Shriver's report is fascinating, in that it shows 75% of Americans taking a positive view of an increasing female presence in the workplace, and a desire by both men and women to work together to come up with a way to balance work, childcare, and paying the family bills. Interestingly enough, "Sixty-five percent of men and women surveyed felt that the decrease in children growing up with a stay-at-home parent has been somewhat or very negative for American society," though the solution, amongst those surveyed, doesn't appear to be "Well, make the women stay home," as much as a desire for employers to consider more flexibility in hours, better benefits, and more realistic view on what it means to be an American family in today's society. As Heather Boushey, of the Center for American Progress tells Allison Linn of MSNBC, "We live in a world that is designed for one kind of family that no longer really exists."

Poll Finds Wide Support For Women At Work [MSNBC]

Of course, that's sort of her job — to serve the President, not the coddle the big egos of her mostly-white, mostly-male colleagues. And, by all accounts, she does a damn good job making sure Barack Obama hears the voices he ought to hear — including the ones who counsel him to think beyond the status-quo advice of the typical white, middle-aged male operative. It's probably unsurprising that there are people who consider her to have stepped on their toes, or that the people who feel that way are mostly white men.

The profile, written by Robert Draper, delves into Jarrett's early life of relative privilege and stifling realities.

The fast track laid out for Valerie Bowman - a Massachusetts boarding school, then Stanford, then a law degree at Michigan, then marriage and work at a corporate law firm - was one she pursued without either resistance or zeal, "kind of like an automaton," she told me. While Jarrett's family rejoiced when Harold Washington was elected mayor on April 22, 1983, the atmosphere at her nearly all-white firm the next day was one she would remember as "polite silence." Four years later, as a 25-year-old community organizer was wading into the tumult of her hometown, Jarrett, then 30, decided at last to reconnect herself to it. She quit both her marriage and her job, and in 1987, as the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, she went to work for Mayor Washington's corporation counsel - relinquishing her high-rise office for a cubicle in the city law department.But like the "sibling" she had yet to meet, Valerie Jarrett had found a path of her own.

It was in city government that Jarrett came to know and befriend the then-Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama, getting closer to the couple even as she experienced her own meteoric rise in Chicago business and social circles. And, then, her friend Barack decided to run for the U.S. Senate. Jarrett was skeptical.

"It was a lousy idea," Jarrett said as she recalled the decision by Obama, then a state senator, to run for U.S. Senate after he was trounced two years earlier in a bid for Congress. "He called and said: ‘I want to come over. Let's invite my closest friends. There's something I want to bounce off of you.'

"Well, Michelle had already told me what it was. She said, ‘So we're not in favor of this, right?' ‘Absolutely not!' ‘That's the right answer!' We conspired against it for all the obvious reasons.

But Barack convinced her, and she stuck by him, including when he asked her to join his campaign for the Presidency in 2007 at the advice of his finance chair, Penny Pritzker. Not everyone agreed. Obama's Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse, wasn't keen on Jarrett's expansive role, and his campaign manager, David Plouffe, openly disliked her. So much for "No Drama Obama." David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel come across as decidedly cool to Jarrett, as does spokeman Robert Gibbs.

Why? Rahm Emanuel got steamed that she talked to the Bushie she was replacing before he talked to his counterpart. Plouffe and she "tangled" over campaign strategy, which he now says she "wasn't terribly involved in." Pete Rouse didn't like her wide portfolio. Axelrod focused on the strength of her personal relationship and advice to Obama over her job-related qualities — and pointedly doesn't invite her to his Wednesday "hard core politics" meetings at his house, which just sounds kind of dickish, if you ask me.

On the other hand, the piece is filled with Jarrett's champions, from the women on staff at the White House and the campaign (like Pritzker and Anita Dunn) to staffers of color, who felt that their advice about how to speak to minority communities was often ignored by the white dudes up front.

It was Jarrett who strongly encouraged Barack Obama to give his race speech - convinced when other senior advisers were not, says Dr. Eric Whitaker, a close friend of Obama, "that he could actually pull off the speech," and that in the wake of the incendiary Jeremiah Wright tapes, now was the time to do it. Numerous campaign officials credit Jarrett, along with the communications director Anita Dunn and Stephanie Cutter, Michelle Obama's chief of staff, for helping to rehabilitate Mrs. Obama's angry-black-woman image. (Three staff members say Jarrett encouraged the future first lady to focus on military families.) According to Clifford Franklin, one of the campaign's African-American media consultants, "Having Valerie at the table kept African-Americans and Hispanics and women at the forefront of our outreach - where before it had been an afterthought."

And there's more than simple encouragement, nonetheless recognized by some people who worked on the campaign.

"But within the campaign, Valerie had been saying, ‘You guys, you're not getting this issue right,' " recalls a top official. "And Obama communicated to his senior advisers that he thought we were a little gun-shy on race issues; that the reality was, he did look different. There were also African-Americans on our staff, some in relatively senior positions, who were clearly upset that we had not consulted them in the response. And she actually organized a meeting to discuss it.

"And that's not just a process thing," the adviser said. "Because moving forward, the candidate made it very clear to us that we were just a bunch of white people who didn't get it - which, by the way, was true."

This, in fact, is exactly what diversity is supposed to bring to a work force: a different way of looking at a set of issues that is not just helpful, but necessary.

Jarrett was also instrumental in organizing one of the more interesting photo ops and discussions of the Obama Administration to date, in which she brought together Al Sharpton, Newt Gingrich and Mike Bloomberg during the commemoration of Brown v. the Board of Education in the Oval Office. Other staffers thought the idea was amusing, while Jarrett and some of her supporters thought it was important.

When I talked earlier to Robert Gibbs about the gathering, he mentioned something that I now relayed to Jarrett: "If you would've started out a line by saying, ‘Reverend Sharpton, Newt Gingrich and Mayor Bloomberg walked into the White House together,' I would've thought it was the start of a joke." But the press secretary had also said, "I think it shows how important she thought that event was that it ultimately got on [Obama's] schedule." Of course, Gibbs wasn't exactly saying that he thought such a meeting was important - which, judging by the measured smile on her face, Jarrett seemed to understand.

Pressing the point anyway, I asked, "If you hadn't suggested that this meeting take place, do you think anyone else would have suggested it?"

Jarrett looked across the table at her friend, the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, who had dropped in on the interview. Dunn stopped taking notes and flashed Jarrett a look of abiding doubt.

"Probably not," Jarrett then murmured.

"Probably not?" exclaimed Dunn, who had been virtually silent until now. "Absolutely not!"

Dunn, as stated, is one of Jarrett's supporters in the White House (other than the Obamas, who could not have been more effusive in their praise of her to the Times Magazine reporter Robert Draper). And Draper heard much the same from other senior African-American campaign staffers.

Without Jarrett, these officials said they believed, their opinions and the often-legitimate concerns voiced by black leaders like Sharpton would have been thoroughly disregarded by the white-dominated senior staff. "There's a cultural nuance that they just didn't get," one such African-American staff member told me. "And the landscape of our campaign is littered with hundreds of stories where she intervened and voices got heard and decisions got made that might've gone a different way."

I think maybe Plouffe, Axelrod and Emanuel ought to worry a little less if Jarrett's got designs on their turf and a little more about whether listening to her will help them better serve the President.

The Ultimate Obama Insider [New York Times]

[Washington, D.C., June 23. Image via Getty]

WASHINGTON - JUNE 23: Former tennis champion Billie Jean King (R) speaks during an event to mark the 37th anniversary of the enactment of Title IX at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building of the White House June 23, 2009 in Washington, DC. The biggest impact of Title IX was to give females equal access to scholastic athletics. Also attending the event were Education Secretary Arne Duncan (L) and White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett (2nd L). (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Although Bill Clinton had a similar office in the nineties — shuttered in favor of the Office on Faith-Based Initiatives by Dubya — some groups like NOW initially asked that it be made a Cabinet-level office (others wanted it to be a Presidential Commission). Obama opted for neither, noting that he had decided to make it a kind of interagency task force staffed with 24 Cabinet-level officials in an effort to make each agency consider the impact of regulations and laws on women and girls. That is, however, apparently, not nearly good enough for some.

"I think it falls far short of what's needed," Martha Burk, a former chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations, said about the new board. The council will be headed by two top Obama advisers, Valerie Jarrett and Tina Tchen.

"With all respect to Valerie Jarrett and Tina Tchen, both of whom are excellent folks….I think both are going to find this is one of many things they're responsible for and I think they'll be stretched to give it proper attention. We have told them that," Burk said.

The Clintonistas are apparently not happy either, though they're not blasting Obama... yet.

One group – made up primarily of women who supported Hillary Clinton over Obama in the Democratic primary – said it will go to Congress seeking a presidential commission on women. The group sent out a blast email to rally its members around the idea just hours after Obama spoke.

Others are taking it to the web, e-mailing screeds to PUMA Amy Suskind about how awful it all is, though Suskind has some weird ideas about Ms. Jarrett.

First and foremost was the notion that Jarrett is perceived to be a major villain in the plot to bring down then Senator Hillary Clinton and Governor Sarah Palin: Did Jarrett stand up when Obama was using sexism, when the Democratic party was and the media was throwing mud and spitting in our faces? No she did not. Second, feminists ask: Where's the beef? Show me something, I mean anything, on Jarrett's resume that demonstrates the vaguest commitment to women's rights: I've been trying to find the answer to this question myself. Can anyone point to any work Jarrett has done to advance women's equality? Third, Jarrett is still linked to the Chicago-style scandals that plague politicians from that city (some rightfully and some wrongfully): She does have her detractors, and is a highly or lowly regarded slum landlady from Chicago. And finally, women feel that Jarrett is not in touch with our needs. One comment on our blog read: My concern with Valerie Jarrett is that I don't think she has been "kicked to the curb" enough to understand the depth and breadth of the problems that women in this country face.

Suskind says, "I see the merit of those concerns." Really? You can only be a "proper" feminist if you've been abused enough? What the hell kind of feminist says crap like that?

Finally, Time's Amy Sullivan, the New York Times' Lisa Belkin and the Independent Women's Forum's Michelle Bernard, on Hardball last night, want to know where the boys are. First up, Bernard, who told Matthews that — despite the fact that she considers the Council wholly unnecessary — she was upset not to be asked.


Later she added:

"Why don't we have an office that looks as to who takes care of boys? Who are our daughters going to marry as our boys are falling behind? And they are. We have a boy crisis."

I'd mock that, but it doesn't seem that necessary.

Belkin has a similar concern, but from a different angle. She thinks that the term "women's issues" ignores the need for men to be more fully integrated into work-life balance issues in order to achieve that balance. On pay equity she says:

Yet to call this a "woman's problem" is to glide over the fact that the pay difference hurts more than just women. Pay discrimination is a family issue. In a two-parent family, it reduces the income of the entire household, and is often a determinative factor in tipping a single parent family from stable to impoverished.

That's rather heteronormative, actually. Also: Isn't equality a goal on its own?

On parental leave, she adds:

Studies show that men already feel stigmatized about taking the minimal leave available to them, and that reluctance hurts who? Among others, women.

Because a government council is going to be able to, through forcing agencies to take note of the effects of laws on women and children, change society's and men's mixed feelings about men taking parental leave through policy?

Basically, Belkin goes on about the changes that she'd like to see the government make to society and social norms along these lines, and Sullivan more or less signs off.

There's also, of course, the whole problem of even calling things like equal pay, maternity/paternity leave, child care, and public health "women's issues." Lisa Belkin has a smart discussion of why some of the items on the Council's agenda won't get far until they're redefined simply as universal issues.

Which is all well and good, but a little outside of the mandate of a government council, Cabinet position and Presidential commission. There isn't even universal consensus that the government should be trying to make women equal, let alone on the idea that equal pay hurts men and not just insofar as they might lose their jobs to women. If we define certain things as being of more importance to the way women lead their lives in this country — which is, after all, the reality — and define women as less privileged by those things then men, I don't see how that's a terrible thing.

Some Women Wanted More From W.H. [Politico]
Is Valerie Jarrett Anti-Woman? [The Daily Beast]
Obama's Council On Women And Girls [New York Times]
It's Not Just Women's Work [Time]

Earlier: Hello, Ladies
Feminists Miffed At Hillary-Hating Ms. Magazine

• Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is free tonight on $4,500 bail and has absolutely no intention of resigning after being indicted on massive corruption and extortion charges. [CNN, Politico, Chicago Tribune]
• Barack Obama said he'd had no contact with Blagojevich over the Senatorial appointment Blagojevich apparently was attempting to sell. [Huffington Post]
• Blagojevich did, apparently, attempt to trade with SIEU President Andy Stern the appointment of Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in exchange for a golden parachute into an SEIU-funded non-profit. Jarrett dropped out of the running shortly thereafter. [Marc Ambinder, Politico]
• Contrary to early reports, Rahm Emanuel didn't tip off the U.S. Attorneys. [Talking Points Memo]

• Other names that have been flushed out of the indictment by bloggers and reporters: Senate Candidate 2, who Blagojevich was reportedly using to fuck with Obama's team over Jarrett, was probably Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan; and Senate Candidate 5, with whom Blagojevich might have had the most serious quid-pro-quo conversation, might well have been Jesse Jackson, Jr. [Marc Ambinder, Marc Ambinder]
• Obama might have said that he'd had no contact with Blagojevich over the seat, but Axelrod said otherwise a month ago. He's now saying he was mistaken. [ABC News]
• The Illinois legislature is likely to move to impeach Blagojevich, obviously, and they may just change the law and hold a special election to fill Obama's seat. [Politico, The Hill]

• Bill Clinton's going to disclose the names of the 200,000 donors to the Clinton Global Initiative by the end of the year. [Washington Post]
• The Minnesota Court of Appeals is definitely, totally not going to let toe-tapping Senator Larry Craig withdraw his guilty plea. He'll continue claiming he is 100%, totally, utterly, without-a-doubt heterosexual and voting against LGBT rights. [CNN]
• New York Governor David Paterson has agreed to consider United Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat after she contacted him and asked him to do so. If he did appoint her, she's be the first openly gay United States Senator. [New York Magazine]
• Meanwhile, John McCain's going to appear on Letterman Thursday. [ABC News]

MEGAN: So I am coming to you live from your ancestral homeland, aka, Brooklyn. It's very noisy.

SPENCER: You are not in Brooklyn. You are in Colonial Williamsburg.

MEGAN: Oh, believe me, I know. To get back here at one point, the cab driver insisted that he didn't know where it was (I had been in Park Slope) and drove me over the Manhattan Bridge, to the Lower East Side and tried to make me get out, which I refused to do until he drove me back over the Williamsburg Bridge, cursing me the entire way.

SPENCER: He has good taste.

MEGAN: I curse more profligately. D.C. is good for some things. So, did you spend the weekend worrying about the security of the homeland if Joe Lieberman is removed from his chairmanship? Because we wouldn't want the terrorists to win.

SPENCER: You know it. The terrorists fear no man like they fear the Jowler. To remove him from his chairmanship for the simple choice to campaign against the new Democratic president and for suggesting that a sufficiently Democratic Senate would end the country as we know it would be like blowing up the World Trade Center all over again.

MEGAN: You can't mess with the motherfucking Nutmeg State.

SPENCER: I want to play by Lieberman rules, you know? Not only ought there to be no consequences for my actions, I want to be actively courted, disloyalty rewarded. Josh Marshall had a good post on this on Friday. This isn't a negotiation! You campaign against Obama? You watch the Democrats gain seven seats, at least? You lose your shit, period. Do you think the Republicans would be this accommodating if Arlen Specter campaigned for Obama and the GOP retook the Senate?

MEGAN: I seem to remember them pretty effectively telling Jim Jeffords to fuck off when they fully took the Senate earlier this decade.

SPENCER: Besides, what's he really going to do? The New England GOP went extinct on Tuesday. Lieberman will either caucus with the Democrats, officially or unofficially, or he'll go down in flames in 2012. His state voted for Obama by fucking 22 points.

MEGAN: But Harry Reid thinks he's progressive. So, like, down is up and up is down and Harry Reid doesn't like making unpopular decisions — or, apparently, even popular ones — so I sort of don't understand why he wants to be Majority Leader.

SPENCER: And if there needed to be another reason here, my friend the unkillable Brian Beutler pointed out that Lieberman's gavel has the power to do serious damage to an Obama administration. But are you really sweating Harry Reid for that statement? Reid's people are saying there's no chance for Lieberman to keep his gavel, so who gives a fuck if Reid praises Lieberman?

MEGAN: I'm just sick of Reid being such a pushover all the time. He's the head of the Senate. The reason the executive branch keeps getting more and more powerful — besides the truism that every Senator thinks he or she will be President some day — is because squishes like Reid and Frist before him allow the executive branch to usurp too much power from the legislative.

SPENCER: But if that's the case, don't look at what he says, look at what he does. He's taking Lieberman's gavel away. That's not being a squish, it's defending the caucus and the Obama agenda. If he puts a crony in charge of the government affairs committee, that's bullshit and I said so here. Even the most outwardly-virtuous Obama administration needs congressional oversight and blah blah blah I hate all this goo-goo good government bullshit like Henry says in Goodfellas. What do you think of Larry Summers because I don't know what to think so help me.

MEGAN: I really, really, really cannot believe that the NY Times called him "a leading candidate to be the next Treasury chief." And I hope that when Valerie Jarrett said this weekend that we're all just guessing and that it's not from them that she's specifically talking about Summers. Because they are obviously, I think, floating him to see if they can get away with it, and I don't think they can and I think, worse yet, that they ought not to try.

SPENCER: What's the case against Treasury Re-Secretary Summers?

MEGAN: I think the biggest reason is that this Administration just shouldn't take on his women are innately not good and math and science bullshit that he said when he was President of Harvard. That is just some stupid, embarrassing, sexist shit that, rightly, caused him to lose his job and the trust and support of the faculty and the student body. I think that, given all the sexism charges floating out and around right now, the main guy that's going to be seen as running Obama's economic policy needs not be someone with his sexist head so far up he ass he can watch himself bloviate from inside his own mouth.

SPENCER: So who do you think would be a better pick? Give me your short list.

MEGAN: I mean, I like Moe's idea of Sheila Bair that she floated last week. It doesn't hurt that she's a woman, qualified and doesn't care as much about fucking Wall Street as Summers does — although I think those are good things — but I think picking someone like Bair would resonate more with Obama's themes that the next step has to be bailing out main street. Summers is a big business, Wall Street loving guy and always has been, and I think there's a good argument to be made that getting first and second quarter's earning and dividends back on track doesn't fix our economy. I can also get on board with Tim Geithner.

SPENCER: Oh shit Crappy Hour just went up in the Kutt! That's change I can believe in.

MEGAN: I mean, let's not take this as a sign that I'm on board with everything the all-union EPI is about, but yeah, I went there.

SPENCER: What are the relative merits of Bair and Geithner? Because I'll speak for myself. The true test of whether we have change I can believe in is whether I can buy a Range I can believe in.

MEGAN: Compared to one another, or to Summers? I think Bair would be an interesting choice if Obama is really serious about this Main Street bullshit he keeps talking about that continues to make me want to pound shots whenever he says it. I think Geithner is a choice more in the Summers school of though, though way less free trade-y than Summers, which is an apt criticism of Summers from the left to which Obama repeatedly promised to "have another look" at NAFTA during the primaries and is sending Emanual around to tell everyone to keep the Colombia FTA out of the new stimulus.

SPENCER: Can you explain Bair being better for this "main street bullshit"? Remember, I'm an economic illiterate. MATH IS TOO HARD FOR TEH BOYS

MEGAN: Ok, so, Obama is all about how now that we've giving away billions upon billions of dollars to the banks — and he wasn't even talking about the possibly incredibly illegal tax policy change that Paulson decided to pass to give them more money than Congress even intended — that it's time to turn to bailing out Main Street (drink!). Bair comes from the FDIC, so she's more intellectually engaged in issues on a daily basis that are actually affecting individual Americans than all in the weeds of intellectual economics and the kind of trickle-down stuff that's supposed to happen from fixing Wall Street. For instance, from the Kuttner article:

She has long waged a battle within the administration for direct assistance to homeowners, rather than having stressed mortgage holders be the incidental beneficiaries of bailouts to bondholders and banks. Last week, she went public with her dissenting views, giving an interview to the Wall Street Journal. "[W]e're attacking it at the [financial] institution level as opposed to the borrower level, and it's the borrowers defaulting. That is what's causing the distress at the institution level," she said. "So why not tackle the borrower problem?"

That's in line with what Obama has said about what the government needs to do next.

SPENCER: Is she the sort of Treasury Secretary who'd urge using fiscal policy instead of just monetary policy as a tool to get us out of the crisis? That's the most econ-wonky question I can ask and I don't really know what it means.

MEGAN: It means that instead of trying to manipulate the price of our currency to encourage exports or interest rates to encourage lending, she's try to spend money on stimulus or passing legislation that would restructure aspects of how we regulate or spend money in order to make longer-term economic changes. And, yes, I think she is. Certainly more than Summers. The question is whether this Administration or the Obama Administration can have the intellectual courage to suck it up, admit that there are some hard times a-comin', and rather than continuing to throw money at the problem in the futile hopes of staving off the worst of the collapse, will take measures to help the eventual recovery and prevent the next one. There's a real political risk to long-term policy investments when they might have to come at the expense of short-term political capital or gains. But, as I said, I'm sick of squishes. It's 2 years until the next election, someone should "run around yelling 'Fuck you!'" besides Joe Scarborough.

SPENCER: I want to give Calderone the link on that, since me, him and another friend are taking a bro-trip to New Orleans on Friday. Also, before you drive back to DC, drive to the Flatbush junction — south on Flatbush Ave till it connects with Nostrand — for a beef patty at Golden Krust. That's BKLYN.

MEGAN: Will it last 4 hours? I can bring you one.

SPENCER: Oh fuck yes.