American Patrol

Happy news for Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel yesterday in the form of a Washington Post article (one of a series of recent hagiographies) offering the theory that if only the President listened more to this “force of political reason,” he’d be having an easier time of it politically. Emanuel, it is said, is largely ignored in favor of cultish Obamaists like Jarrett and Axelrod, but nonetheless bravely catches flak for the White House as a whole.

Heady stuff, to be sure, though Emanuel himself is said to be embarrassed by the attention (gosh, all that and humble too) and trying to avoid escalating internal conflicts. Sad, then, that I have to point out that these attempts to cast Emanuel not as a problem but as an unheeded solution come off as fairly typical products of Beltway mainstream media, larded with such choice cuts from the centrism’s greatest hits collection such as “going for the perfect at the expense of the plausible,” utterly dismissive of Progressives and the progressive agenda, and possessed of a fairly high horse shit content.

For starters, exactly what Obama initiative thus far introduced to Congress has constituted “the perfect”? The diluted stimulus package? The health care reform package that omitted even the slightest mention of the benefits of a single payer plan? In truth, just about everything that has made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to the hill seems to have been designed with an eye towards politics over policy, a distinction made in the Post yesterday by Ezra Klein as a handy means of introducing a bit of reality into the discussion, and has seemed to have Emanuel's fingerprints all over it.

Klein doesn't quite take it far enough, however. While Klein points out that health care reform would have passed long since were it not for the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, he fails to point out the degree to which that election exemplified ineptitude in the White House political operation-- Emanuel's bailiwick and supposed area of expertise.

While Emanuel was brought into the Administration as an experienced political hand with a unique understanding of Congress, his experience consists of time among the madly triangulating Vichy Democrats of the Clinton White House and his years as a northern Blue Dog in the House. Thus it is completely lost on him that a rather large portion of the decline in Obama's political capital has occurred not on the right, where Emanuel's political operation has been aiming its pitches, but on the left, among the people the Chief of Staff has characterized as "fucking retards." Emanuel is of a generation of Democrats who came of age in the Reagan/Bush hegemony and has been trained, Pavlov-style, to bark wildly at liberals and to assume the position and pucker up whenever a bell goes off in the conservative echo chamber. In this way, Obama's supposed pit bull has shown himself to be a very good doggie indeed, and this latest collection of media biscuits proves the point nicely.