Obama called up Podesta. “His pitch to me was, ‘I need you to come back here,’ ” he recalls. “Everyone else was trying to fix health care. ‘So you need to come back here while everyone else is attending to the forest fire.’ ” Obama wanted Podesta to take charge of climate change. “He said, ‘I want to make sure the stuff I promised gets done. And you can mess around in everything else too. But this is the thing I really need you to do.’ ”
