Rahm: The Man, The Myth, The Failure?
March 9, 2010 by Zac Townsend
Filed under For Your Reading
There has been a lot of talk recently about Obama’s inner circle and its effectiveness. Particularly in the news recently has been Rahm Emanuel. The discussions began months ago, but I’d begin with Dana Milbank’s column, where he argued that the problem in the White House isn’t Rahm, but that the President doesn’t listen to him. He begins by pointing to other articles that serve as a good preface to this discussion:
It is the current fashion to blame President Obama’s disappointing first year on his chief of staff. “First, remove Rahm Emanuel,” writes Leslie Gelb in the Daily Beast, because he lacks “the management skills and discipline to run the White House.”
The Financial Times’s Ed Luce reports that the “famously irascible” Emanuel has “alienated many of Mr. Obama’s closest outside supporters,” while the New America Foundation’s Steve Clemons lumps Emanuel in with the “Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama Presidency.”
They join liberal interests who despised Emanuel long before he branded them “retarded.” Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com, together with conservative activist Grover Norquist, demanded a Justice Department investigation into Emanuel, who is “far too compromised to serve as gatekeeper to the president.”
His argument in the end is, however, that
“Obama’s first year fell apart in large part because he didn’t follow his chief of staff’s advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter.”
This was followed up by a new story from the Washington Post by Jason Horowitz, which had as its thrust that Rahm is doing an alright job. Then David Broder, the so-called dean of the Washington press corps, attacked his own paper’s reporting and Dana, which is surprising, as you wouldn’t expect “the Post’s marquee political writer of the past 40 years [to] beat up on the Post.”
