Continues on page 2 >>
.
By Elisa Wood
AOL Energy
From the start Heather Zichal, chief energy adviser to President Barack Obama, struck Elgie Holstein as an unusual Washington player.
.
He got to know her when Zichal was a Congressional aide for Senator John Kerry, a position she held from 2002 to 2008. One day, she sought out Holstein, a veteran policy adviser who had served in the Clinton administration, because she needed information on refinery economics.
"It was a substantive inquiry," said Holstein, who is now a senior director with the Environmental Defense Fund. "We talked about it, and then she invited me to come to Senator Kerry's office to meet with him and discuss the same set of issues."
That is where Zichal diverged from the Washington norm, he said. Typically, senior staffers repackage such interviews and present the information to the boss as their own, rather than make the source of the information front and center.
"I felt it was an unusual and noteworthy kind of thing for a senior senate staffer to do – not to claim that she knew everything about everything, but rather to bring in somebody to give her boss some perspective other than hers. I thought it was a class act, and I was really struck by it and impressed," Holstein said.
It is this willingness to invite others to the table, whether they conform with her opinion or not, that helped the 36-year-old Iowa native in her mercurial rise to a top policy position, say those who have worked with her.
"She is collaborative to a 'T'," said Melinda Pierce, lead lobbyist for the Sierra Club, where Zichal worked as an intern while studying environmental policy at Rutgers University.
Rich in political cred
Her background is markedly different from that of billionaire oilman Harold Hamm, energy adviser to Mitt Romney's campaign. (See Part I of this series, "Who Obama and Romney listen to on energy.") They do share in common a small town, rural upbringing – Zichal was raised in Elkader, Iowa, a town with a population of about 1,200. But that is as far as the similarities seem to go.
Where Hamm worked his way up in business, Zichal worked her way up in government. Where Hamm earned a substantial fortune, Zichal earned substantial political cred.
"The President by all signs and all reports trusts her completely," Holstein said. "By now the President, four years in, has defined his energy policy and clearly there are some who like those policies better than others. Yet, I hear nothing but compliments about Heather's willingness to listen, about her open mindedness and about her accessibility."
After graduating from Rutgers in 1999, Zichal worked as an aide on Capitol Hill, first for Rep. Rush Holt and later Rep. Frank Pallone, both Democrats from New Jersey. She signed on with Kerry's office in 2002 and also served as top energy and environmental adviser for his unsuccessful 2004 presidential bid. Later, when Obama decided to run for president, Holstein urged Zichal to join the campaign.
"I had been working for Senator Obama since January 2008, and I called her up begging her to come and work for Senator Obama. As it turned out, I wasn't the only one," he said. "There were people who were a lot closer to the senator than I was that were making the same case."
After Obama took office, Zichal served under Carol Browner, then chief energy adviser to the President. When Browner left in early 2011, Zichal stepped into her role, acting as adviser to Obama under the title deputy assistant for energy and climate change.
Her rank in the Obama administration is higher than is typical for a presidential energy and environmental adviser, according to Holstein. This speaks to Obama's decision to make energy a key part of his agenda.
Page 2: A savvy political strategist >>
Talk Back
