September 30, 2010
SO RAHM'S DEPARTURE PRESENTS HIM WITH A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY TO HIRE AN EXECUTIVE...:
Obama's likely new staff chief was known as '101st senator' (Tom Kizzia, 9/30/10, Anchorage Daily News)
Rouse has deep family roots in Alaska — his mother, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, grew up in Anchorage starting in World War I, when it was a railroad construction town.But Rouse himself was born on the East Coast and had never been west of Denver until late 1978 when he flew to Alaska to visit a friend, Alaska's newly elected Republican lieutenant governor, Terry Miller.
Rouse ended up working as Miller's chief of staff for the final four years of Gov. Jay Hammond's administration. It was a great experience, Rouse said, a time when Juneau was filled with young idealists eager to grapple with the state's new oil money, infrastructure need and unformed social policies.
"Juneau at the time was 19,000 people, but it was really a town on the move in terms of young, well-educated people excited by these policy issues," he recalled.
The ambitious young staffer returned to Washington, D.C., in 1983 and went to work for for Democrats in the Senate. For a while, he imagined returning to Alaska if Miller ever managed to win a race for governor. The dream faded; Miller died of bone cancer in 1989, at age 46. Rouse's last visit to Juneau was to attend his old friend's memorial.
...and the best he can find is a guy who was chief of staff to a lt. governor thirty years ago? Man, he just sucks at this being president stuff.
