text: White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler is seen during the fraud and conspiracy trial of two Enron executives in 2006, in which she was the federal prosecutor. (PAT SULLIVAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS) 
   
   As soon as White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler heard about an upcoming inspector general’s report on the Internal Revenue Service, she knew she had a problem. 
   
   The notice Ruemmler saw on April 24 gave her a thumbnail sketch of a disturbing finding: that the IRS had improperly targeted tea party and other conservative groups. She shared the news with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and other senior White House aides, who all recognized the danger of the findings. 
   
   But they agreed that it would be best not to share it with President Obama until the independent audit was completed and made public, in part to protect him from even the appearance of trying to influence an investigation. 
   
   This account of how the White House tried to deal with the IRS inquiry — based on documents, public statements and interviews with multiple senior officials, including one directly involved in the discussions — shows how carefully Obama’s top aides were trying to shield him from any second-term scandal that might swamp his agenda or, worse, jeopardize his presidency. 
   
   The episode also offers a glimpse into the workings of Obama’s insular West Wing, which has struggled to cope in recent weeks with the IRS scandal, the continued fallout from last year’s deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the Justice Department’s tracking of journalists as part of leak investigations. 
   
   But Ruemmler and McDonough’s careful plan for the IRS was upended on May 10, when Lois Lerner, a senior official at the agency, broke the news by admitting that the IRS had given extra scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. 
   
   Senior White House officials were stunned to see the IRS trying to get ahead of its own story — and in doing so, creating a monstrous communications disaster for an administration that appeared not to know what its agencies were up to. 
   
   Ruemmler views her mission strictly as advising Obama on the law and protecting executive branch prerogatives, colleagues and friends said. “She’s a lawyer’s lawyer,” said Neal Katyal, acting solicitor general in Obama’s first term and a close friend. “She can go with you toe to toe on footnotes and Supreme Court opinions or she can get into the intricacies of protecting the president against a Capitol Hill investigation.” 
   
   Yet Ruemmler’s lawyerly focus sometimes conflicts with political imperatives. The absence of such dominant first-term personalities as former adviser David Axelrod and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who could bridge those differences, has left the White House scrambling to contain its public damage. 
   
   In the IRS case, many prominent Washington lawyers say Ruemmler made the sensible legal call. She protected her client — Obama — by distancing him from a politically sensitive problem and ensuring that he could not be accused of meddling in an inquiry. 
   
   In addition, one senior administration official said, Ruemmler at the time did not know key facts: How extensive was the IRS’s targeting? How many and which employees were involved? Did they target only conservative groups and was the effort politically motivated? And were those groups’ applications for tax-exempt status denied or delayed? 
   
   To keep from intervening in the audit, Ruemmler could not seek answers, the official said. 
   
   “The single most important thing the White House counsel can do at that point is make sure no one in the White House does anything to interfere with or anything that may obstruct the conclusions from being finished and rolled out,” said Jack Quinn, who served as White House counsel under Bill Clinton. 
   
   It fell to others, including White House press secretary Jay Carney and senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, to explain the White House’s decisions to the public, and that’s where problems arose. Inconsistencies in their stories undermined their credibility and invited scrutiny. 
   
   “It’s become a Washington spectacle,” lamented David Plouffe, a longtime Obama political adviser who left the White House in January. 
   
   Privately, other Obama allies said Carney’s repeated corrections of the official account left an impression with the public that White House aides were incompetent or hiding something. 
   
   Late last week, McDonough summoned Plouffe and a cadre of former Obama and Clinton advisers — including Stephanie Cutter, Robert Gibbs, Anita Dunn, Paul Begala and Mike McCurry — to the White House for two separate public relations strategy sessions. White House aides said they urged getting out information about the IRS situation as quickly as possible, and provided advice on refocusing attention on Obama’s jobs agenda. 
   
   The president expressed “outrage” at the IRS findings last week and acted swiftly to install new leadership at the agency. This week, however, news reports have centered on the fine points of the White House’s evolving accounts, including why Obama did not learn of the situation until the media reported it on May 10. 
   
   Plouffe — who derided the press corps as “figure skating judges” for focusing on minutiae — said the counsel’s office is routinely notified about inspector general reports. Protocol is to wait for the final reports before briefing Obama, he said. 
   
   “The truth is, there wasn’t like a playbook of 12 plays here,” Plouffe said. “The notion that somehow the counsel’s office or the White House should have leapt into action here before the IG report came out is beyond curious. That would have been the real scandal.” 
   
   As counsel, Ruemmler is a regular presence in the Situation Room and the Oval Office, making legal judgments and helping coach other senior officials on how to discuss them publicly. Internally, she is a fierce opponent of public disclosures that could expose communications within the executive branch, especially those between the president and his advisers. 
   
   “I think she’s one of the most cool-headed people in the entire White House and does a lot to ensure that nobody gets themselves in trouble,” said Cutter, who served as deputy campaign manager for Obama’s reelection bid. She added that, on the IRS inquiry, “she did the president a huge service by keeping it away from him until the IG report was final. That’s her modus operandi. . . . It makes everything that much cleaner.” 
   
   Associates say the way the IRS situation was handled fits with Ruemmler’s approach to making decisions: wary to act before knowing all the facts, but then decisive once they are clear. 
   
   “She’s very deliberate,” said Akin Gump lawyer John M. Dowd, a friend. “There’s no reason to go busting into it. . . . Even though it’s a hot subject and there’s going to be some political implications, to me you wait until you’ve got a work product in your hands.” 
   
   Unlike most senior White House aides, Ruemmler has no campaign experience. Although she has worked in Washington for years, as a prosecutor and as a litigation partner at Latham & Watkins, former colleagues said she showed little interest in politics. 
   
   Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis said Ruemmler lacks political and media savvy. He said she had “an obligation to give the president a heads-up and generally describe what might be coming down the track [on the IRS] so you can do crisis management planning.” 
   
   Plouffe rejected that criticism, saying, “I know blowhards like Lanny Davis have posited this question, but they’re dead wrong.” Obama, he said, has “plenty of people who give him political advice. He needs a top-flight lawyer who’s going to run a good process, and that’s what she’s done.” 
   
   Beth Wilkinson, a Washington lawyer and former Justice Department official, said Ruemmler’s focus on the law is considered a virtue inside the White House. 
   
   “She stays in her lane, which people appreciate,” said Wilkinson, a close friend of Ruemmler’s. “She really sees her role as the counsel to the president and to protect the presidency and provide legal advice. She doesn’t try to do other people’s jobs.” 
   
   Discuss this topic and other political issues in the politics discussion forums. ||||| Here is a tale of being a woman in public life in two tweets by Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin: “Read what @PhilipRucker and I wrote about Kathy Ruemmler, who went from an outsider to Obama's chief protector.” “And then, read about Ruemmler's fabulous shoes.” 
   
   Ruemmler is the White House counsel. According to quotes in the first piece, pegged to the controversy over what she did and didn’t tell the president about the IRS inspector general report, she is a “lawyer’s lawyer,” “very deliberate” and “one of the most cool-headed people in the entire White House.” There is also room in the first piece for Ruemmler’s “legendary” shoe habit -- in 2006, she wore pink stilettos while prosecuting Enron! -- but two paragraphs were simply not enough. Hence the second story, dated five days later, devoted entirely to divulging that Ruemmler owns one pair of shoes characterized by “a jeweled paisley pattern; another is black and strappy.” Guys, there is a regular Carrie Bradshaw in the White House. 
   
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   But wait, you say. If Ruemmler didn’t want the Washington Post to talk about her shoes while she’s in the midst of White House “scandals,” why did she wear them? A truly serious person would tiptoe through the West Wing barefoot. Could she arrange for some office-appropriate sackcloth and ashes? 
   
   On my personal outrage scale, this ranks around the same place as the same paper's describing congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema as “lecturing, hectoring, defensive, accusatory, pouty and curiously repetitive,” and just below NPR recently scrubbing its incredulousness that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand could both have a "girlie" voice and fight sexual assault in the military -- at the same time. It registers a lot below Vogue pressing Gillibrand again and again about how she lost weight. (The true highlight of Jonathan Van Meter’s 2010 story was when he noted that the weight loss would help Gillibrand “no doubt remain attractive to her husband of nine years, who is two years younger than she is.” Alternative headline: Sexy cougar gets back her beach body!) But it registers nonetheless. The Washington Post is still one of the country's major papers, there are still far too few women in positions of power in the city it mainly covers, and at a time when Ruemmler is in the spotlight for whether she did her job right, the shoe chatter is simply undermining and trivializing. 
   
   A recent study conducted by Name It, Change It asked voters to assess hypothetical male and female candidates. Hearing descriptions of the female candidate's appearance "had detrimental impacts on her candidacy ... even appearance coverage that purports to be neutral or complimentary damages the woman." It cost the male candidate nothing. That's probably because the average American still has trouble believing that women can both participate in what Garance Franke-Ruta termed "the system of beauty" while working in "the system of power," such that a woman is more harshly judged for a leisure habit while a man's extracurricular habits are par for the course. There is nothing wrong with Ruemmler straying from the sparrow-like business casual norm of Washington, to an extent that President Obama has apparently teased her about, but a description of a pair of shoes she wore seven years ago doesn't belong in a national newspaper's profile of her. 
   
   It was once, reluctantly, my professional responsibility to come up to Condoleezza Rice at a gala just after she ceased being secretary of state and ask her what she was wearing. But I worked for a fashion trade paper. Eilperin is the White House reporter, and as I write this, the shoe story is the third-most-read on the Washington Post’s politics section. (How much of that is referrals from furious feminist tweets, one of which I issued, I cannot know.) Meanwhile, that shoe story, which Eilperin impressively carried on her own, is sadly undermined by the fact that the only photographic proof of Ruemmler’s alleged fabulousness is her wearing muted beige heels. 
   
   There is something else that is interesting about that photograph: There are eight people in the room, and Ruemmler is the only woman. Indeed, the first story notes that Ruemmler operates in a White House in which “some women complained that they felt marginalized” and that she is “one of the few women who has been able to break into the club.” She has apparently done so on her own terms, professionally speaking, which can't be easy. So here is a proposal for the politics reporters who want to add color and "fabulousness" to their prose: How about we issue a moratorium until there's more than one woman in the room, and see what happens?
target: – Kathryn Ruemmler is the White House chief counsel (and currently in the middle of the IRS mess), so it totally makes sense that the fourth-most-popular story in the Washington Post's political section right now would be ... an article about Ruemmler's love for flashy shoes. Wait, what? It seems the shoe habit initially got two paragraphs in a more serious profile of Ruemmler and the IRS scandal, but the shoes were just so interesting they ended up getting their own article. This, writes Irin Carmon on Salon, is the perfect "tale of being a woman in public life," and it's just as ridiculous as the time the same paper described a congresswoman as "hectoring" and "pouty," or the time Vogue became obsessed with Kirsten Gillibrand's weight loss, or the time ... well, you get the idea. "The Washington Post is still one of the country’s major papers, there are still far too few women in positions of power in the city it mainly covers, and at a time when Ruemmler is in the spotlight for whether she did her job right, the shoe chatter is simply undermining and trivializing," Carmon writes. Studies have shown that hearing descriptions of a female political candidate's appearance—even positive descriptions—damages the candidate in a voter's eyes, while the same effect is not seen for men. Plus, politics is still a boys' club. "So here is a proposal for the politics reporters who want to add color and 'fabulousness' to their prose: How about we issue a moratorium until there’s more than one woman in the room, and see what happens?" Click for Carmon's full piece.