My guest is Robert Gibbs.

Robert was the top advisor to President Barack Obama for a

decade, starting as the communications director with then Senator Obama. Robert served in the same

role for the 2008 campaign of the first White House press secretary for the administration and

as a senior advisor on the 2012 re-election campaign.

He then went off to the private sector and is a partner now at Bully Pulpit International,

a major consulting firm. Welcome to the podcast, Robert.

Thanks for having me. Before we go straight into politics, you know, this is a

bumpy year for elections, especially the United States, but elsewhere in the world as well. I'd like to ask you how you first met Barack Obama. He's very much revered at this side of the pond,

and if we could all vote, many of us would vote for Barack Obama to be president again,

if we had any kind of voting rights in the U.S. But seriously, I think I'd be very interested to know how the two of you first came to each other's knowledge. I started working for then state Senator Obama in April of 2004,

and he had just won the Democratic Party's nomination for U.S. Senate in that state,

and had run a pretty shoestring campaign with lots of

volunteers and not a lot of campaign staff. Was he pretty unknown even that, I suppose?

He was. I mean, you can't think about it now, but we have great pictures,, even in 2005 and being in the U.S. Senate with then Senator

Dick Lugar, you know, walking around Russia, walking around Moscow, oblivious that, you know,

that anybody of any stature was walking by.

But I worked on that 2004 Senate race and then pretty straight away, a matter of days after that race, became the first employee in the U.S. Senate office before he was sworn in.

And so went to the U.S. Senate with him for a couple of years, spent a lot of time traveling around in those days, both the state of Illinois and the

U.S.

Because as everyone knows, he did become known that summer based on the speech that he gave

at the convention in Boston.

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