Rhee: 'Really Thought Fenty Would Win'

Michelle Rhee turned up at work last Sept. 15 utterly stunned.

“I really did think he was going to win, ” she told the staff of her boss, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty.

“Yes, we know you did,” came the reply.

Rhee was probably the only person in Washington surprised by Fenty’s defeat. Even her fiancé, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, told POLITICO he saw it coming.

Rhee had already amply demonstrated that she was terrible at politics. The toast of the Washington Post editorial board for shaking up the city’s troubled school system, she now admits she should have done more explaining — and selling — of her policies. She campaigned openly for Fenty, without apparently realizing that she might be hurting him and that she was ensuring that her job would end when his did.

“She really thought that, at the end of the day, people would see the results he had produced and want them to continue,” Johnson said.

But in the weeks since that defeat, Rhee, 41, has pivoted hard and emerged, ironically enough, as a national political force to be reckoned with.

She’s an important voice among centrist Democrats — led by President Barack Obama — who are pushing a new agenda of teacher quality and high standards in education. She’s an adviser to some of the nation’s most ambitious Republican governors, like Florida’s Rick Scott, New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, who envision a more apocalyptic confrontation with teachers unions.

And among Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential nomination, there’s something of a Rhee primary underway, with potential candidates regularly dropping her name as a path to both policy credibility and Beltway buzz.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty refers to her as “superwoman,” citing the education policy film “Waiting for Superman.”

“Michelle’s passion for reform and her refusal to wait for the bureaucracy to act is what makes her so effective, and one of the ways she will be effective on the national stage is by achieving success on a state-by-state basis, starting with Florida,” Scott, who shares a take-no-prisoners approach to governance with Rhee, his adviser, told POLITICO.

Now Rhee is in the process of shifting from political naif to full-fledged power broker. She has created an emphatically political new organization, StudentsFirst, and she told POLITICO she hopes to raise and spend an astonishing $200 million annually — a large sum, even in the deep-pocketed world of education philanthropists.