Now speaking for the White House

Jules Witcover is a syndicated columnist.

The midterm changes in President Barack Obama's White House inner circle reflect the need to gear up for next year's reelection bid. Two of the three key figures in his 2008 campaign are leaving to return to the political battleground.

The president's longtime chief political strategist, David Axelrod, is going back to Chicago soon to mastermind the effort from there. Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is to leave shortly to set up a political consultancy for the campaign. The third of the strategic team, David Plouffe, the hands-on manager of the 2008 campaign, is taking over Axelrod's White House role.

These three Obama insiders were very effective in that campaign because together and separately they had the candidate's ear and confidence. The fact was of particular importance to Gibbs later in giving him credibility with the White House press corps, with whom he was obliged to have daily interplay.

Unlike many campaign press secretaries, Gibbs was an integral part of that 2008 operation, as underscored in Plouffe's revealing campaign book, "The Audacity to Win."

They along with Axelrod were critically engaged in concept and consultation with Obama throughout.

Gibbs over the last two years has been the closest presidential insider in the job of White House press secretary since the late Jody Powell, Jimmy Carter's traveling companion and right-hand man through his run for the presidency in 1975-76 and then in White House.

When Powell spoke to reporters during the Carter campaign and presidency, they knew that he enjoyed constant access to his boss as well as engagement in highest levels of political strategy with Hamilton Jordan, the functional equivalent of Axelrod in the Carter operation.

Unlike run-of-the-mill White House mouthpieces from Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan under George W. Bush to Larry Speakes under Ronald Reagan and Ron Ziegler under Richard Nixon, Gibbs like Powell has had the gravitas to speak with authority to the often skeptical band of daily inquisitors in the press room.

Few of these or other White House press secretaries going back half a century were themselves former reporters. A notable exception was the late Jerry ter Horst, a Detroit News Washington bureau chief who became the press secretary for President Gerald Ford but quickly resigned in protest when Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes in 1974.

But the new White House chief of staff, Bill Daley, is said to have favored a former newsman to sit in that hot seat. Gibbs' successor is Jay Carney, a former Washington bureau chief for Time who has been Vice President Joe Biden's communications director for the last two years. As such he has kept a close eye out for pitfalls by his sometimes gaffe-prone boss.

Unlike Gibbs, Carney cannot claim the intimate association with Obama that his predecessor has enjoyed, nor the credibility as his spokesman it has bestowed. Also, a caution for any refugee from the news business becoming a press secretary is to remember that he or she is no longer part of the news-gathering community; first loyalty must go to the new employer, not to old press-corps cronies.

On the other hand, a former reporter turned press secretary sometimes becomes more Catholic than the pope. Rather than talking freely to the press, he or she sees the job as protecting the new boss from close press scrutiny and access. In my recent experience with Carney while writing a biography of Biden, someone I'd known for many years, such was the difficulty until the very end. Then Biden's own irrepressible openness led to a single long and informative interview -- in Carney's watchful presence.

But a president operates in much more of a fishbowl than does a vice president. There is much greater news media pressure for exposure and much greater need to deal with a demanding press community. Hide-and-seek is a more difficult and chancy game to play at that level.

The Obama White House press corps has been accustomed in the Gibbs regime to careful but open exchanges with the press secretary, who has generally presided with cordiality and good temper and a minimum of dissembling. The president will be best served if that climate continues in new hands.