A lot of us have been jumping all over Rahm Emanuel as a destructive force within the White House. Dana Milbank tells us we're wrong, and he's not unpersuasive. For the record, here's what he has to say.
Obama's first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter.
Obama chose the profane former Clinton adviser for a reason. Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating. One thinks big; the other, a former House Democratic Caucus chair, understands the congressional mind, in which small stuff counts for more than broad strokes.
Obama's problem is that his other confidants -- particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod -- are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn't dirty his hands in politics.
The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel's counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig's effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn't politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn't met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder's plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.
Obama's greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support. He opposed the public option as a needless distraction...
If, as Milbank suggests, Axelrod et al. are sycophants protecting Obama from reality, then they should go, and Obama's savvy, realistic political adviser should stay.
But I'm not at all convinced that Obama is a political babe in the woods. It's also possible that Emanuel has stood between Obama and the president's ability to apply hands-on "Chicago" politics in his dealings with Congress. It's possible that Emanuel's own loyalties are split between new his boss and his old buddies in the legislative branch. When Emanuel pronounces something -- closing Guantanamo, for example -- "not politically feasible," I think it's fair to ask whether Emanuel isn't avoiding putting some serious pressure on his erstwhile allies, pressure that President Obama knows very well how to exert.
