The Obama Administration’s focus on bipartisanship “wasn’t about politics,” Jarrett says. “It was about governing.” Photograph by Valerie Macon / AFP / Getty

In her new book, “Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward,” Valerie Jarrett, who served for eight years as a senior adviser to President Obama, recounts her early life and later experiences in the White House. Jarrett, who is sixty-two, was born in Iran to American parents. Her family moved to Chicago when she was a child, and she practiced law before entering city politics. In 1991, she hired Michelle Obama to work for the city’s mayor at the time, Richard Daley, and became a friend of the Obamas. Nearly thirty years later, she remains one of their closest political and personal confidantes. In addition to advising them, she currently serves as a board member of Lyft, and is a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Jarrett’s book presents, unsurprisingly, a flattering portrait of President Obama and his measured approach to governing; she seems to be aiming to drive home the contrasts between him and his successor. I wanted to speak with Jarrett to get more of a sense of her time in the Obama Administration, and how Team Obama’s record on various issues—prosecuting Wall Street’s bad actors, regulating tech companies, trying to find common ground with recalcitrant Republicans—looks to her a few years later. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed the emerging Presidential field, how the next Democratic President should approach governing, and why so many of the Obama Administration’s most prominent members have gone to work for Big Tech.

How did your idea of political power change between when you arrived at the White House, in 2009, and when you finished serving, eight years later?

Let’s begin with some fundamentals that I think are the same. The power doesn’t come from the top down—it comes from the bottom up. One of the reasons why I’m glad that I started in local government is that you are very proximate to the people you serve. It’s not about you—it’s about them, and they remind you of that all the time. One of the many reasons why I was attracted to joining President Obama’s Administration is that he had that same perspective he had when he was a community organizer.

What I was unprepared for when I arrived in Washington—and it took me a good while to figure out—is that the Republicans were willing, in the middle of the worst economic crisis of our lifetime, to put their short-term political interests ahead of what was good for the country. When President Obama was a senator in Springfield, even a junior senator, he had this ability to work across the aisle. That was a strategy that he employed and that we all followed when we first arrived in Washington, and we hit a wall. I was not prepared for that, and that took some getting used to. He tried a thousand different ways to get them to come around.

If this had been clear to you and everyone in the Administration on January 20, 2009, what do you think you could have done differently?

I think we would have done the same thing, and that is try, because it seemed unbelievable to us, and we felt that we owed it to the American people to try mightily to change their minds. So we tried all kinds of strategies to get the Republicans to come to the table and meet us not even halfway—just a little bit of the way. All of the changes and amendments, for example, that were made to the Affordable Care Act were designed to try to make it bipartisan. We had the votes if we’d wanted to just push through what we wanted from the beginning.

What was it that you could have pushed through from the beginning?

We could have pushed through a plan that didn’t have all of these amendments. There were [almost] two hundred of them, all of which I have put firmly out of my mind, but, for example, we really had hoped that Olympia Snowe would come on board, and we worked with her. We worked with several of the Republicans to say, O.K., what is it that you need in order to support this? Keep in mind it was modelled after the Massachusetts health-care bill that Governor Romney had endorsed, so we started out with a compromise. We didn’t start out with a public option or single-payer.

Then we said to them, “O.K., well, if that doesn’t make you feel comfortable, what would?” We spent months. Had we known that there was nothing that we could do that would persuade them to come on board, we still would have felt like we had to try, because it’s important that the American people see us trying to do that. I think we would have employed the same strategy. If I’d known that there was nothing we could do, I still think we would have thought, Well, let’s just make absolutely sure, because it’s a lot better if it’s bipartisan.

Why is that important, though? Obama tried to be bipartisan in a lot of different ways. He was still hated by Republicans. The bill was still extremely unpopular with Republicans and, until fairly recently, with Independents, too, so what was either the patriotic value or political value of trying?

I think it’s a good governance value. For us, this wasn’t about politics. It was about governing. When you’re elected President of the entire United States, it’s important that you’re not just appealing to the people who elected you, and President Obama was determined to be the President for all of America. The reason why it was important to reach out is that we wanted people who lived in states that had elected officials who were Republican to know that we were there for them, too. We were trying to work on their behalf as well, going through their duly elected representatives. I don’t look at it through a political lens. I really look at it first through a good-governance lens.

You’ve seen people like John Hickenlooper say that, if he were elected President, he would get Mitch McConnell in a room and talk to him and hash things out. You’ve had former Vice-President Biden say a version of that. Is your feeling that it’s still important to try, or that that’s completely naïve?

I feel it’s harder than it looks for those who are running now, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. I think just because the Republicans took a posture of saying no to everything we tried to do doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try, because you’re not just talking to them—you’re talking directly to the American people, and you’re making an appeal to them. I will tell you, the only reason why the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land is because people who are now benefitting from it showed up at town halls when the Republicans were determined to repeal it early on in the Trump Administration, and they said, “No, I don’t want to lose this benefit.” The voice that I think is the most important one is that of the American people, and, you know, you can’t stop talking to them.