With help from Allie Bice Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here! BRUCE REED, one of JOE BIDEN’s closest aides in the White House, has always been politically ambitious. While serving as vice president of his seventh grade class, he tried to impeach the president and take her place. “The little worm,” the seventh grade president, BONNIE LePARD , said with a laugh as she recounted the (unsuccessful) power play in a February interview with Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Press. LePard got over it — she married Reed years later. (She didn’t respond for comment). Now 61 with a face some colleagues still call boy-ish, Reed’s industriousness has carried him far. The Princeton grad and Rhodes scholar has now been a senior policy adviser in all three Democratic administrations since the 90’s—from directing the Domestic Policy Council under Clinton to serving as Biden’s White House deputy chief of staff now. And while he keeps a low profile and almost never talks on the record to reporters — including West Wing Playbook — he is one of the most influential people in the Oval Office, according to people familiar with the dynamic. In practice, Reed is the most senior domestic policy adviser in the White House, and coordinated all the policy sections of the president’s joint address to Congress last week. That large portfolio puts him near the top of the West Wing hierarchy, above more high-profile aides like SUSAN RICE and BRIAN DEESE, and it is coupled with a close personal relationship with Biden that comes from serving as his chief of staff from 2011-2013 and being a close aide on the campaign trail. Reed traveled with Biden more than any senior adviser during the campaign, essentially becoming his policy body man — a role not unlike the one he played nearly 30 years ago when BILL CLINTON ran for president. He still regularly travels with the president to his home in Wilmington on the weekends. “Throughout the campaign, Bruce was the person constantly with Biden on the road, on the plane — in the hard moments, in the fun moments. He was the strategic advisor beside Biden in crunch time, in crises, or when news — good or bad — would come in,” said LIZ ALLEN , a longtime Biden aide who worked with Reed in the Obama administration and during the 2020 campaign. “I think that just due to the sheer number of hours they spent together, there's a deep trust that developed between him and the president and he knows the president as well as anyone.” Reed is part of an elite trio: Biden’s three chiefs of staff when he was vice president, all of whom are now senior West Wing advisers. Each of them —Reed, RON KLAIN, and STEVE RICCHETTI -—have very different dynamics with the boss, former aides said. Biden sees Klain as a genius, especially after navigating the financial crises in 2009 and 2010. Ricchetti is more his pal, the friend who was his chief of staff while BEAU BIDEN was sick. Reed is a bit in between. The president is close with him personally and has a lot of respect for his policy chops. In some ways, Reed is a link back to the politician Biden used to be — a moderate Democrat ideologically aligned with two of Reed’s former bosses, AL GORE and Clinton. The Washington Post described him in 1992 as perhaps the “ultimate Clintonite;” he even helped draft Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign announcement. Laying low in this White House has also allowed Reed to avoid blowback from the left-wing of the party. Some progressive forces led a campaign against his potential nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget, given his roles in passing welfare reform, serving as executive director for the Bowles-Simpson commission, and being a leader of the so-called “new Democrats” in the early-90’s. Ironically, he’s probably more powerful now than he would have been at OMB. But the left-wing’s contempt for Reed doesn’t mesh with the progressive policies Biden has put forward with Reed’s help. Reed has been especially influential in Biden’s proposals to raise taxes on capital gains for people making over $1 million and cracking down on technology companies, his allies say. ‘‘Whether it’s making the tax system reward work not wealth or taking on big tech, Bruce has influenced a lot of the Biden agenda in ways people might not expect,” said SARAH BIANCHI , a longtime adviser to Biden who worked with Reed on crafting the campaign policy agenda. Reed grew up in Idaho with parents he described as liberal Democrats; his mother later became the Democratic leader in the state Senate. “My first impressions of politics came from trying to hand out Democratic bumper stickers at county fairs in northern Idaho … to guys with pickup trucks and gun racks,” he said in an oral history interview in 2004. “I learned to experience rejection at an early age.” “I was attracted to Gore and to Biden and eventually to Clinton because I saw them as the closest thing to a BOBBY KENNEDY of my time,” he said in the interview. “Somebody who could bring together working stiffs and the more liberal parts of the party.” PSA: We’re going to be experimenting with some new items and sections. Tell us what you like and what you hate. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you REGINA LaBELLE? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: transitiontips@politico.com. 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