Former White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers at a reception in March 2010. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT)

By Melissa Harris | Desiree Rogers might stay in Chicago. Or she might move to New York. Or
she might do both.

“I’m still deciding if I’m going to be here or I’m going to be in New
York,” the former White House Social Secretary said during a Chicago
Advertising Federation luncheon Thursday at The Palmer House Hilton.

Although Rogers has been spotted at several events in Chicago since
resigning her White House post in February, she said she was moving out
of Washington, D.C., in early May, and that her job prospects were “wide
open.” After her remarks, she told reporters that ideally, she would
like to split her time between New York and Chicago.

The advertising federation function marked her first public comments since leaving Washington amid criticism of her management of President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, which was crashed by an aspiring reality-television star and her husband.

“I’m not crying for me,” she said. “If the worst thing that happened to me, is someone said I was beautiful and I had on the wrong dress and I should have had a clipboard. OK. Alright. I’m very comfortable with that. If it was a risk to do 350 events and to see smiles on people’s faces and the thousands of children that came in, I’m comfortable with the work that we did.”

“Clearly Washington had never seen anything like you before,” moderator Gloria Scoby of Crain’s told Rogers.

“That’s for sure,” Rogers said. The room, filled with many of Rogers friends and her ex-husband, Ariel Investments CEO John Rogers, erupted in applause.

Rogers said that the President and First Lady instructed Rogers to take the social office in a different direction. For starters, Rogers hired two men as her deputies, one from the advertising industry and the other had a policy background. The White House also began hosting Wednesday night bipartisan meetings “no matter how bad the day was.”

“If you follow papers in Washington, they kept saying, ‘Why are they inviting the Republicans over?’” she said. “The Republicans are asking, ‘Why are we here?’ I said, ‘Mingle. Mingle. That’s why you’re here. Mingle.’ Democrats saying, ‘Why are we here?’ ‘You mingle. Mingle.’ It’s a very visible sign things were not going to just be same as they were year before.”

She said some of the changes, such as a more avant-garde style and fewer dinners, disrupted White House staff and the Washington elite.

“Here’s a young family, who has got young children, and they’re just getting settled,” Rogers said. “They’re not going to have as many dinner parties as Bush did in his last year. So people get antsy. Where’s my invitation? What’s going on? I don’t know what’s happening. Quite frankly, we only did four dinners. Unless you were a governor, a leader in Congress, at the state dinner, or — and I can’t remember what the fourth dinner was — you weren’t going to be at a dinner. They didn’t have dinners. One was because they ate with their children.”

She said the White House social office would forever be changed.

“I don’t think I’ve changed it; I think President Obama and Mrs. Obama have changed it.”

Scoby asked Rogers if she regretted using the term “Brand Obama,” which she described as “the best brand on earth” to a reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

“As I did my work and as our team did our work, we often thought of the personality of the President and First Lady as we selected musicians to come and play at the White House,” Rogers said. “We said, Mr., you know, you name it. How about Jon Bon Jovi. Jon — we’d like you do some public service the day that you’re here. Can we get you to sign on to that? Every performer signed off on that. That’s part of the personality. That’s part of the President and First Lady saying service is important.”

“So are you saying that’s Brand Obama?”

“To me, yes.”

“Would you have used different a different expression beside Brand Obama?”

“I could have.”

Rogers also said she should have spent more time cultivating relationships in D.C. by hosting a tea, for instance, but “I just needed to sleep.”

“That was the trade-off,” she said.