The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has snagged Margaret Spellings to be a senior adviser to chamber President Thomas Donohue. Spellings, who was Education secretary during the Bush II administration, will also continue running her own consulting firm. She expects to work with governors and mayors on a variety of issues affecting states and cities.

Spellings, 51, a Houston native, worked on a Texas education reform commission and for the Texas Association of School Boards. She enlisted as political director to George W. Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign and served as senior adviser in the Governor's Mansion.

She enjoys working on education partly because "it implicates kids and a high degree of revenue and taxes, which everybody is an expert on ... it's a highly populist issue." Spellings was the first Bush administration official to appear on Jon Stewart's Daily Show and took center stage on The Colbert Report. "College students are one of the primary audiences for those shows, so you've got to go where your customer is," she says.

Spellings is now starting golf lessons, and she'll soon take her second daughter (a high school junior) to look at colleges. "You have to be heavily into reverse psychology," in dealing with that, she jokes.

Because of the stimulus package, Education successor Arne Duncan will have a lot of money to work with, but the abundance of dough also presents challenges, Spellings says. "They'll have to be very careful about how they implement that funding."
                                                                                           --Gregg Sangillo