Scheiber homes in on the way this corporatist ethos runs like a vein of silver through Jarrett’s role in the White House. A former corporate lawyer with deep family roots in patronage-fueled Chicago, Jarrett “resigned from no fewer than seven corporate and nonprofit boards” in order to join Obama in Washington. There, she was instrumental in ensuring that the president could “rely on the largesse of corporations,” soothing whatever “fragile egos of corporate executives” needed therapy along the way.
Yet Scheiber didn’t pursue the trail of breadcrumbs all the way. The ultimate boardroom figure isn’t a hands-on operator accountable to no one but the CEO himself. The ultimate boardroom figure reposes in splendor atop the world’s economic heap—an eminently apolitical position. Jarrett, by sharp contrast, plays a subtle, passive-aggressive role that would seem stereotypically “womanish” were it not sketched out with such brilliant foresight by Niccolo Machiavelli, the patron sinner of patriarchal power-tripping.
Machiavelli didn’t counsel the Prince to become a human resources manager, of course. After all, the Prince of necessity had to focus on defeating his external enemies. Although sometimes the Prince was required to attend to his internal foes, that very division of Princely labor made it necessary for someone—someone else—to make internal politics his full-time job. That, of course, was Machiavelli himself, or Machiavelli’s creation: the clever, devoted, unaccountable expert in manipulation and control.
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