Jay Carney knows all the right people.

By his own account, Carney’s move from journalism to White House politics took place because he’s in a band with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Blinken was a foreign policy bureaucrat, and Carney led Time magazine’s Washington DC bureau, covering presidential politics — he’d even been on Air Force One with George W. Bush on September 11, 2001. Carney had been at Time for twenty years, and while he says he’d “been close to McCain,” when Blinken told him to consider a position as communications director for then-vice-president Joe Biden, he did.

Carney took the job in late 2008. Obama made him his press secretary in 2011, a position he held for three years. When he was appointed, a battle was raging in Wisconsin as then-governor Scott Walker sought to push through a bill that would strip public-sector workers of collective bargaining rights. As an uprising took place to oppose Walker, unions urged the Obama administration to send either Obama or Biden to Wisconsin to support the labor movement. But despite the president’s pro-union rhetoric, he declined to stand with the workers (this was far from the only time he abandoned organized labor). Instead of action, Obama offered words that did nothing to stop Walker, who succeeded in pushing through the bill. As Carney told the press at the time, Obama believes it is wrong for Wisconsin to use its budget troubles “to denigrate or vilify public sector employees.”