By SARAH BAXTER

Nobody can compete with Obama for cool. Even Republicans cannot say No to an invitation to party in the White House

It is happy hour on Wednesday night at the White House and the guests are downing cocktails before dining on wild-mushroom crisps, steelhead salmon and toasted saffron couscous pearls.

Barack and Michelle Obama are doing the rounds. “This is a pretty big house, so we get lonely,” Obama jokes. “It’s hard for me to move around out there sometimes, so I got to bring the world to me.”

All eyes are on the 44th president of the United States. “There is a part of Barack Obama that is ‘I’m the man, I’m the guy,’” says one of his friends. “The way he walks – even the vice-president walks behind him. He has risen so fast, he has got to have a bit of bravado about him.”

Nobody can compete with Obama for cool. Not the saxophone-playing Bill Clinton, and certainly not the early-to-bed, teetotal George W Bush.

PICTURE: U.S. President Barack Obama and members of the first family listen as entertainer Fergie (R) sings the national anthem on the Truman Balcony of the White House, on the South Lawn, in Washington. From L-R are: Obama, first lady Michelle Obama (top), daughter Sasha, daughter Malia, Obama’s mother-in-law Marian Robinson and Fergie.

One former White House adviser calls it Obama’s “Aloha Zen,” borne on the winds of his native Hawaii to the South Side of Chicago, the capital of black America, where the 47-year-old president forged his political career.

There has already been a White House party to honor Stevie Wonder – he wrote the “soundtrack to my youth,” Obama recalled – while the 1970s group Earth, Wind and Fire entertained state governors at a reception a few weeks later.

The Jonas Brothers, a boy band, have played hide-and-seek with Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, Washington’s queens of tween. The most coveted invitation is to the first daughters’ sleepovers, because the president just might turn up to tuck you in.

“People think I’m cool. Nobody is cooler than my girls,” boasts their father.

Resist invitation

Even Republican congressmen who have laid into Obama’s $9 trillion spending plans are unable to resist an invitation to the big house. Some were there for St Patrick’s Day, knocking back the Guinness as the White House fountains flowed green. Others turned up for hot dogs, pizza and potato chips on Super Bowl night.

Friends, cabinet members and congressmen crowded into the president’s private movie theatre for the game as their children watched Disney’s Ratatouille and ate ice cream in an anteroom.

Patrick Murphy, a Pennsylvania congressman who was one of Obama’s earliest Democratic backers, was there with Charlie Dent, a Republican from the same state. It was only a few weeks into Obama’s presidency, yet it was Dent’s second visit to the White House.

“I said, ‘Charlie, how many times did you come here with President Bush?’” Murphy recalled. “He said, ‘I was never invited here with President Bush.’”

It is no easy task to summon up the spirit of Camelot in the midst of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Some scrooges are already grousing that so much partying is unseemly as America’s national debt mounts.

Wednesday cocktails are fast becoming a White House “tradition,” according to Desiree Rogers, the immaculately groomed White House social secretary. But it is work as well as play.

At the Super Bowl party, “The president was in his khakis and shirt sleeves, but we talked shop at half-time,” said Murphy. “He was working the room. He made sure he had a private conversation with everybody. It was an effort.”

The lightness of being that John F Kennedy and his wife brought to the White House in the early 1960s wasn’t effortless either; it only looked that way. Leticia Baldridge, former social secretary to Jackie Kennedy, has a caustic take on the elegant cocktail parties of that era.

“We had them, we didn’t like them, but they’re a necessary evil,” she says, “a way of taking care of social obligations.”

For Obama, the bipartisan schmoozing is a weapon aimed at the heart of the Republican party. It’s disarming. He can’t win everyone’s vote, but he can court their admiration.

Under Obama, the alchemist who turned an e-mail list of 13m supporters into pure electoral gold, the White House has become a permanent campaign headquarters. Every member of staff is on full alert.

On Wednesday nights, while the Obamas entertain at the White House, another soiree takes place across town – one for workaholics, led by David Axelrod, the sharp but sleepy-eyed senior adviser, who has followed his boss from Chicago to the West Wing.

Obama’s victory

The rumpled “Ax,” 54, is the communications genius who masterminded Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries last year – a far harder task than the one that followed: beating John McCain, the 72-year-old Republican presidential candidate. It is Axelrod’s job to keep Obama’s feet on the ground as his head, inevitably, swells in size.

The regular invitation-only Wednesday Night Meeting draws together policy-makers, advisers and the speech-writers who craft Obama’s nonstop message.

“It helps clarify my thinking to talk to people I have faith in,” Axelrod says. Jon Favreau, Obama’s 27-year-old “mind-reader” and speech-writer, says Axelrod often asks aloud: “Can I speak on behalf of the American people here?”

Keeping it real is an obsession at the White House. “The inability to just go and sit at a corner coffee shop and have a chat with people… that, I think, is something that as president you’ve got to constantly fight against,” Obama says. He sees himself as the “people’s president,” says Betsy Myers, a senior Obama campaign official.

The president’s day begins with a briefing by economic advisers; a change from Bush, who always addressed national security and intelligence matters first. With the economy in freefall, it is a question of priorities. When he began his run for president, nobody, least of all Obama, foresaw how two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be elbowed out by more pressing matters, such as the failure of the US banking system, the collapse of the car industry, and the loss of more than 4m jobs.

After midnight

At night Obama reads 10 letters selected by his staff from the 40,000 that arrive by the sackful each day, helping him to break free of the White House “bubble”. It is normal for the lights of the Oval Office to be burning after midnight.
Aides feel the strain.

The rising stars, such as Favreau (“Favs”) and Reggie Love, 27, the president’s “body man,” who carries his jacket, hands him his phone and is on call 24/7 in a tiny alcove outside the Oval Office – sometimes for a quick game of basketball – are living off their wits and adrenaline.

“They’re exhausted, but they’re also pinching themselves. It’s like, ‘I’ve got so much to do, but it’s so neat, I’m sitting on Air Force One with the president,’” an adviser says.

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s hard-boiled chief of staff, a ballet dancer turned congressman, gets up at 5.30am to work out at his old haunt, the gym in Congress. It is there that he has been arm-twisting some of the more conservative “blue dog” Democrats into supporting Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill. He rarely gets home before 10.30pm.

“As I always like to joke around the White House,” he says, “on Friday I say, ‘Good. It’s just two more workdays till Monday.’”

Obama has the advantage of living above the shop. “It must be nice to get home in two minutes,” another congressman told him. “Thirty seconds,” Obama grinned.

One of Obama’s first demands was for an encrypted “BarackBerry,” so that he could be the first president to stay in touch by e-mail with his close circle of friends, including those he left behind in Chicago.

“People appreciate that there’s a real family atmosphere back in the country,” says the congressman Patrick Murphy.

During the inauguration, he was with the Obamas on their whistle-stop train ride to Washington along with his wife and two-year-old daughter, Maggie. “I asked Malia, ‘How much would you charge to baby-sit?’ ‘Aw,’ she replied. ‘I love Maggie. I wouldn’t charge you to watch her.’”

Obama’s family values have boosted his popularity, but the goodwill won’t last if his economic recovery plans falter. Republicans are warning of a slide to “European socialism” that could leave America as the sick man of the western world and drag other nations down.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Emanuel, a phrase that sums up Obama’s activist style of government. Universal health care, a green energy revolution, the redistribution of wealth: no problem seems too big to solve, even though the country is broke.

Hillary Clinton, Obama’s surprise choice as secretary of state, said the same thing. “Never waste a good crisis,” she stated, while offering to reboot relations with Russia, woo Iran, flatter China, reopen the Middle East peace process, surge in Afghanistan and leave Iraq.

With such a big beast of the jungle in his cabinet, perhaps waiting to pounce, the possibility of a bust-up cannot be ruled out.

“I’ve heard she is very happy,” said one former Clinton staffer. “But sometimes she must want to smack Obama.”

No Drama

The attacks on him are beginning to mount. The Economist, in an article widely quoted in America, recently described his performance as erratic.

“The man who earned the sobriquet ‘No Drama Obama‘ for running such a disciplined campaign has, since coming to office, slipped on one banana skin after another.”

After an initial smooth start during the transition from Bush, he ran into snafus on a series of appointments, particularly at the Treasury, leaving the overworked Tim Geithner in charge of saving the world’s economy almost single-handedly.

Betsy Myers says Obama presents a fascinating study in leadership. “It will be really interesting to watch him over the next few years. When is the bloom going to come off the rose? Or maybe it won’t? He’s had an amazing start.”

Obama is already campaigning for the next election. He has attended town-hall meetings in the big swing states, submitted to questioning from internet users, addressed the nation several times on prime-time television, and deployed his army of volunteers to lobby Congress for his budget (counterproductively, one hears).

If it doesn’t work, he won’t lose his cool, Myers predicts. “It’s typical Obama, which is, ‘We’re going to do everything we possibly can, and if the country doesn’t like it, in four years’ time then we’ll have a new president.’”

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