Loyal aide brings taste for a good fight

CHICAGO — On one of his last nights on the campaign trail, Barack Obama was agitated. He was backstage and face-to-face with a traveling aide after giving a speech to an overflow crowd at a football field.

Like a referee inserting his body between two fighting players, Robert Gibbs quickly stepped in and ushered Obama away from the ashen aide. Later, Gibbs said the flare-up was over a teleprompter malfunction.

There are few Obama advisers with the clout to defuse such a squabble. In recent years none has spent as much time around Obama as Gibbs, who was named White House press secretary Saturday.

Past occupants of the job have rarely had such intimate knowledge of the thoughts, habits and secrets of the Oval Office's inhabitant.

Theoretically, that could allow Gibbs to give highly informed responses from the White House podium. But it will also make it more difficult for him to say he does not know the answer to a question.

The Alabama native will bring his Deep South roots to the most visible post in the administration of the nation's first black president.

Gibbs, 37, also brings a taste for a good fight. He can have a foul mouth and is not shy about mocking reporters.

One critic called Gibbs "the bland face of brazenness" when he said Obama's decision to resign from his church amid the controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was "a deeply personal decision, not a political decision."

Others were surprised when he called Fox News' Bill O'Reilly a "bully" and asked Sean Hannity, "Are you anti-Semitic?" in response to the TV commentator's questions about Obama's relationship to William Ayers, a 1960s radical.

His favorite lines have been dubbed "Gibbs-isms" by colleagues, including one about feeling like a "one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest." The son of two librarians, Gibbs can seem pretty disorganized. He often ends trips with notes on cards, napkins and borrowed scraps of paper.

He majored in political science at North Carolina State University and got his start in politics in 1991 as an intern for former Rep. Glen Browder, D-Ala. Gibbs' wife, Mary Catherine Gibbs, is an attorney in Alexandria, Va. They have one son.

Gibbs spent much of 2005 and 2006 traveling with Obama on commercial planes and small private jets as the future president built his national political network and raised money.

Because of his history with Obama, Gibbs is one of the few people viewed as being able to "speak the truth" to the president-elect. "I've always wanted to be in a position where as a staffer I could always speak freely and in an unvarnished way with whoever I was working for," he said.

He was zealous about protecting Obama from reporters who wanted to pull him off message.

Relations grew tense in June, when Obama's campaign plane took off from Washington, D.C., with many reporters but with no candidate. Obama was secretly meeting with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

When the plane landed in Chicago, Gibbs confessed Obama had been visiting with his defeated rival. The incident came to be known as "the kidnapping."

Gibbs was first hired in 2004 for Obama's U.S. Senate bid. Before joining Obama, Gibbs faced brief unemployment when he left the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry in 2003. He previously worked on congressional campaigns, on Capitol Hill and for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

On the night of what is arguably Obama's most famous speech, his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the then-U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois was wearing a tie that belonged to Gibbs.

The one Obama had worn that day was not quite right for TV. "It was requisitioned for a higher purpose," Gibbs said. "I have never gotten that back, and I never had the illusion that I would."

Information from The Associated Press

is included in this report.