Coming up in the New York Times Sunday magazine, an article by White House correspondent Peter Baker exploring the relationship of President Obama and chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel. We're talking about two strong and very different men, one a policy wonk and the other a process wonk.
Excerpts:
Excerpts:
Emanuel occupies a unique niche in Obama’s White House. He makes up the rules of the game that others are supposed to follow, and he gets away with what others cannot. Emanuel seems to serve as a virtual prime minister, the most powerful chief of staff since James Baker managed the White House during Ronald Reagan’s first term. Baker was also an experienced, savvy operator who took the arrows for his boss. Just as Emanuel is often criticized by the left for steering Obama toward the middle, Baker was considered a moderate who tempered Reagan’s more conservative instincts. “Let Reagan be Reagan” was the cri de coeur against Baker. “Let Obama be Obama” is the thrust of the liberal critique of Emanuel. What that fundamentally misses, of course, is that Reagan and Obama chose their chiefs of staff to serve exactly the roles they did.
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He pushes for as much as he can, and when he judges he has as much as the system will give him, he cuts a deal. “He’s a Malcolm X Democrat — by any means necessary,” Paul Begala, a longtime friend from the Clinton White House, says.
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When Obama ran for the presidency, liberals saw him as the crusading head of a movement to sweep in a new era of progressive policies on health care, climate change and national security, while independents and some Republicans saw him as a sort of postpartisan figure who would reach across party lines and end the ideological polarization of Washington. Inevitably, of course, he could not be both. Instead he has managed to disappoint both sets of believers. ... That has been the story of health care, the defining project of Obama’s first year as president. Along the way, Obama has been willing to be flexible on the details to the point that he switched positions significantly from his own campaign promises — giving up on the public option, embracing a mandate requiring everyone to have insurance and accepting a tax on high-value insurance plans. But when it comes to the broad sweep of his plan, to extend coverage to more than 30 million uninsured Americans, he has refused to retreat.
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“[The President's] thinking,” Anita Dunn told me, “was: I actually do not want to play it safe on this issue. I want to get it done; and if we don’t get it done now, we won’t get it done for a very long time. And I’m not ready to fold on this. It may get to that point, but not yet.”
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They are not as personally close as many assume. While they both come from Chicago and have been political allies for years, they are more friendly than friends.
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Even today, Emanuel sometimes has a hard time talking about the Massachusetts election. Asked recently by a visitor what happened, Emanuel simply sighed and said: “I can’t. I don’t have enough medication.”
