Path to Power
Halle grew up in Champaign, Ill., where his father was a professor at the University of Illinois,and his mother worked in the public schools.
Halle attended college at Illinois State University in Normal, Ill. Although he started out with an interest in business, he explored a variety of majors before ending up in sociology and political science.
Halle stumbled onto his passion for health care through one of his favorite professors at Illinois State. She happened to teach a class on the health-care system, and to the college junior, health care seemed to be a crucial issue, one that individuals had little control over.
“If you are unable to obtain health insurance because of a lack of money or a chronic disease or something like that,” Halle recalled thinking, “it still adversely affects you, and gives different kids, different people, an unfair chance at fulfilling whatever their full potential is.”
Halle’s political interests also began in his college days. He told his alumni magazine that working on sociology projects off-campus revealed broad class distinctions. “The polarization of wealth was pretty clear . . . seeing how people in one neighborhood had so many fewer options—that was a call to get involved.”
Center for American Progress
In January 2007, Halle headed to Washington, D.C., where he won an internship at Podesta’s liberal think-tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP). Halle requested to work in the health-policy group, where he met CAP fellows including Lambrew, who is now his boss at HHS.
He reported to CAP Health Policy Director Karen Davenport, who “really allowed me to do things that a lot of interns [at other organizations] wouldn’t be able to do,” said Halle, who even co-authored a paper during his time there..
Halle also met Cassandra Butts, CAP’s senior vice president for domestic policy and a senior Obama campaign adviser who is now deputy White House counsel. After Halle had worked at CAP for six months, Butts helped him get a position with the Obama campaign in Iowa.
2008 Presidential Campaign Aide
Ahead of the January 2008 Iowa caucuses, Halle worked as a field organizer based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“Iowa was an extremely humbling experience,” Halle said of the 18-hour work days he put in seven days a week. “I think you learn things about yourself after something like that.”
“Halle became so familiar with his assigned 13 precincts that he could walk down a street and point out where the Democrats lived, and how they said they’d caucus,” the Illinois State University Alumni Magazine wrote. Halle recounted to the magazine the day he grilled a burger for the then-candidate in an Iowans’ backyard at an event with only 10 supporters.
Obama’s win in Iowa gave the underdog momentum over competitors Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards. Halle moved to Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and back to Pennsylvania again.
When Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, Halle became deputy field director for North Carolina, overseeing 150 employees and thousands of volunteers. As the election neared, Halle was working seven days a week and reading as many as 11,000 emails a month.
“There’s nothing I’d rather be doing, and I think almost anything would seem pretty easy after this,” Halle said.
Presidential Inaugural Committee
Halle parlayed the election job into a job on the presidential inaugural committee (PIC), planning what became one of the largest inaugurations ever hosted on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall.
Halle worked on the kick-off event featuring Bruce Springsteen and other singers at the Lincoln Memorial. “PIC was fun, it was a great wrap-up to the whole [election] thing,” he said.
Iowa Floods
After the inauguration, Halle had the chance to work on a different kind of campaign. In late 2008, Halle had still been on the campaign trail in North Carolina as flooding devastated the area near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he had lived for nearly a year during the Democratic primaries.
Halle wanted to do something to help the community rebuild.
After the inauguration, he had the chance to return to eastern Iowa for about six weeks to help the area pass a local-option sales tax that would help rebuild some of the homes lost in the flood.
Halle said the campaign was a great way to contribute to a community he had come to feel was his own. “You see a direct effect . . . there’s money allocated to rebuild homes,” he said. “A bonus was getting to go back and see all these people I hadn’t seen in a year and work with them again.”
When he returned to Washington, D.C., he heard that Lambrew, his former CAP boss, needed a special assistant for the new health reform office she was to run at HHS. “It just clicked,” Halle said.
He took his position as special assistant in May 2009.
