Fast track to the White House

When president Barack Obama signed the landmark health care reform legislation from the White House East Room in March, granting millions of uninsured Americans access to medical insurance, Jennifer Cannistra ’01 was among the select few chosen to watch. But she was also among a far smaller group that had been shaping the health care reform process from the White House for the past 18 months.

As Obama discussed how health care reform would specifically benefit those sitting in the audience, Cannistra said, “You could just feel the history in the air ... I was just so proud to work for the president.”

As a health policy analyst in the White House’s Office of Health Reform, Cannistra wrote background memos that eventually landed on the president’s desk and designed public relations strategies to explain the initiative to the general public.

“It was incredibly intense,” she said. “Sleeping a couple hours a night, trying to get as much work done as possible ... always concerned that something you did could cause a problem.”

Cannistra called working in the West Wing “high-pressure and intense” — intense is a word she used often in her interview with The Daily Princetonian — but also said there were times when she lost sight of her position’s unique nature. “The reality of ‘You’re working in the White House’ is something that can slip by you at moments,” she said.

Given the workload involved, consistently producing quality material was a challenge for Cannistra.

“There, as you can imagine, was a lot of background paper we had to prepare for the various principals and the president,” she said.

But the Wilson School major, who later graduated from Harvard Law School, impressed her coworkers.

“One of the key things Jen did was she helped in our efforts to communicate these policies to the American people,” said Nick Papas, a White House spokesman who worked with Cannistra on the messaging campaign. “She was a tremendous, tremendous asset as we moved to discuss these issues with the American people.”

Though some of Cannistra’s memos stayed in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., her projects were targeted toward widely differing audiences. “I also drafted health reform policy materials for state and local elected officials, key constituencies and [members of Congress] during various Congressional recesses,” she explained.

Cannistra said she was not authorized to comment on specific assignments, but she explained that working on health care reform was stressful and exhausting, though ultimately rewarding.

“I have really enjoyed working on health care,” she said. “I think one of the reasons is that health care is a policy area that’s personally important for so many Americans.”

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The opportunity to witness history firsthand was another major perk, Cannistra said.

“It was certainly amazing to have a front-row picture into how major legislation gets passed, and definitely it was a long journey to the end of it when the president signed the bill, but I think it made the accomplishment ... even more meaningful,” she said.

Cannistra had been working for Obama for two years before the signing ceremony, following a path to the White House that began on the campaign trail. After campaigning for Obama in several states during the Democratic primary season, Cannistra’s first policy position came during the general election campaign when she served as the campaign’s policy director for Pennsylvania, a role which involved “making sure that voters and volunteers and campaign surrogates had all the information they needed on Senator Obama’s policies.”

After the general election, Cannistra was offered a position on a policy working group for Obama’s transition team. She chose the health policy group because it was a topic that she had become passionate about during the campaign, since it affected so many people.

That job segued to her current one. “I wanted to join the health care policy team and I was able to, and the woman who I worked for offered me the position to come over to the White House,” she said.

Now that the health care reform legislation has passed, Cannistra said, she will be leaving the White House in the next few weeks to work at the Department of Health and Human Services, where she will “be part of the team working on [health care reform’s] implementation.”

Cannistra said she is excited to continue working on health care policy and that she is grateful for her “once-in-a-lifetime experience” at the White House.

Though Cannistra was interested in public policy as a student, she attributed her current interest in politics to “looking at Senator Obama, listening to him, reading his books and just believing that he has a fundamental ability to be a great leader for our country.”

While at Princeton, Cannistra ran for four years on the track and field team and cross-country team, for which she was co-captain as a senior. She also volunteered through the Student Volunteers Council and served on the USG Projects Board.

Cannistra’s fast-paced work life comes as no surprise to women’s track and field team head coach Peter Farrell.

As a student, Cannistra was “a workaholic with noble goals in mind,” Farrell said. “From the very beginning, it was clear that Jen had a mission to make a difference.”

As an athlete, “Every team seems to have a mother, and Jen came closest to filling that role and keeping people together,” Farrell said, adding that Cannistra “wasn’t the best runner on the team, but she was certainly one of the better runners on the team, and she worked very hard.”