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.
