These are the first-person memoirs of 18 Obama administration mid-level staffers. But don't get your hopes up for dirt-dishing about what it was actually like to work for the 44th President, or for his notoriously abrasive and foul-mouthed first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel (lately mayor of Chicago), or for She Who Must Be Obeyed, a.k.a. “senior advisor” Valerie Jarrett, who not only had unlimited access to the President and First Lady but controlled and patrolled everyone else's.
West Wingers: Stories From the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House is not that kind of book. You can open it at random, as I did, and you will read only that the President “earned” his role “by caring for others and listening to the voices of people who often aren't heard”; that “the thing I loved about Obama was his crystal clarity, his infamous calm, his love and devotion to taking the long view”; and that Michelle Obama always exuded “calm and grace” and “allowed me to live in” the “realm of infinite possibility.”
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