Pete Rouse: A Career on the Hill

After 30 years on Capitol Hill, Senator Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Pete Rouse, has much to say about what it takes to work there and the challenges the country now faces. In his time with the Zuckerman Fellows during our trip to Washington, D.C., this spring, Rouse surveyed the skills needed to work on the Hill and the challenges of a career in government and politics.

According to Rouse, congressional offices are looking for staffers who (as you might expect) write well, are smart and motivated, are strongly interested in the same issues, and share philosophical compatibility with their colleagues. But the Obama office also looks for something more: people who focus on the group’s achievement, not their own credentials. “Once we accept that we all feel overqualified, then we can move on to what we have to do,” said Rouse, “with the whole group taking credit for success and responsibility for failure.” Rouse observed that the Capitol Hill experience differs from one office to the next. “Who you work for matters,” he said to the Fellows. “Do due diligence on how the office is run and what its reputation is.”

Like other leaders we visited in Washington, Rouse expressed deep concern about the capital’s partisan atmosphere. “We’ve got to try harder to find principled compromises,” he told the Fellows. “We have to change our politics.” Even so, he spoke warmly of public service. “When people leave to go into the private sector,” he said, “they always look back on government service as the most rewarding time in their career.”

—Elisa Basnight