positions in the Obama camp, including deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer and consultant Anita Dunn, who helped run Bill Bradley's campaign in 2000.

Daschle himself remains the most mysterious member of Obama's team. During the primary campaign, he played a key role in twisting the arms of undecided superdelegates. But when pressed for more details on his day-to-day influence, he says only, "I'm involved somewhat in strategy and some of the campaign questions as well."