As a weekly strategy meeting in the White House drew to a close on a recent Monday, staffers hesitated before pushing their chairs back from the table.
It would be the last meeting of its kind. And no one was quite ready to leave.
“We’re at the end,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, in recalling the moment. “And people are nostalgic.”
In a few days, President-elect Donald Trump’s team will occupy the same table in the same meeting room, eager to get to work dismantling President Barack Obama’s legacy.
For now, though, Earnest and the other people who toiled to build that legacy are savoring their final moments in the cramped corridors of the 115-year-old West Wing.
The last meetings. The last meals in the Navy Mess. The last chances to linger on punishingly long days, just to banter with colleagues.
The adjustment will be a big one for Earnest, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, who spent the past decade on the campaign trail or in the West Wing, working for Obama.
From Kansas City to the West Wing
Earnest, 41, grew up in the Red Bridge neighborhood of South Kansas City and attended the private Barstow School on scholarship.
He earned a degree in political science from Rice University in Houston, Texas, in 1997, and went on to work on a series of political campaigns and the Democratic National Committee before joining Obama’s bid for the White House in 2007.
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Earnest had moved to Iowa to work for then-Gov. Tom Vilsack, who planned to run for president. When Vilsack dropped out, Earnest interviewed with the campaigns of then-Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Obama.
After talking to Earnest and spending time with him on the road, Obama turned to an aide, Dan Pfeiffer, on a flight out of Iowa, and said, “That Josh, he’s really solid.”
It was the ultimate Obama compliment, Pfeiffer said. “Solid for President Obama means calm, confident, and a good human being.”
The campaign offered Earnest the job of running Obama’s communications operations in Iowa.
“I’d watched the first few events that he had done as a candidate in Iowa, and I was impressed,” Earnest said. “He was optimistic. He was committed to a vision that brought people together, that was inclusive, that made people feel like they had a place. And it was a posture he had, a body language of very forcefully defending the values that he believed in. And all that resonated with me.”
Earnest fondly remembers driving across the barren Iowa landscape in the winter to attend town hall meetings and rallies.
“We did one in a livestock auction house in western Iowa one Saturday where the president literally stood on a stage sort of in the center of the room, like a prize-winning cow,” Earnest said.
It was a grueling pace, Earnest said, but there was a sense of possibility, palpable to Earnest in that livestock auction house, that fueled him and other Obama staffers through the long days.
Nearly ten years later, that livestock auction house, Earnest admits, “feels a long, long way away from the West Wing.”
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Two terms
Earnest is one of the few White House staffers who has stayed with Obama through all eight years of his administration.
It’s a rare feat. Even the most dedicated senior staffers burn out from the nonstop demands that come with working for the most powerful person on earth. They can’t tune out on weekends and holidays. They miss weddings and anniversaries and birthdays. They travel frequently.
Earnest rarely sees his 2-year-old son, Walker, on weekdays. He leaves for work before Walker wakes up, and gets home after the toddler has gone to sleep.
On his second-to-last Monday as press secretary, Earnest arrived at 7:20 a.m. He grabbed breakfast in the Navy Mess cafeteria on the ground floor of the West Wing. Then he settled into a series of meetings with communications staff and White House senior staff before prepping for the daily press briefing.
Most days, the packed schedule means Earnest ends up eating lunch at his desk — and sometimes dinner, too.
“I know it’s a bad day in the White House when I’ve had three meals at the White House, so if I can keep it to two, then it’s manageable,” Earnest said.
That Monday, the briefing prep ran about half an hour past its scheduled start time as Earnest and his staff finalized talking points for questions they anticipated he’d get from reporters. A few minutes before 1 p.m., Earnest straightened his tie, poured coffee from a thermos into a blue Royals mug, and headed down the hall to the briefing room.
A couple of staffers in the hallway wished him luck.
“You look good,” one joked.
“Thanks,” says Earnest. “I’ll try not to screw it up.”
The daily briefing
Earnest typically spends between an hour and an hour and a half taking questions on camera from journalists in the White House briefing room.
The grilling covers a mind-boggling range of subjects. That Monday, reporters asked Earnest about everything from Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes speech, to Russian hacking, to reports of White House staffers partying into the wee hours at a star-studded goodbye bash the Friday before.
“What time did you leave?” one reporter asked.
“That’s classified,” Earnest quipped, to laughter from the press corps.
Earnest is known for his affable, even-keeled demeanor at the podium, which he chalks up to temperament.
When Obama promoted him to chief White House spokesman in 2014, the president said, “You can’t find a nicer individual, even outside Washington.”
Among his colleagues, he’s also known as a master of the dad joke, and a formidable karaoke singer on foreign trips, said Jen Psaki, the White House communications director.
It’s all part of Earnest’s fundamental groundedness — a quality that helps him survive the pressures and scrutiny of his job, she said.
“The Josh that you see when he’s at that podium is the Josh you see when you’re his friend or know him in his personal life,” said his friend Brent Colburn. “In a way, he’s kind of a throwback to a time in politics when people understood that you didn’t have to be disagreeable to disagree with people.”
But keeping calm also is strategic for Earnest.
He said he learned from watching his predecessors that if he walked into the briefing room determined to win a debate with the press, he would lose even before he’d started.
“The press corps decides who wins and who loses the debate,” Earnest said. “There will never be a day that any White House press secretary finishes the briefing and the White House press corps begins their stories by saying, ‘Today White House press secretary so-and-so really proved us wrong.’”
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So instead of trying to convince reporters they’re wrong, he concentrates on laying out a case he hopes reporters will present in their stories.
“If they’re fair minded and if their readers are fair minded, then hopefully I’ll persuade them of the wisdom of the approach that the president has selected,” Earnest said.
That’s not to imply that Earnest’s briefings don’t spark controversy.
There was the time, after Earnest criticized Russia’s deployment of anti-aircraft missile batteries in Syria, that the Russian Embassy tweeted a picture that appeared to show one of them pointed at Earnest’s head.
He didn’t feel personally threatened but, he said, “It’d be fine with me if they didn’t ever do that again.”
Recently, Earnest provoked the wrath of the president-elect when he said Trump “obviously knew” during the campaign that Russian hacking helped him and hurt Clinton.
At a thank-you tour rally in December, Trump called out Earnest by name, provoking a cascade of boos from a stadium full of his supporters.
“This foolish guy Josh Earnest, I don’t know if he’s talking to President Obama,” Trump said. “You know, having the right press secretary is so important because he is so bad, the way he delivers a message. He can deliver a positive message and it sounds bad. He could say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen today we have defeated ISIS,’ and it wouldn’t sound good, OK?”