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.
I think the better analogy (at least for the critics) is Karl Rove. They see Rahm as driving an ideological, DLC-type agenda that has completely cut Obama off from the progressives who helped elect him.
I take the criticisms with a grain of salt, since obviously Obama must be signing off on whatever Rahm is doing. That said, when Obama does speak he is much closer to my POV than when Rahm speaks.
The stories I’ve read of Rahm trying to shut down Eric Holder’s investigations of Bush war crimes are enough to align me against him. Plus, the fact that he is supposed to be an epic arm-twister and yet Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman and the rest of the conservative Dem senators have run circles around him.
The only time you hear the WH making strong threats is against liberal Dems and House Dems. I don’t like that.
May I suggest a moratorium on stories from outfits like Politico and The Hill built around unnamed alleged sources? They just give a patina of reliability to junk journalism.
Eventually some long post mortems will be written about the HCR fiasco or success (still don’t know which one it will be) and the story, probably in Vanity Fair or the New Yorker, will heavily source Rahm. Then we should get a few more facts that we’d need to properly decide whether Rahm really is to blame.
What we still don’t know is what carrots and sticks were on the table when Rahm asked for the cloture votes from Nelson, Lieberman and the handful of others who were seriously considering joining a republican filibuster. Even then though, we’re back in the debate of whether Rahm’s a bad guy or just bad at twisting arms. Few people in this world are really qualified to judge the latter, but I think we all know that Nelson and Lieberman are monsters. In the end, I imagine Rahm will go the route that Harry Reid went and claim he was betrayed by Lieberman and Nelson. Still, begs the question though, if that was the case, what did he do about it?
Congress wants to blame the White House in an election year for their failure to pass legislation the White House supports.
Rahm Emmanuel is the designated hit man b/c he has enemies to his left and to his right.
This whole thing is going down b/c Harry Reid didn’t know what he was doing when the President told him to go for a trigger and Snowe’s vote. He went left and got burned. Now, he has a do nothing senate on his hands and he’s burned his bridges with Snowe and Collins (the later who has reacted by going hard at the Administration and democrats on terror issues). This is a failure of progressives and by progressives and it’s stalled the president’s agenda and hurt them going into the 2010 campaign season.
It’s dead simple.
The White House didn’t take progressives to the woodshed or abandon them; in point of fact the White House echoed progressive messaging on health care to this day despite whatever negotiations where going on or what they were willing to give up.
Progressives, however, when they didn’t get anything called a public option took the bill hostage and started attacking it using right wing memes. This drove support down.
Public Option: supported by WH and progressives is popular despite a fervent attack from the right and corporations.
Health care reform: supported only by the administration and attacked by progressives and republicans and interest groups hated on all sides.
It is what it is; but it’s this way b/c of the progressives failure and decision to go become political hostage takers.
As I said in an earlier posting on Rahm Emmanuel, good chiefs of staff manage the Executive Office of the President and are neither seen, heard, or memorable. In the past their job has not been politics or legislative relations. Those always fell to the President, Vice-President and House and Senate leadership of the President’s party. And the cabinet members themselves.
If Rahm is being a designated scapegoat (which I really doubt, but if) he is a scapegoat for the President and the Senate leadership. I hear few Republican complaints about Harry Reid and almost nonstop Republican complaints about Nancy Pelosi. That tells me something.
Noting that W’s chief of staff stayed out of the news and didn’t alienate his base while W’s agenda got passed hardly qualifies as a defense of Rahm Emanuel.
I don’t really have anything positive to say about Rahm. I just don’t hold him responsible for everything that happens or doesn’t happen.
The legendary middle has become the holy grail of American politics. Always pursued, never attained..
Oops, you misspelled “teh.”
These sounds like something Evan Bayh or Lincoln woulde spout. I am curious to what is the legitimate criticism you have seen of Rahm?
My beef on HCR: Not ramming HCR through reconciliation right away like Bush did with tax cuts, allowing Max Baucus/Harry Reid take lead on your number one agenda item, not immediately pushing back on Teabagger lies, and having no plan B whatsoever.
I was encouraged to see Obama show some fight and push back towards GOP’s stalling tactics today in his press conference. We will see if the WH actually backs it up with action. I hope so.
Some legit criticism I’ve heard is that he doesn’t play well with cabinet members, that he’s on the wrong side of internal debates about terrorism policy, and that he let Messina handle Senate strategy on health care past the point where it was obviously not working.
“It’s not a bad thing that Emanuel is taking the heat off his boss.”
As far as ihateobama people who claim to be on the left are concerned, it’s quite the opposite. They use Rahm as a funnel for heat TOWARDS Obama.
Card was right in in line with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and Rove. They worked as a team and they did precisely what they wanted to do, ignoring the constitution, public opinion and common sense. But they did it as a team and it was an amazingly effective team. What we have is what they chose – from the destruction of the middle class right on down the line.
CONVERSELY – Obama ran on a pro-middle class, progressive, pro-constitution platform and then hired a bunch of corporate centrists who have frustrated every element of that platform. Emanuel, Geithner, Summers and Holder have all behaved as if they were part of the Bush Administration, and even if you disagree with that premise, the Administration and the democratic party, as a team, have failed miserably with infinitely more political capital.
I’d like to defend Holder from inclusion in that group. I think he’s been better than advertised.
I’m not sure exactly how to proportion the blame but certainly Rahm (and other top Obama advisers) deserve the ax because the they’ve failed and wasted a year when the Dems should have been walking over a prostrate GOP.
Neither Reid nor Obama can be terminated before their terms expire.
Mistake #1 was abdicating designing the bill(s) to the Congress with seemingly minimal leadership and concrete guidelines. Why not hold the summit of Congressional Democratic leadership 12 months ago to hammer out a basic framework. Then invite the GOP in for a bipartisan photop?
Mistake #2 was not essentially continuing the campaign in order to build popular support for HCR– especially in the states with weak/bought Democratic senators and “moderate” Republicans. (Maine, Virginia, New Jersey, Arkansas and Louisiana come to mind readily.)
Rahm’s failing? Wasn’t he supposed to be the fiercely partisan hatchet guy? Wasn’t he supposed to bring knowledge of the Congressional processes that could be used to pressure recalcitrant Dems? Looks like it’s fail on both counts. Pissing on the base makes the third strike.