Meet Obama’s environmental evangelist.

Of course, all of this is the inspiration part of the equation. But it affects the implementation as well. In a messaging meeting with the Union of Concerned Scientists and some other Obama colleagues, it was clear who the UCS was here to see. His reputation as a package artist precedes him, and the reps from UCS went straight to Jones with the hard questions they were hearing out in the field. What do you say to people who think the transition can't be done? "You don't think we can do this? You don't think America can rise to this challenge? Oh, yes we can!" What do you say to coal miners whose jobs might be lost in a green economy? "The coal miners are heroes, and we've been forcing them to blow up their grandmothers' mountains?!" Let's give them jobs putting wind turbines on top of their mountains, he continued. What do you say to people who are afraid the costs are going to go up? Talk about the Clean Air Act, which was expected to cost $1,500 per ton of emissions for big business. "American business did not pay $1,500 per ton. They didn't pay $1,000 per ton. They didn't pay $500 per ton. They paid $250 per ton. One-sixth of what was expected." Competition would drive down prices, he swore. (Later, I asked how, given that energy companies often operate local monopolies: There's nobody else who can supply my home's energy. How would prices go down without competition? He didn't have a satisfactory answer.) It was Jones' rhetorical skill being put to use; from there, UCS could use Jones' packaging as a way to implement policy.

Jones swears that he spends most of his time being a strict implementer, listening to what the rest of government has to say. He says people from many different departments—energy, labor, housing and urban development, environmental protection—work on different pieces of the green-jobs portfolio. He sees his role as being a Gladwell-ian connector, making sure that somebody in labor knows about somebody in energy and that he's happy to serve as a go-between.

I didn't see much of Jones' implementation in action, but the little I did see was promising. The first meeting I attended was between Jones, a few other Obama types, and representatives of a home-builders' association. They were subtly lobbying for green-jobs money, saying how great their training programs were and how much good they were doing in the industry. Jones, though, was a tough sell. He wanted to know how quickly they could ramp up training if given extra money, saying Obama's criteria for supplying retrofit money were that the jobs be done "effectively, fast, and fairly." One of the home-builders' reps didn't want to say that it would take him up to a year to build enough training centers to double the program's reach, but Jones kept pressing until he got the answer out of him. It was a polite exchange in the policy weeds, the place where almost everything in Washington does gets done.

The two sides of Jones' jobs are hard to reconcile, even for him. When I asked what, exactly, his job was, he didn't have a snappy answer, surprising for a man who thrives because of the way he contextualizes hard-to-understand concepts. Similarly, when I asked about the difference between an advocate and a political servant, he had to pause for a bit to collect his thoughts. It was as though he had spent so much time within the inspiration-implementation spectrum that he hadn't had any time for reflection.

But then, just as I got back from D.C. the next day, I had an e-mail waiting for me. It was Jones, who had summoned a way to frame his job. "I'm a community organizer inside the federal family," he wrote. Compared with my belabored switchboard metaphor, it was an inspiring way to put it.

(Photo of Van Jones by Vince Bucci/Getty Images)