Meet Obama’s environmental evangelist.

Years before it was announced that Van Jones, the premier green-jobs advocate in the country, was headed to the White House, it was clear that Van Jones was headed to the White House. Thomas Friedman devoted an entire 2007 column to Jones, writing of his lofty goals, "I would not underestimate him." Jones muscled his way through Congress to get a Green Jobs Act passed in 2007 and then lavished praise on Nancy Pelosi and now-Labor Secretary, then-Rep. Hilda Solis. Pelosi returned the favor with a rave book blurb for Jones' 2008 best-seller The Green Collar Economy, writing that Jones possessed "sparkling intelligence, powerful vision, and deep empathy." When he wasn't running his fix-poverty, fix-the-planet nonprofit in Oakland, Calif., he was seeding Obama's transition team with ideas for an all-encompassing environmental/labor/energy/economic plan that would push the country toward a green future. After The New Yorker ran a glowing yet thorough profile of Jones in January, his ascendancy was complete. By the time the green-jobs-heavy stimulus bill passed, Jones may as well have been in the White House, since his philosophy had infected the place.

So despite originally saying he had no interest in moving to Washington, Jones is now part of the executive branch. Officially, he's the "special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation," a clunky title unbefitting of a man so who's especially talented at turning a phrase. Basically, he's Obama's green-jobs guy. But he's the green-jobs guy who used to be the green-jobs advocate. When I spent the day with him in Washington last week, Jones told me he sees the transition as one of "inspiration to implementation." It's a slogan that summarizes not just Jones' challenge but the whole administration's. The trouble for both: Inspiration is the easy part.

Jones is the switchboard operator for Obama's grand vision of the American economy; connecting the phone lines between all the federal agencies invested in a green economy. The $787 billion stimulus Congress authorized in February had at least $30 billion of green-jobs funding attached to it. It's Jones' responsibility to work within all the government agencies to make sure it gets doled out appropriately. Obama wants a cap-and-trade policy that will eventually force American industry to develop new green technologies that will lead to new green jobs. It's Jones' task to convince the American people that this is a good idea. The administration will have to get employees of dirty-energy companies—companies Jones calls the "pro-polluter status quo"—to believe they'll have jobs in a green economy, too. It's for Jones to sculpt that messaging operation. Jones told me the one thing he's learned in the four weeks he's been in Washington is that "power in D.C. is an illusion. Nobody in D.C. has as much power as they want—not even the president." Maybe Jones should lend Obama some of his.

Van Jones loves Barack Obama. As far back as 2004, he was calling Obama a "hero." These days, it's rare for Jones to go 20 minutes without mentioning his boss's brilliance. Jones compared the president to Michael Jordan—twice. (Obama is just going to keep scoring until somebody makes him stop.) Jones couldn't stop raving about the "extraordinary" speech Obama gave about the economy at Georgetown last week; he was "so proud of him" for giving it. His 4-and-a-half-year-old son calls the president "Baracko" and for a long time thought "Barack Obama Joe Biden" was the name of one person. Jones tells that last anecdote with an especially gleeful tone—it combines his real family with his new one.

Jones' crush on Obama is partly authentic and partly occupational. He has become the administration's chief spokesperson for all things green-economy. It's a mark of the strange nature of Jones' job that he has to be a switchboard operator who talks as much as he listens. While I was with him, the press person for the Council on Environmental Quality—the executive committee for which Jones works—repeatedly talked with Jones about the media hits coming up. There was loose chatter about Anderson Cooper, Larry King, and other spots rumored for the weekend. CNN was thinking of following him to a speaking gig in California. I accompanied him to a green-jobs-are-the-future talk he gave to business journalists. Directly afterward, he took a cab to the airport to go to Massachusetts, where he did the same thing for a bunch of college students. His job has become an institutionalized, more regimented, version of what he was already doing outside the administration: speaking Obama's praises. It's one that Jones says takes up only 15 percent of the time, but it appeared to be more like 50 percent.

This spokesperson role is largely why the administration brought him into the fold in the first place. It had two options: 1) let Jones compliment the policies from the outside, lending it credibility within the activist community, or 2) bring Jones inside and give him the authority to evangelize to a far larger audience—all of America—since Obama would probably already have grass-roots support. Option 2 it was.