Peter W. Fulham, Columnist
Ideology: Democrat |Writing From: Wellesley, Massachusetts
When the news arrived in 2008 that President-elect Barack Obama had named Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff, the sense of renewal that accompanied his victory speech in Chicago began to erode. It was a subtle shift, but it was present nonetheless. Perhaps voters found it hard to reconcile that the same candidate who pledged to “change the way we do business in Washington” had employed as his number-two man a quintessential Washington pit bull, remembered primarily for once demanding point-blank to Tony Blair before a pro-Clinton speech, “Don’t f*** this up.”
If this come-down didn’t happen immediately, the tipping point may have occurred one night during a Washington cocktail party, during which Mr. Emanuel reportedly commented on the obstacles the new administration faced, confiding to a journalist, “All that we’re going to be able to affect at the beginning are the optics of things.”
After two years of campaigning and eight years of disastrous Bush Administration foreign and domestic policies, all we were going to see “at the beginning” was a change in “the optics”? It seemed, not for the last time, that Mr. Emanuel failed to interpret the mood of the country, let alone his responsibility in the Obama Administration.
All politicians who make it to the Oval Office eventually bear some tint of the cutthroat side of Washington. But few presidents have embraced it as wholeheartedly – and with such blatant 
contradiction to their public gospel – as Mr. Obama. If you needed a reminder that Team Emanuel was willing to toss anybody under the bus for the sake of political points, you only had to watch the sly kick-to-the-curb the administration gave to White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig. Mr. Craig, who was called in to help resolve the calamity at Guantanamo Bay, was ousted in a series of leaks after the president failed to summon enough Congressional support to close the prison before a January deadline.
This kind of scapegoating – most of which was orchestrated by Mr. Emanuel, according to the estimation of NPR’s Nina Totenberg – was common during the Bush years. (Remember Joe Wilson?) But it is not what any reasonable person expected from the president who offered us “a new kind of politics.”
Then again, Mr. Emanuel is calling many of the shots in the White House, and a careful examination of his record lends important insights into what we should expect from him in the future. Mr. Emanuel was an Illinois congressman from 2003 until he became White House Chief of Staff in 2009. In 2000, President Clinton appointed him to the board of directors of Freddie Mac – the long-since bailed out mortgage giant – where he earned $320,000, including stock sales. He then proceeded to pocket $16.2 million during a two-and-a-half year stint at the Chicago investment bank Wasserstein Perella.
The revolving door between Wall Street and the White House apparently never stops spinning, but, even in these times, this kind of proximity should raise serious questions. What did Mr. Emanuel know of Freddie Mac’s risk exposure to sub-prime mortgages during his tenure on its board? And how did any of this knowledge inform any of the President’s decisions during the financial crisis of 2008?
The real problem with Rahm Emanuel is not his razor-sharp personality, not even his unapologetic partisanship. (After the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1996, he famously grabbed a steak knife and began announcing each of the party’s betrayers as “Dead!” – plunging the knife into the table after every name.)
Rahm Emanuel’s problem is that he assumes each mission this administration faces can be accomplished with a tactical solution – a mentality that if he makes enough phone calls and rattles off enough threats, the country will start crossing a hopeful bridge into the new decade. Mr. Emanuel, indeed, is a famous dealmaker. He helped orchestrate the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006. And – to be fair – he has cast off some of his earlier partisanship in favor of courting Republicans. But he is too much of a tactician to find a happy marriage between his own brand of bare-knuckles politics and Mr. Obama’s soaring oratory.
As the Americans who voted for him certainly know, President Obama had a chance to change more than just “the optics” during his first months in office. And, to be sure, he is on the brink of signing into law a sweeping and much-needed health care reform bill. But when faced with many other serious issues – from genocide in Darfur, to detainment of offshore prisoners, to gun control, to gay rights – he has offered merely the same kind of equivocation Americans have come to expect when their president faces a tough political question.
The health care bill is probably going to pass, and it will be a tremendous accomplishment for the Obama Administration and for the country. One has to wonder, however, if we would find ourselves looking at a much more comprehensive bill – with, perhaps, a strong public option – had the president not failed (and that, really, is the only word for it) to frame the American health care crisis with the kind of searing moral language it demanded.
It is often easy to forget that the president’s political deftness – especially during the campaign – was as much a product of his own skills as it was the highly specialized advice of his advisers, namely David Axelrod. But the political calculation that served Mr. Obama well during his campaign has not translated to his role as president – nor should it. Immediately after the Christmas Day terrorist attempt over Detroit, the president should have returned to Washington. Instead, he stayed in Hawaii and gave a press conference, three days late, acknowledging the obvious: “This was a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature of those who threaten our homeland.”
One year after the Obama Administration promised to usher in a “new kind of politics”, the Democrats are now under siege from all sides – from a disenchanted base as well as from Republicans who see an opportunity to peel away at their majorities in the House and the Senate this year. In 2010, Democrats might finally understand just how “new” the politics of Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama truly are.