For Monday’s episode of Working, Slate’s Jacob Brogan talks with Amy Rosenbaum, assistant to the president and director of legislative affairs. As the president’s “chief negotiator,” her job is to help develop strategies to push legislation on the president’s priority list. In this episode, she goes into detail about how her office puts the president’s goals into focus.

Rosenbaum lets us in on the tactical side to pushing legislation—from what kind of conversations she’s having, to determining whom she needs to meet with. She also reveals how she stays on top of a set of never-ending responsibilities. What challenges does she face when it comes to pulling together teams across D.C.? How does she manage to put her children to bed each evening?

And in this episode’s Slate Plus extra, Rosenbaum tells us how she got to work in the White House—and how her career started in D.C. What major pieces of legislation has she helped pass? And how exactly has Congress changed throughout her time working on Capitol Hill?

Jacob Brogan: You’re listening to Working, the podcast where we talk to people about what they do all day. I’m Jacob Brogan. This season on Working we’ve been visiting the White House, trying to get a better sense of what it takes to make the executive branch actually function. For this episode, we visited the West Wing office of Amy Rosenbaum, President Obama’s director of legislative affairs. Though she spends much of her time there, she also shuffles between the White House and Capitol Hill, striving to persuade Congress people to get behind the president’s priorities and moving to protect existing legislation that’s important to him.

We talked with Rosenbaum about the ways that her team mirrors the makeup of Congress and went through her daily schedule. We also got into specifics, discussing her handling of the Iran deal and talking about how she knows when it’s time to bring the president himself to the negotiating table. And in a Slate Plus extra, Rosenbaum takes us through the arc of her own career, explaining how the time she spent on Capitol Hill earlier in her life led to her work with the Obama administration today.

What is your name and what do you do?

Amy Rosenbaum: My name is Amy Rosenbaum and I am the legislative director here at the White House.

Brogan: What does that mean? What does the legislative director at the White House do?

Rosenbaum: I run a big team of people to help the president implement his agenda in Congress. And to on the flip side of that prevent Congress from undoing the president’s agenda.

Brogan: Can you tell us about some of the legislation that you’ve been involved with?

Rosenbaum: Sure. In the time that I’ve been here, we’ve worked on a wide number of bills that represent the president’s priorities.

And so maybe I’ll pick one from each category. One that we tried to pass. And then one that we worked to prevent Congress from undoing.

So one of the most interesting bills that I think we worked on that we drove from the White House in particular was a bill to change the way elementary education worked. So, it’s really hard to change the laws of education.

There’s a lot of different stakeholders and a lot of people have really strong ideas, including parents and teachers and Congress. And the president very much wanted to see if he could reduce the amount of testing that was done in public schools without losing the accountability for making sure that schools in the hardest hit areas couldn’t be left behind. So we worked very closely with Republicans and Democrats in the House and the Senate and signed it into law.

I’m a mom who sends her kids to public schools, so I know how important those issues can really be to people. On the flip side, we do spend a lot of our time, because the Congress is run by Republicans, in protecting the president’s legacy and protecting the president’s agenda. So, at this time last year, my office was really hard at work protecting the Iran nuclear deal. And we worked very closely with the congressional Democrats on the House and the Senate side to prevent Congress from undoing the nuclear deal.

We knew we were going to hit that vote and we needed to make sure that we had enough votes lined up to prevent the Congress from stopping the deal from moving forward.

Brogan: So, can we talk about one of those pieces of legislation? I think the Iran thing is super interesting.

Rosenbaum: Sure. I’m happy to talk more about Iran. When we pulled together a leg strategy, as soon as the deal was signed, we knew going into the deal that we would have to put together a legislative strategy to defend it. And so that’s when it helps to have a really strong team.

So we’ll pull the team together, so the deputy assistants and the special assistants, and in this case we’d also include the NSC, which is the National Security Council, as well as the agencies that are involved, which in this case was Department of State and Department of Energy. And put together a House strategy and a Senate strategy.

Brogan: So you’ve got all of these people from these various departments in a room together?

Rosenbaum: Well, usually the way we work is we’ll pull together, we call it an EOP strategy, the Executive Office of the president. So it would be NSC—National Security Council has its own legislative team. And then there’s our team.

So we’ll first sit down together and kind of figure out what we think the right House and Senate strategy are. And from there the different specials, the special assistants and NSC, and on my team for Iran would go out to the agencies to try and coordinate with their legislative affairs teams. So each agency also has its own legislative affairs team. When we work well, we’re all synched up together.

Brogan: What does an actual legislative strategy look like on your end? What kind of things does it include or focus on?

Rosenbaum: Sure. So, there’s the tactical side of it, where you try and think through, OK, is this House-focused, or is this Senate-focused, or is it both. And Iran it was both. And then the first thing you do is, OK, what kind of conversations do we need to have? What conversations need to be done at a special assistant to member Senator level? What conversations need to be done from a principal level out of the White House, below the president, to principals in the House and the Senate?

What kind of Cabinet conversations need to occur? And what kind of conversations do the president and often the Vice-president need to have? And that’s a really good way to organize like a first run legislative strategy. And then you get back together when you have all of that information, reassess what you think your options are, and then reassign.

Brogan: You’ve talked a lot about finding consensus. Are you also thinking about arm-twisting at that point?

Rosenbaum: Well, I think consensus is particularly important when you’re trying to drive an agenda.

When you’re trying to block people from undoing your agenda, there can be consensus. Sometimes you can find a middle ground for people to land so they don’t want to block it all outright. With Iran, there was not really arm-twisting, but a lot of conversations. A lot of detailed conversations about the merits of the agreement itself that occurred.

Brogan: So it’s about selling the deal to specific people in specific ways?

Rosenbaum: That’s right. One-on-one. Small group meetings. You know, going at them from different directions. Answering every question. Keeping track of the questions that were asked. Making sure you have the right answers. Making sure everybody doing the calls has those right answers. Making sure everybody has the readouts from every conversation, so when they’re reassigned they know what questions are likely to be asked.

Brogan: So in those early stages, how much of the thinking you were doing is about winning support in your own party?

Rosenbaum: For something like Iran, almost all of it. Because you only needed your own party. You’re dealing with veto override margins in the beginning.

Brogan: What methods exist then for appealing to the opposition when you have to on something like that?

Rosenbaum: On something like Iran, most of the conversations were with the Democrats. We work a lot with the Republicans. I work a lot with the Republicans and the principals who include the president do as well, more when we’re pushing an agenda itself. For example, when we did the Trade Promotion Authority Act, the TPA bill, which gives the president, this president or any other future presidents fast-tracked ability to be able to get a trade bill through Congress.

What our job is—and what my job is—is to identify where the consensus is. And in this case, both the Republicans and many Democrats and the president believe that it was important to pass a free trade agreement in the Pacific, both for national security purposes and economic purposes. Identifying the arguments that are going to resonate with the Republicans and then making those arguments directly on the principal level and on the staff level.

That’s what I mean by consensus.

Brogan: With Iran, what were the most difficult parts of that process then?

Rosenbaum: The hardest part of that process was getting some of the members comfortable disagreeing with some of their closest friends at home. So in many instances, there are long held feelings about Iran in different communities and different stakeholders that members and Senators have close relationships with. And in some cases those stakeholders agreed with the Iran nuclear deal, and in some cases they didn’t.

And we approached that, the president approached that very eyes wide open, but making a national security case. And that’s hard to do, you know, separating emotion and friendship from what’s best – what we believed and what we were making the case for was best for the country.

Brogan: When you’re dealing with someone who has a personal objection, maybe based on their friendships, or the other people they work with, is that stuff you try to anticipate going into interactions? Or do you have to respond to it as it comes up?

Rosenbaum: Sure. I think no matter who you’re talking to—it’s like going into a job interview.

Knowing where they come from, what’s important to them, is always going to help you communicate better. And sometimes acknowledging up front that, look, I know this is something that’s going to be hard to talk about. I really appreciate you give me the time to talk about it is the best way to approach a situation. So, yeah, you do. And that’s whether it’s Democrats or Republicans.

I know it’s hard to talk to me. We don’t usually talk. But I want to talk to you about criminal justice reform. That’s something, it’s helpful.

Brogan: How willing are people to have those conversations with you?

Rosenbaum: Pretty willing.

Brogan: How long did the Iran process take for your office from your perspective from start to finish?

Rosenbaum: Four months.

Brogan: Is that typical for something like that?

Rosenbaum: Three or four months. Yeah, that’s pretty fast. I mean, there was some groundwork laid before the agreement, and then very quickly after the agreement a lot of work was done, over the summer, and through September.

Brogan: If that’s fast, how long do you typically spend working on a particular issue or topic?

Rosenbaum: Sometimes it can take a really long time. So, you know, we’ll spend a year or more laying the groundwork for legislation easily. Because especially if it’s something that you’re coming up with and starting with, you have to pitch it to the right people. It’s got to go through regular order. It’s got to go through the committee process and then pass the House, pass the Senate, and pass both. So it can take a pretty long time to come together.

Brogan: Can you tell us a little bit about pitching an issue that you’re pushing?

Rosenbaum: So, I think again if your job is to negotiate, the best thing that you can do is figure out where the consensus is. So, this is what the president wants to get done. And within the committees of jurisdiction this is what’s important to the chair, this is what’s important to the ranking member.

And I know it’s also important to the majority of leaders, the minority leaders, and the Speaker. And so you start with that consensus point, and then you just hit all of the stakeholders you can figure out who are the right people based on their relationships to talk to those stakeholders.

Brogan: And that’s people within your office? Or do you find other people in the administration?

Rosenbaum: Sometimes it’s people within my office. Sometimes it’s other senior advisers. Sometimes it’s Cabinet members who have the best relationships with the stakeholders, you know, the authorizing or the appropriating committees. Oftentimes it’s the president. We use who we can with the goal of getting done what the president wants to get done.

Brogan: Great. Have there been any times when you were interacting with someone who is just too challenging to work with?

Rosenbaum: I don’t recall a time having to work with someone who was too challenging to work with, but I do think that’s the nature of my job. So, I think it’s my job to find a way to connect with anybody I can. And at the end of the day people are just people.

When I do, without naming names, find it hard to connect with someone, often they have kids. We talk about our kids. They also go on vacation. We can talk about that. And so I rise to that level when it becomes hard.

Brogan: Do you work primarily out of this space that we’re in right now, this office in the West Wing?

Rosenbaum: So, I really try when Congress is in session particularly not to be here too much, because my job is to be on the Hill.

I’m probably here more than my staff is here if they’re doing their jobs right they’re there all the time. They’re the principal face of the president with members and with Senators and with their staffs. But I probably spend I’d say 65, 70 percent of my time either in this office or in meetings in various places around the West Wing, and 35 percent of my time up on the Hill.

Brogan: How do you get from the White House to the Hill? What’s your route?

Rosenbaum: So, usually we have a car service that gets us back and forth.

Sometimes that doesn’t work, or sometimes they’re busy. So sometimes I drive my very old car back and forth. And luckily I can get parking.

Brogan: You have a spot over there?

Rosenbaum: Well the Vice-president has spots, and he very kindly lets us use them. Sometimes I really run out of luck and in the middle of the night am taking a cab, which is not my favorite thing to do, but that happens also sometimes.

Brogan: Do cabs come to the White House?

Rosenbaum: Well, that’s also hard, because they’ll drop you off like way out of the way, and you end up walking around pretty late at night.

Brogan: That’s great. When you are over there on the Hill, do you interact primarily with Congress people themselves? Are you interacting with their staffers and legislative people?

Rosenbaum: Both.

Brogan: What are those interactions, like you walk into offices, do you call people up?

Rosenbaum: Usually I have appointments, because my schedule can get pretty busy. I’m not usually just wandering around, though sometimes it’s kind of fun to just knock on the door and see who’s there. I spent a long time working up there, so I have some good friends who work up there.

And so if I have some free time, I just pop in and shock people, which is kind of fun. But, no, usually they’re all scheduled meetings. Scheduled negotiations. Scheduled drop-bys.

Brogan: And how do you decide who you’re going to meet with?

Rosenbaum: It would depend on the issue. So, I spend a lot of my time as the president’s chief negotiator. And so sometimes that means the negotiation is on the House side. Sometimes it means on the Senate side. Sometimes it means bringing the two sides together. Sometimes you can meet with Republicans and Democrats together. Sometimes you can’t.

It just depends on the specific issue and what me and my team think is the best way to get it done.

Brogan: If there’s a vote happening for something that you’ve worked on, do you show up to watch? Or do you watch it on C-SPAN?

Rosenbaum: No, I don’t usually show up. If there’s an important vote happening, my team is there. And so I actually think that’s really important. I have like 23, 24 people who work in this office.

There’s me. There’s a guy who runs the Senate side named Marty. He’s wonderful and is an institution there. And there’s a guy who runs the House side who is equally as wonderful named Alejandro. And then they have people who report up to them who cover both the different members and the different committees. And there’s like overlap, right? So your, the SAPs, that’s what they’re called, Special Assistants to the president, will often cover the members who are on a particular committee, so they’ll cover the committee and then they’ll cover the members.

Brogan: Do the people on your staff who do work over there have specific areas or issues that they focus on?

Rosenbaum: They do. And it’s all organized through the committee systems. The Legislative Affairs Office mirrors how Congress works. So, it mirrors also very much how the leadership offices are set up. And the Congress, you have underneath the Deputy Assistants the Special Assistants who will cover issues by committee. So, I’ll give you an example. If you’re the SAP, the Special Assistant, who covers judiciary, you’re going to do criminal justice reform.

And in the Senate side you’re going to handle Justice Garland as well. So, it’s all the issues are determined by the committees and the jurisdictions of the committees.

Brogan: Do you and your staff have to spend a lot of time building relationships with people over there?

Rosenbaum: Yeah. So, for me, the way that I think you can do my job very differently. The way I’ve done my job is I negotiate based on personal relationships and I ask my staff to do the same thing. You know, anybody can pick up the phone and call a member of Congress, or a staff person, or a Senator.

Brogan: I probably can’t.

Rosenbaum: Well, you might. But having a relationship with them and a relationship based on trust is really important. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or you’re a Democrat. People are just people. And those relationships that are built on years of experience, and most of my staff is older, because they’ve spent 10 plus years on the Hill building up relationships.

And it’s incredibly helpful. Because not only do they know so much about both the Senator or the member, but that member or Senator knows them personally and will sit down and talk to them.

Brogan: Is it ever hard to separate the kind of political frustrations that you might have with someone from the kind of personal connection that you’re trying to form with them?

Rosenbaum: Yeah, I mean, sometimes it can be very hard. We really try and work towards consensus. The central part of my job and how we drive negotiations is trying to figure out where the consensus points are.

And then to your point, like if I’m talking to a Republican about an issue that’s important to the president like opioids or cancer research, I might not be able to agree with him on anything else, but I know I can talk to them openly and honestly about really needing to get something done in that space. And we just narrow the conversation to that.

Brogan: Do you meet people then in order to build those connections? Do you meet people outside of ordinary office hours? Do you do dinners and lunches, coffees, things like that?

Rosenbaum: I do some coffees. I don’t have a lot of time, unfortunately, so my day is pretty stacked from about 7:30 to about 8:30 or 9:00. So not as much as I would like.

I try and do that during recesses, you know, when Congress is out of session and things are little quieter here.

Brogan: When you do get coffee with someone in that capacity, who pays?

Rosenbaum: I always pay! I always pay.

Brogan: You spend a lot of time working with people on the Hill. What about the president? Again, here we are in the West Wing and you spend a lot of your time here. Do you interact with him much?

Rosenbaum: I do. It’s obviously one of my favorite parts about the job, because I think he’s pretty extraordinary. I have access to the president as we’re developing the legislative agenda, so we know what’s most important to him. And so I’m a political scientist, so I spend a lot of time thinking about, or I used to before I had this job, a lot of time thinking about different kinds of presidents and how they operated.

And this president operates so well on a one-to-one basis with members of Congress and Senators, or in small group meetings. And so what I try and do is leverage those strengths to get done what he wants to get done on the Hill. And then whenever we make a recommendation to either do one of those meetings or some of those calls, or, you know, maybe sometimes they’re a larger group. We did a lot of larger groups on Iran for instance.

We both prep him for the meeting and then staff the meeting as well.

Brogan: Has your sense of him changed over the course of his administration or your time with it?

Rosenbaum: I think I have grown to really appreciate his ability to connect with people, to include how he can connect with individual members of Congress. He is our best asset on the Hill. Always has been. But I’ve really grown to appreciate that more watching it firsthand.

Brogan: How often are you able to mobilize that capacity of his for projects that you’re working on? That ability of his to connect?

Rosenbaum: I’ve been very lucky, and whenever I’ve asked he has said yes.

Brogan: How often do you ask?

Rosenbaum: Oh, I try not to ask unless I actually need him. Also, because I think there’s some value in using your best asset not every day, right, because then it becomes less value on the Hill.

So I ask always for our top priorities. Sometimes it’s best to ask at the front end. Sometimes it’s best to ask at the backend to close a deal. But I always ask.

Brogan: Juliet Eilperin who we interviewed for a previous episode has described the schedules of people in your office as grueling. Does that ring true for legislative affairs for you?

Rosenbaum: That rings true. Yeah.

Brogan: Can you walk us through a typical day?

Rosenbaum: Sure. I’m embarrassed to say that I often sleep with my phone at this point. So, I usually wake up really early, check my phone…

Brogan: What are you checking when you check it? Or what are you looking for?

Rosenbaum: Anything that came in after 12am. Now it’s 5am. And sometimes things come in in that time period that need to be responded to.

Brogan: So you sleep five hours a night?

Rosenbaum: Five or six. Yeah. It’s pretty average I think. And then I have three little kids, so I try and spend some time with them in the morning before I come into work. And my day at work here usually starts at around 7:45, 8:00.

Brogan: Before you head in there, are you reading newspapers, checking Twitter?

Rosenbaum: Yeah, I try and do that in the early morning. Read the newspapers. Check Twitter. Read any news compilations.

Brogan: Are there briefings that come to you? Does someone put stuff together for you?

Rosenbaum: There are briefings that come to me the night before. So every night the Leg Team puts together a briefing for me for the morning to include conversations that they had, any flags they may have. Oftentimes people will miss the deadline for that and they’ll just email me. Those are some of the emails that come in late at night. Things that they think I need to be aware of in the morning. So I catch up on all of that. And when I walk in, Ryan, who is my assistant, is always here. And he will flag anything for me also.

Brogan: So what happens then after you arrive and get that early briefing?

Rosenbaum: So I have a series of meetings every morning.

The first meeting is a senior advisers meeting. And then we go right from that into a senior staff meeting, which is a little bit bigger. And then I go right from that to a daily Leg Affairs meeting. So we cram 24 people into a very small room. I report out based on what I know from my senior staff conversations, which I think is important because I need my staff to be tracking on what the senior advisers are tracking on.

And then they all report back to me. And so that happens every day. By then it’s like 11 o’clock, somewhere around there, and I either go to the Hill, or spend more time in meetings here, or do more calls with the Hill or calls here.

Brogan: Is there space for sustenance? Do you eat?

Rosenbaum: Some days I eat better than others. And then we do a lot of senior advisers meetings, meetings with the president, or calls with the president that might occur. And then my day usually wraps up, the last thing I do is I sit down with Ryan again and with my chief of staff and we call it Wrap.

And we go over everything for the end of the day to head towards tomorrow. And that can be everything from signing off on SAPs, which are the Statement of Administration Principles for bills that go before Congress, because we run the SAP process out of Leg Affairs before it goes up through the chief of staff’s office, to like anything that’s going up to the Hill from any agency to any flags that have come up throughout the day that I’ve missed, because sometimes I can’t stay on top of my email.

Brogan: How are you staying focused throughout all of this? Are you just mainlining coffee?

Rosenbaum: Yes. I drink a lot of coffee. And I think a very common personality for Leg Affairs generally speaking is we have a lot of energy. We all do. And so we kind of feed off of one another. So, I’ve had people who spent some time in our office amazed by the amount of communication, the emails that fly, the phone calls that happen. And the general level of incoming that people like me who are attracted to these jobs kind of thrive off of.

Brogan: Is most of that communication email?

Rosenbaum: A lot of it is. Just because I like my guys to be up on the Hill as much as they can be. So, anything that can be on email is, and sometimes that’s not the easiest way and it’s easier to pick up the phone.

Brogan: Your career has bridged the sort of smartphone moment it sounds like. Has that changed the way that you think legislative staffs and others communicate?

Rosenbaum: My career has bridged the Internet. Yes. It has. I think in a Leg world it’s just made us more efficient. Because you can very quickly. It’s allowed us to specialize, so you can have one person specialize on an issue area and just send out talking points to everybody who is up on the Hill. So everybody who is up on the Hill talking to members and Senators and their staffs will know exactly what they should be saying and will know exactly what the president’s position is on something. So I think it’s helpful.

Brogan: Are there a lot of meetings in the late afternoon, or are you buckled down and reading or whatever after a certain point?

Rosenbaum: No, they go all the way up until eight o’clock often. As you said, it can be a grueling atmosphere. So we really try and make it fun anyway that we can.

So we bring food to meetings. We bring drinks to meetings, if we can. If they are on Fridays, after six o’clock. You know, it makes life easier if you have a little bit of fun.

Brogan: Yeah. Do you usually make it home, around when?

Rosenbaum: 8:30.

Brogan: 8:30. Do you spend time with your kids? What’s the evening like at that point?

Rosenbaum: So I try to. Sometimes I’m less successful than others. I often don’t see them in the morning because I keep them up late so I can see them at night. So, I keep them up late at night. I read them stories and tuck them into bed and talk to them about their day.

Brogan: Do you ever really sign off? Has there ever been a time when you did feel like you could just turn the phone off and put it away?

Rosenbaum: No.

Brogan: Not even during recess?

Rosenbaum: No, no. Because recess for us, if the person at my job, which would include me, is doing their job right, they use recesses to plan ahead. So you need to take the recess to restock, to measure where you are and all of your priorities. Reassess your strategy. Figure out what’s changed. And plan for the upcoming session essentially.

Brogan: So it’s relentless. Do you get vacation?

Rosenbaum: I do get vacation.

Brogan: That’s good. There’s a popular perception of Congress as a kind of desolate, unproductive wasteland. Does that seem like a fair characterization to you? Do you see it as being a more productive space?

Rosenbaum: I still see Congress as productive. And that might be a factor of what we’ve managed to do over the last eight years, or at least the time that I’ve been here.

It might be a factor of my own stubborn personality, where I like to see consensus and opportunity. And I tend not to focus on roadblocks and rather focus on how to get around them. I do think it’s fair to say that Congress, the parties are a little more polarized than they were 20 years ago. But I also think like taking a step back, looking at it with perspective that’s happened over history. And so while I think there are some structural reasons, like gerrymandering or other real reasons why Congress is the way it is, I don’t think it needs to stay that way.

And I do still find a lot of Congress’s ability to be productive depends on its leaders, both on the Republican and on the Democratic side. And when you have effective leaders in place on different issues you can still get things done.

Brogan: You have a background in political science. Does that shape the way you think about these kinds of historical trends?

Rosenbaum: I think so. It helps me be a little less discouraged by it. Because you know that Congress has waves of inactivity and waves of being polarized.

It reflects the electorate. A lot of times we see, as people who work with Congress, trends before they kind of bubble up to the national level. So, you could see in the Tea Party six, eight years ago what’s being reflected on a national level now when you try and negotiate with them. And when you see what happened with Speaker Boehner and others.

Brogan: What are you proudest of in your time here?

Rosenbaum: I’m proud of the bills that we’ve passed for the president and some of the priorities we’ve protected. And some of it, you know, doesn’t get reported very much. But when I first came here, we did so much work to protect the Affordable Care Act.

You know, walking people through why we thought it was important. Working with them to make small changes. We went in with an attitude of, you know, reasonable people can have reasonable problems with this law, and if we can fix those reasonable problems we’ll just make the law stronger. And that attitude which came from the president really helped us, I think, protect the ACA. And the Affordable Care Act, and is a lot of the reasons why Congress was unable to repeal it.

So I’m really proud of that. I’m also really proud of the work that we did surrounding the Paris agreement, both building the consensus in the Congress and preventing the Congress from undoing it. And not just Paris, but everything regarding climate is in a better position now in Congress than it was before we got here. And I think there’s really strong majorities in favor of protecting the climate now in a way that weren’t there just ten years ago. And I’m really proud of the work that my time has done and that we’ve done to make sure that keeps on going.

Brogan: While you’re working on this grand scale, thinking about House and Senate, and the relationship with the executive branch to those various interests, how do you stay focused on the real effects that legislation will have.

How do you think about the particulars, the consequences of what you’re trying to push through?

Rosenbaum: OK. That’s a great question. And I think it really goes at the heart of what it means to run a negotiation. When you enter into a negotiation, when you start the negotiation, you find the consensus issues. So I’ll use an example.

Congress just passed a bill to negotiate a bankruptcy for Puerto Rico, which was a really hard bill to pass. The consensus position was Democrats and Republicans all agreed Puerto Rico was part of the United States. We have to do something. They can’t just go into bankruptcy. To keep yourself focused on what you really need to do, you set into the negotiations and you get all the parties to agree upon the principle of the bill, right.

So for Puerto Rico was that it had to work, so the mechanism actually had to work so Puerto Rico could get through the process and it had to be workable. In order for it to be workable, no one side could benefit more than the other. So hedge funds couldn’t benefit more than the pensioners. No matter how much you wanted one side or the other, it had to be Even Steven, or it wouldn’t work. And when you go into a negotiation with criteria like that, it keeps you really focused on what’s most important.

You know, the negotiations have different stages. You kind of start at the beginning with those principles and you work through the different issues. And then at the end of the day there’s we call it Whack-a-mole, like different issues pop up and you figure them out. But you always go back to the table with the same group of people and say does this violate the principle we agreed upon. And if the answer is yes, then no, we can’t do it.

And that, to me, is the way we stay focused on what the purpose of the legislation is. And it also just helps guide you through the process.

Brogan: Has the culture of the White House itself changed in the time that you’ve been here?

Rosenbaum: Not really. I think both the president and the chief of staff’s office have done a really great job making sure everybody stays focused on getting as much done as we can.

We still have a lot of priorities left on the table that we want to get done, and we’ll keep fighting to get them done until we’ve completely run out of time.

Brogan: What’s it like then being in this period where you have six months or so left to be thinking about those priorities?

Rosenbaum: Well, it just makes you work harder, because the obstacles are bigger - always in Congress, the closer you get to an election.

And so it makes you work harder and think through more of all the different ways you could get to build that consensus so you can get done what the president wants to get done.

Brogan: Does it change your strategies, the way that you approach people, to be in this more heightened moment?

Rosenbaum: It doesn’t change how you approach people, but you certainly need to sometimes be a little bit more creative. You need to try harder.

Brogan: What’s next for you after January 2017?

Rosenbaum: So, the only thing on my list of things to do is I promised my kids a dog. So I need to do that. And they’re gunning for a puppy.

Brogan: It’s a lot of work.

Rosenbaum: Yeah, it’s a lot of work. Once that’s done and I get a little sleep I’ll have to figure out what’s next.

Brogan: Would you like to stay in politics?

Rosenbaum: I don’t know. I suspect I’ll always want to be in a position where when I’m frustrated with the world I’ll want to change it. But there’s lots of different ways to go about doing that, and yeah, I don’t know.

Brogan: What drives you to work this hard in this position?

Rosenbaum: What drives me, I’ve always since I was little looked at the world and not always liked what I’ve seen.

And never been willing to accept that you have to settle for it. And so what drives me, I come from a policy background, so oftentimes what drives me is I don’t like what I see in a policy. So with the Affordable Care Act I felt like you should be able to have access to healthcare. It should not be a factor of whether you have a job or how much money you have. And what I learned early on in the Hill is if you can see things you don’t like around you, and see that— and identify that there’s a consensus— if you work really hard, you can change it.

And that’s a little bit addictive, I think. So, that’s what drives me forward. Because every time I get discouraged, every time we lose, every time I lose, which happens a lot, we’ll find a new way and we’ll be successful. And that just drives you to keep on going.

Brogan: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. This was delightful.

Rosenbaum: Thanks very much. Thanks.

Brogan: Thanks for listening to this episode of Working. I’m Jacob Brogan. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Our email address is Working@Slate.com and we do read all of those emails. You can listen to all seven seasons of the show at Slate.com/Working. This series was produced by me and Mickey Capper. Mikey also edits the show.

Dan Bloom recorded this episode and helped to produce it. Thanks to Efim Shapiro and special thanks as always to Rachel Racusen at the White House. Our executive producer is Steve Lickteig and the chief content officer of the Panoply Network is Andy Bowers.

* * *

In this Slate Plus extra, Amy Rosenbaum takes us through the arc of her own career, explaining how the time she spent on Capitol Hill earlier in her life led to her work with the Obama administration today.

Brogan: So, how did you end up in this role? You started here in January 2014, is that right?

Rosenbaum: That’s also a good question. Sometimes I wonder that myself. I came to DC right after college and started working for a really active member of Congress from Massachusetts who really trusted me and really wanted to pass campaign finance reform.

And he let me, for reasons I still don’t really understand, drive that process. And we passed a major campaign finance reform bill. And the way the Hill works is a little different than the White House. The staffers on the Hill, especially the leadership and the committee staffers, are there for a very long time. And so the staffer that I met working on that bill, which took a long time to pass…

Brogan: How long did it take?

Rosenbaum: Five years. Six years. It took a long time.

Brogan: It’s a long time to work on one thing.

Rosenbaum: Well, luckily I worked on other things.

But we must have started in ‘95 and it didn’t become - passed the House in ‘98. Didn’t become laws until 2002.

Brogan: Wow.

Rosenbaum: So it took a long time. The process that we went through to pass it caught the attention of some senior staffers who then mentored me.

And when leader Pelosi at the time was looking for a policy director, the same person I worked with to pass that campaign finance reform recommended me for the job. And I worked for her for five years. And she became Speaker and I became her policy director. So it was kind of a natural jump here. I think also it’s very satisfying to pass a piece of legislation, even more so when it takes a long time to do it, believe it or not. As long as you don’t get too frustrated.

Brogan: Does that longue duree experience that you had there differ from the way things work at the White House?

Rosenbaum: Well Congress is really different now than it was then, so I’ll betray my age. It was about 20 years ago! But at the time there were a lot more moderates on both the Republican side and the Democratic side. And we put together a coalition of moderates that was built from the ground up.

And that doesn’t happen as much anymore, unfortunately. So that’s changed remarkably. I think the other big difference between working here and working in the Speaker’s office is you really have a much better ability here to get things done, because you see all of the moving parts a little bit more objectively. So in order to get a bill through, you have to get through the House, you have to get it through the Senate. And then you have to get the House and Senate to pass the same bill. And you just have a much greater ability to do that from here than you do just sitting in the House or just sitting in the Senate.

Brogan: Because you’re at a distance from the action?

Rosenbaum: You’re at a distance and you have a unique ability to pull the sides together. And to help - when you’re negotiating, so if your job is to be the chief negotiator and your job is to figure out where the consensus is on the issues that the president wants to get done and bring all of the sides together to form that consensus, and it’s a lot harder to do from the Congress than it is to do from here.