Rahm is now officially gone. In his place, is Pete Rouse.
Intensely private, Mr. Rouse is unmarried and lives alone in northwest Washington with his two cats. (He is a big cat person, friends say.) He is not given to socializing; when Mr. Daschle hosted a huge staff reunion just before he left the Senate, Mr. Rouse did not show. He is also a huge music buff; in 2008, he persuaded the surviving members of the Grateful Dead to reunite and campaign for Mr. Obama.
I saw the Dead play at Penn State that year. I didn’t know I had Mr. Rouse to thank for that. Sounds like he won’t be nearly as enthusiastic as Rahm was in the “punching hippies” department. Apparently, he is a hippie himself.
Also, too:
When Republicans rose up against the appointment of Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, to oversee a new consumer protection agency, Mr. Rouse helped devise a strategy that ended with the president appointing Ms. Warren as a top-level adviser — a position that needed no Senate confirmation.
Not that the guy isn’t an insider. When he worked for Majority Leader Tom Daschle, he was known as the 101st Senator. I doubt Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Joe Miller, or Marco Rubio will give much of a shit about that, however. Nor will Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn. I don’t care who you appoint as chief of staff, the Senate Republicans aren’t going to cooperate with this administration. They used to work with Obama. Now they stand silent while their base questions his religion and citizenship.
Personally, I never liked Rahm Emanuel. I thought he did an excellent job as head of the DCCC in winning back Congress. But many of the details infuriated me. He took a lot of the credit that should have been shared with Howard Dean, and he never respected Dean’s contribution to the party’s resurgence. I didn’t support Dean in the 2004 primaries, but I admired his work and the organization he put together, and I credit him with putting life back in a party that was totally on its back.
Emanuel’s record as chief of staff still needs time to properly evaluate. He was a strong advocate for getting out of Afghanistan, for example, which is something no one but Bob Woodward seems to want to give him credit for. On the other hand, he seemed too willing to go for the lowest common denominator, which Pete Rouse does not seem inclined to do. At least, not if this July 11, 2008 interview with Frontline can be believed:
FRONTLINE: The Harvard [Law Review] experience: … We’ve talked to [members of the conservative Federalist Society] that were there at the same time and were very supportive of him because he had this bipartisan attitude about how to get things done. Can you see that in the way he operates?
ROUSE: Yes, definitely. … I believe that his rhetoric or his pitch about working together to solve big problems and building consensus, that’s how he thinks; that’s what he’s always done. It goes back to his days as a community organizer. That’s what he brought to the Senate; that’s what he brings to the White House.
But that doesn’t mean — and I don’t want to be disparaging here, but criticism of the DLC [the centrist Democratic Leadership Council] is find the lowest common denominator and pass it. That’s not what he’s talking about here. I think he’s talking about moving forward with a progressive agenda. Clearly it’s not going to be 100 percent of what you want, but we can do better. And we can get 65 to 70 percent, 75 percent, whatever it is, if we work together and are honest about it and, obviously, build popular support for it.
And maybe this is part of going back to the previous comment about the traditional black leadership. It’s a different approach to trying to make progress and move forward. It’s not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, but it’s different. And when something’s different, not what people expect, sometimes you get skepticism or resistance. …
FRONTLINE: Bottom line is it’s putting the ball forward. It’s moving ahead.
ROUSE: Moving forward. And the question is, where? Because I think you have to have a bottom line. And if you say health [care] reform or education reform or FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], whatever the case may be, I think going in you have to know what your bottom line is, and you’re not going below your bottom line. …
FRONTLINE:… One of the big issues that [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.] brought up … about Obama as senator is that he had a problem, as you know, with the immigration bill. … What happened from the point of view of Obama there, and your reaction to Lindsey Graham’s problems with the way Obama reacted?
ROUSE: Ironically, Lindsey Graham was one of the people that he worked pretty well with the first two years, and that changed afterward. So I think some of this has to be on Lindsey Graham for his supporting McCain and his politics on this.
I don’t remember all the details about this, but I think this is exactly what we’re talking about. Immigration reform is a tough issue. You have to have a bottom line for what you can accept and what you can’t accept. You’ve got to look down the road and see where this is headed.
We don’t think what we were asking for was unreasonable. We were still in line with Sen. [Ted] Kennedy [D-Mass.]; he was, after all, the principal sponsor with this. We were talking to him all the time. And I hardly think that it’s fair to lay the collapse of immigration reform on Barack Obama, freshman senator, playing politics on it. I think this is just generally politics. …
FRONTLINE: So the direction that Obama wanted it to go, the reasons that he made the decisions he made on immigration are what?
ROUSE: I think, again, the decisions he made were based on his views of what is acceptable immigration reform and what’s doable. And again, I would go back to the comment I made about the DLC, just using them as an example. We’re not looking for the lowest common denominator just to pass something. We’re looking to pass something that may not be the bill we would write if we were sitting alone in the Harvard library writing it, but it’s one that we think significantly moves the ball forward. It’s not just passing it to pass it. You’re passing it because it’s making things better.
For my money, the president would have been better served by having Rouse as his chief of staff from the get-go. But, we’ll see if there is any discernible difference in the administration’s performance now that Rahm has gone off to Chicago. On the big issues, it is still Senate arithmetic that drives the decision making, and the rest is just fiddling at the margins. I hope, however, that things will improve with a man like Rouse in there. Maybe the Grateful Dead agree with me.
Mr. Rouse sounds like a great hire. I think you are right about the whole “punching hippies” bit. Being all over the Sunday bobblehead shows doesn’t seem to appeal to him. That’s good. He seems right up the “No Drama” Obama alley of the campaign.
As Brad DeLong is fond of repeating, “the Kossacks work for the Czar”. Rouse works for Obama, just as Emmanuel worked for Obama. One thing they have in common is Obama recruited them both—heavily. After Daschle lost in 2004, Rouse was ready to leave Capitol Hill, was reluctant even to talk with Obama, and reportedly it took several conversations for Obama to persuade him to work for the most junior senator in Congress. Emmanuel wanted to be Speaker of the House. Again, Obama went after him and persuaded him to leave Congress and work in the White House (again).
Obama’s good at recruiting and surrounding himself with talented people. (Now if only Rouse can help him move faster on appointments….)
I think it’s good that the White House is experiencing some high-level staff turnover, and not because I particularly disliked the job Rahm or Summers or anyone else was doing. Rather, we’re entering a new period of the Obama era and new strategies are needed. If, as now seems likely, Democrats lose one or both of their Congressional majorities, or at best hold onto slim leads, then the period of major legislative change we’ve been experiencing is over, until 2012 at least. Instead, we’re going to be fighting a rearguard action against the newly-elected and fired up GOP crazies; trying to hold onto the legislative and administrative gains we’ve made since Jan. 2009; keeping the economy, foreign policy, social issues inching in the right direction; maintaining the Democratic coalition; and preventing the Tea Party insanity from tearing our country apart. I think we can do this. But as interesting as it is to learn about Rouse’s background, style, and maybe even hippie leanings, I think progressives will be best served if our commentators of choice try to use Rouse’s appointment to shed light on some new political moves our side is going to have to employ in order to be successful over the next 2 years. And what, in fact, success will look like if we achieve it.
Now is the time to gird our loins and prepare for the very difficult, but winnable battles up ahead. Sorry if that comes off as too aggro, but it will be important to keep our fighting spirits up, to veer away from the despair that may hit hard after Nov. 2.
The Obama team is slowly becoming the Obama team and less the Clinton team. The same thing happens in most administrations; there is a reliance on appointees from the last administration of the same party in order to get oriented to how stuff works. In two years there is a shift. Carter couldn’t do this very well because the previous guy was LBJ and that was seen as a failed presidency; he had to bring his Georgia team in with him. They had to learn on the job and it is amazing that they did as well as they did in foreign affairs.
Yes, Rouse probably understood more about being a chief of staff than Rahm did. There undoubtedly was some deference to the Clintons in his appointment but that is not the entire story. My guess is that Obama wanted Rahm out of the House and this was the best way to do it. Imagine the House debates with Rahm in the caucus.
Obama seems to be a “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” sort of guy. And it is very hard in this confused political situation to tell who is who. Ray LaHood has turned out to be a friend. I think that Gates comported himself as a friend. Judd Gregg decided that he was an enemy after all.
I think that most folks think that Rouse is very good news.
I think the most important reason that Emanuel was picked for CoS is that the is a very close personal friend of the president. That he had prior experience in the WH was obviously important, as was his close personal connection to dozens of House members he helped recruit and get elected. But I don’t for a moment think he was picked to marginalize him or get him out of the House.
Just to elaborate on this point. Obama, when organizing in the 1980s, would have had drilled into him by his mentors the importance of identifying and developing talented leaders, and the further importance of building a “charismatic collective of leaders”—as opposed to searching for an individual charismatic leader.
Obama has consistently done this—when he recruited his Senate staff, when he put together his presidential campaign staff, when he assembled his cabinet, when he chose his White House staff.
You can disagree with individual decisions (e.g., would it have been better to leave Napolitano and Sebelius as governors than pull them into the cabinet?), but it’s hard to argue with the overall results.
Check. It was also a big deal that Rahm, despite his long-time close association with the Clintons, declined to endorse Hillary (and gave no endorsement ultimately, iirc) in the primaries. That was a fair-sized positive no-endorsement situation for Obama at the time, and it may have provided additional cover for other former Clinton people to not endorse her.
I’m also inclined to give Rouse the benefit of the doubt at the outset, as I too am glad Rahm is departing the scene.
I just wish Gates would decide to go sooner too.
I want Gates to stay long enough to help get DADT repealed (hopefully by the end of the year).
The Daschle link is enough to already damn Rouse to the seventh circle of Shillitude, at least as per Democratic Underground, where it’s still Dean, or nobody.
More face slapping, as per usual.
The sheer level of venom levelled at Emmanuel has always surprised me. It’s like there never was another politician before.
Advisers advise, presidents decide. People tend to forget that, and look for a scapegoat with an adviser — happens all the time with excuse-seeking LBJ revisionists on some of these boards who want to blame the evil McNamara — who takes on an inordinate amount of power and influence in their minds.
In the end, while Rahm was very important, it’s not as if a passive Obama was taking his advice on every major issue, and apparently at times the guy had the right instincts (Afghanistan). Credit him for that, if not for some of the other advice early on.
Rouse’s connection to Daschle doesn’t exactly make me want to stand up and cheer, but I suspect he’ll be less inclined to unnecessarily make waves with the base and otherwise seek the press limelight.
That’s the way that it is supposed to work, but the chief of staff is more than an adviser. The chief of staff is the administrator/manager of the entire Executive Office of the President which is what, 1000 people.
Unlike the better chiefs of staff, Rahm’s role became too public and he did not delegate some critical tasks that could have been better handled by someone else. Andrew Card did not attend Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meetings and try to drive support for a preset agenda; Rahm apparently did. And whether it was Rahm or Gibbs or someone else in the White House who thought they could co-opt the Republicans at Politico, they failed at some very critical times. These are failures of management and failure to delegate properly. And they are at the detailed level that the President should not have been involved in them.
My imaginer ain’t working. How would Rahm being in the House Dem caucus have impacted Obama’s plans? There are already aggressive members like Grayson and Stark, and plenty of RINOs, which Rahm is not. So what would Obama have wanted to head off?
This is a good change. I do wish Obamam would get a new Sec. of State.
The State Department is giving a 10 billion dollar contract to Blackwater/Xe.
Blackwater has slipped in under another company. The story is on Wired.com.
This makes me feel sick at my stomach.
There has to be a way to reduce and then remove private contractors from protection et. with the State Department and the military.
The Afghanistan review is in December, I hope we get out of there.
Sorry for OT, but it is disturbing.
Extremely disturbing, especially in light of Hillary’s promise not to hire Blackwater again. However, the Wired story isn’t clear about the amount that would go to Blackwater.
The underlying issue is, there should be no mercenaries working for the US government anywhere, for any reason. If we have to have armed thugs, at least they should be our armed thugs, not some corporate mercenaries whose impunity is not balanced with responsibility as government agents. How Constitutional scholar Obama can allow this is beyond me. Oops, there goes that enthusiasm gap again.
The Wired story is here.
I realized that I had the money amount wrong after I posted.
There was a contractor abuse issue left over from Bush and I don’t know what happened. I read about it and then heard nothing again. The State Department was letting a whistleblower twist in the wind.
The White House doesn’t usually interfere with State, but perhaps it will now.
The question about Iraq is interesting. It looks like Al Malaki is in and he doesn’t want Blackwater in the country at all.
Is it possible to get US Marines to protect State in Afghanistan?
So was this before or after Tuskegee?
AA never forgot the scandal of the Tuskegee experiments, so is it any wonder that they would believe that he “government infected people with AIDS” conspiracy. It’s hard to trust your government when they literally decided to treat your people as lab rats and cattle for the better part of 200 years
And yet people were shocked, I tell ya shocked about Rev Wright and the dumb AIDS meme. Of course it’s crazy to still believe it, but try to tell someone who vividly remembers a time when the government was aiding and abetting the klan and the like in terrorizing people, and you can kinda understand the paranoia a little bit.
Add this story to that, and can understand the paranoia even more.
OOOPs!! sorry, wrong thread!!!!
“Hippie Punching”. Please. Black folks have a saying too, “Don’t start no shit won’t be none.” Hippies, liberals, progressives, whatever seem to be under the delusion that Barack Obama studied politics at the “turn the other cheek” school of government. If you don’t want to get punched, stop swinging at him. Why shouldn’t he and his administration defend themselves against your attacks? You should feel fortunate he can’t say what he really wants to say and what Black folks are saying on his behalf. You all talk a lot of shit because you know with a segregated media you can get away with it. If only you all would bring your criticisms of the President to one of our forums.
This.