By: Amie Parnes

In a small office above a Subway sandwich shop near Capitol Hill, Michael Strautmanis picks up his BlackBerry, punches in a number and leans back in his chair to listen.

Strautmanis is a member of Barack Obama’s Capitol Hill liaison team, and it’s time to check in with a staffer for a high-ranking House Democrat.

“I wanted to see if there was anything I could pass along,” Strautmanis says. “Is there anything I can tell him?”

He listens for a moment, then asks: “What’s your boss’s perspective on this now?”

Strautmanis gets an earful.

“You want to set up a private meeting?” he asks the staffer. “All right. Done.”

As congressional Democrats grumble about a lack of coordination from their presumptive presidential nominee, Strautmanis and his colleagues on Obama’s newly formed Hill team know that the first job of the liaison is to listen.

“The hope is, you listen to people, you find out the areas of common ground and you start to work from there,” Strautmanis says. “It comes straight from Barack’s philosophy. People always think, ‘He may not be agreeing with me, but he’s definitely listening to me.’”

A 39-year-old Chicago native, Strautmanis has a direct line to the Obamas. He met Michelle Obama in 1991, when he was working as a paralegal and she was a young associate at Sidley & Austin. She was Michelle Robinson then, engaged to Obama, a former Sidley summer associate.

Nearly two decades later, Strautmanis is working with Phil Schiliro — the former chief of staff to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) — and a handful of other former Hill aides to persuade members of Congress that an Obama presidency would be “not only good for the country but good for the party.”

“We’re going to need partners in Congress,” Strautmanis says. “Creating a partnership now means a partnership in a few months when we inaugurate President Obama.”

Strautmanis spends his days working the phones, going door to door on Capitol Hill, and appearing at Democratic leadership and caucus meetings. With an Obama “Hope” pin on his lapel, he introduces himself, takes the political temperature of members, talks about legislation coordination and asks for advice.

“It’s been intense,” says Strautmanis, who was Obama’s chief counsel in the Senate before being assigned to the Hill liaison team in June. “The Senate operates at a certain pace and was always a challenge, but it’s nothing like having a couple hundred members wanting your number and wanting to talk to you.”

The phone calls and e-mails have been coming at a steady pace and on a variety of topics: legislation, policy, coordination in members’ districts and states, the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Recently, Strautmanis heard from a member who had thoughts on how Obama should manage the campaign back in the lawmaker’s state. “It was informative,” Strautmanis says. “We listened to him because we wanted him to know we weren’t just checking the box or paying lip service.”

Strautmanis relayed the information to Obama headquarters in Chicago. But in the end, the campaign “just didn’t end up agreeing [with the lawmaker],” he says.

Still, Strautmanis says, he hoped the member came away from that interaction “saying that the Obama campaign has an idea about how they’re going to win the election.”

Strautmanis says many of the early Hill coordination hiccups have come as a result of the decision to delay setting up a full operation until Obama became the nominee last month.

“We’re here now, and we’re trying to hit the ground running,” he says. “My sense is that the leadership feels like we’re here for them and we’re being receptive. I hope any feathers we’ve ruffled have been smoothed.”

A Senate leadership aide who had complained previously about the lack of coordination with the Obama campaign said Tuesday that Hill Democrats appreciate the overt moves the Obama team is now making but have yet to see substantive changes in the campaign’s approach to Congress.

Strautmanis says he hopes Hill Democrats understand that the Obama campaign is taking the party’s concerns seriously. “I hope they realize they haven’t been sent some functionary, but someone who knows Barack and has known him throughout his career,” he says.

Strautmanis remembers being impressed by Michelle Obama when he first met her at Sidley. “And Barack, forget about it,” he says. “If you spent any time around that firm, you heard his name mentioned.”

Over time, through law school at the University of Illinois and after he took his first job in politics, Strautmanis grew close to the Obamas, playing basketball with Barack and having frequent lunches with Michelle. When Obama decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Strautmanis flew in from Washington, where he had taken a job as an aide to then-Rep. Rod Blagojevich, to volunteer for the campaign.

After Obama lost, Strautmanis returned to his job with Blagojevich, then moved on to the Association of Trial Lawyers in 2002. He says he and Obama began to talk “more and more” about politics.

One day in 2003, Obama called with some news. He was running for U.S. Senate. Strautmanis asked what he could do to help. “Just pick me up from the airport when I come to town and keep your ear to the ground,” Strautmanis recalls Obama saying.

He did, Obama won and the new senator hired Strautmanis as his chief counsel.

“It became apparent that they needed someone who knew Barack well,” Strautmanis says.

Michelle Obama agreed.

“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have providing Barack counsel on so many critical issues than Mike,” she said this week.

Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett says Strautmanis is “quietly effective.”

“He’s the perfect guy for this job, because he has such a good read on people and has a wonderful leadership skill of being able to relate to the most junior people all the way up to Barack,” she says.

“When you leave the room, he leaves you feeling good.”

On the wall in the office above the sandwich shop where Strautmanis and his colleagues work the phones, someone has posted a note. “Stay Cool and Chill,” it says. “Obama ’08. It’s all good.”

Strautmanis doesn’t really need the reminder.

“I’m feeling good,” he said one day this week between meetings with lawmakers. “Between the candidate that we have, the team that we have and the mood in the country, I just can’t help but feel great. I think we’ll do OK.”

Copyright © 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC | Distributed by Noofangle Media