Obama picks Capitol Hill insider for White House liaison to Congress
Published Tuesday November 18th, 2008
WASHINGTON - Phil Schiliro has spent his entire working life in Congress, doing every imaginable job from drafting arcane legislation to running for a seat himself. Steeped in the culture and traditions of Capitol Hill, Schiliro seemed to be one of those people who'd never leave voluntarily - he'd have to be carted out.
But president-elect Barack Obama changed all that when he snagged Schiliro to be his White House liaison to Congress. Now Schiliro, 52, has the task of being the bridge between the new president and the legislators who have the power to make or break his agenda.
Schiliro, soft-spoken but intense, has had several months of practice for the job. He was the middleman between the Obama campaign and Congress. Schiliro was the one Obama dispatched to closed-door meetings of House Democrats last month to soothe nerves and count noses on the eve of a vote on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.
Now, when legislators want to give the president-elect advice - solicited or otherwise - on anything from cabinet appointments to legislative strategy, they turn to Schiliro.
After more than a quarter-century on Capitol Hill crafting major legislation and spearheading investigations, Schiliro now toils in an office in downtown D.C. - about halfway between the White House and the Capitol - where his job is equal parts lobbyist, ambassador and even sometimes psychologist.
"I give Phil Schiliro a great deal of the credit for the smooth working relationship between Obama and the Congress," said Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Schiliro's former boss.
"He listens to people, he hears what their concerns are, he's very tactful and diplomatic. ... He knows how things can get done," said Waxman, who chairs the Oversight and Government Reform Committee where Schiliro led probes of everything from the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster in India to steroid use in major league baseball.
Schiliro, who declined to be interviewed for this report, could not be more different in temperament from the other man at the centre of Obama's relationship with Congress: the bombastic, cocky and foul-mouthed Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who will become chief of staff in the new White House.
Colleagues and adversaries uniformly describe Schiliro instead as quiet and even-keeled, with sharp political instincts and steely persistence when it comes to getting his way. Though he shuns the spotlight himself, he's known as a skilled spin doctor adept at leaking to the media when it suits his purposes.
"He is a ruthless partisan," said Mark Corallo, a Republican strategist who faced off against Schiliro as a top aide on the government reform panel when the Republican controlled the House. "He is the kind of guy who's going to fight tooth and nail for his side, but he's not going to be odious and disagreeable and hateful."
He's not likely to lose, either.
Waxman credits his former top aide with killing a clean air bill by a one-vote margin during then-president Ronald Reagan's administration.
Schiliro set up backers of the legislation, including Democratic Representative John Dingell, to lose a test-vote during a legislative drafting session on the measure in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Waxman said. That changed the dynamics on the issue on Capitol Hill and eventually yielded a compromise bill in 1990.
It's stories like that that have fuelled private speculation by some congressional insiders that Schiliro is quietly working for Obama, and with the unspoken encouragement of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to help Waxman, a strong environmentalist, topple Dingell as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. The panel will take the lead on climate change legislation that will likely be one of the heaviest lifts of Obama's presidency.
There's no concrete evidence of those efforts, and Obama has taken pains so far to steer clear of intramural party fights about committee chairmanships or policy differences.
But there's little that goes on these days among senior Democrats in Congress that Schiliro - a Pelosi favourite - isn't intimately involved in, or at least privy to. Last week alone, Schiliro dialled into Democratic leaders' strategy-plotting sessions on a new auto industry bailout, dealt with queries about inauguration tickets and fielded legislators' recommendations for whom Obama should tap for his administration.
When Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) had a few picks he wanted to send Obama, he dialled "Phil." Schiliro told him to get the relevant resumes to him and John D. Podesta, who's leading Obama's transition to the presidency.
"I didn't feel the need to go beyond that. I trust his word," Cummings said.
The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Schiliro studied political science at Hofstra University and landed on Capitol Hill in 1981, fresh out of Lewis and Clark Law School. He took an entry-level job with then-Representative Tim Wirth (D-Colo.) but it wasn't long before he impressed Waxman, who poached him for his own staff. Within a year, Schiliro was Waxman's chief of staff, a position he held for a total of 25 years, with a yearlong intermission in 2004 when he became a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.)
Schiliro made two unsuccessful bids to become a congressman himself, moving back to his parents' home on New York's Long Island in 1992 and then again in 1994 to run.
Schiliro displayed his willingness to use bare-knuckled tactics in the 1994 bid, when he helped engineer a late move to kick another Democrat off the ballot so he could run.
Even though Schiliro lost, many legislators still say they regard him as one of them.
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