A funny thing about all the criticism of Rahm Emanuel is that no one that I can remember ever blamed Andy Card for Bush’s policies and failures. I used to wonder about Card a lot. He had a reputation as a fairly moderate Yankee Republican, and I thought at the time he was hired that it was a nod to Poppy Bush. Card would be the adult who kept the crazy conservatives at bay. It didn’t turn out that way. In all the time he was Bush’s chief of staff I never saw Card’s fingerprints on anything. And when it came time to visit Attorney General John Ashcroft in the hospital and try to strong-arm him into authorizing more illegal warrantless wiretapping, it was Card who made the trip with Alberto Gonzales. It turned out that Card was just as dim-witted and evil as Dick Cheney. So, who knows what goes on between a president and his chief of staff? Ideology isn’t necessarily a predictor.
What matters in the end is results. It’s not a bad thing that Emanuel is taking the heat off his boss. Whether he really deserves all the criticism is a different question. I’ve seen some legitimate criticism in recent days, but I’ve also seen some pretty blatant monday-morning quarterbacking and some real idiocy, like this:
“I like Rahm; he’s always been a straight shooter with me,” said a Democratic centrist senator who was closely involved in the healthcare debate.
The lawmaker said Emanuel misjudged the Senate by focusing on only a few Republicans, citing Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins as too narrow a pool.
“In the Senate, you have to anchor in the middle and build out,” said the lawmaker.
“They just wanted to win,” the source said of Emanuel and other White House strategists. “Their plan was to keep all the Democrats together and work like hell to get Snowe and Collins. The Senate doesn’t work that way. You need a radius of 10 to 12 from the other side if you’re going to have a shot.”
The stupid, it burns.
