BARACK OBAMA HAS APPOINTED Chicago congressman Rahm Emanuel as
his new White House chief of staff. Emanuel, a bruising partisan
street fighter, has the kind of blunt- talking tough-guy persona
that Obama clearly doesn’t possess but would like to call on in his
relations with Congress. Emanuel is also a political brain of the
highest order, having orchestrated much of the machinery with which
Democrats took back the House in 2006. It’s as if Obama had picked
a liberal counterpoint combination of Al D’Amato and Karl Rove to
run his White House.
Emanuel is nothing if not driven. He calls himself a “Vince
Lombardi Democrat,” because he shares with the late Green Bay
Packers coach the belief that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the
only thing.” Emanuel’s life has been a testimony to that
philosophy. He started out as an aide to Tony Coelho, a notoriously
aggressive Democratic House majority whip in the 1980s who
pioneered the kind of squeeze plays on businesses designed to get
them to pony up campaign contributions that are now routine in
politics. Emanuel then became a political advisor to Bill Clinton.
He made his mark by advising then Gov. Clinton in 1991 to forgo
campaigning in New Hampshire and instead embark on an ambitious
national fundraising tour. The tour raised enough funds to bankroll
the Clinton campaign’s ad blitzes necessary to fend off character
attacks later on.
In the Clinton White House, Emanuel was a key communications
advisor and also a strong supporter of the first HillaryCare. But
he really came into his own after leaving the Clinton White House.
Following a brief, but highly lucrative career as an investment
banker in Chicago, he was elected to Congress in 2002 and quickly
rose through the ranks. In 2006, he became chairman of the
Democratic House campaign committee and chief architect of the
party’s campaign strategy that year. He recruited many of the
insurgent challengers who knocked off Republicans with rhetoric
that shied away from the ultra-liberal themes of past Democrats.
Syndicated columnist George Will paid him a supreme compliment
after the 2006 election when he wrote:
The Democratic Party, a slow learner but educable, has dropped
the subject of gun control and welcomed candidates opposed to parts
or even all of the abortion rights agenda. This vindicates the
candidate recruitment by Rep. Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Chuck Schumer,
chairmen of the Democratic House and Senate campaign committees,
respectively. Karl Rove fancies himself a second iteration of Mark
Hanna, architect of the Republican ascendancy secured by William
McKinley’s 1896 election. In Emanuel, Democrats may have found
another Jim Farley, the political mechanic who kept FDR’s
potentially discordant coalition running smoothly through the
1930s.
To make a more recent comparison, the Obama White House is
likely to take on some of the look and feel of the Clinton White
House and the political “war room” that Dick Morris ran in the
mid-1990s. Indeed, Emanuel’s appointment may be an olive branch
extended to the Clinton forces. During the primaries this year,
Emanuel maintained neutrality during the long battle between Obama,
who hails from his own political base of Chicago, and Hillary
Clinton, with whom he has long enjoyed good personal ties.
The longer Obama is a candidate, the more he has seemed to
appreciate the Clinton approach. If this is the “change” Obama has
in mind, voters may be surprised how much it turns out to be an
updated edition of the last Democratic White House.
But it may well take a different approach to the Democratic
Congress than Bill Clinton took. Obama obviously has thought
carefully about mistakes made by previous Democratic presidential
winners who wrongly believed a Congress controlled by their own
party would help make them a success.
POLLSTER DOUG SCHOEN, who helped Bill Clinton win reelection in
1996 in the face of overwhelming odds after the 1994 Democratic
debacle, recently warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:
“If the Democrats govern as if there is no Republican Party, they
are likely headed to the kind of reaction that Bill Clinton faced
when he made the same misjudgment after the 1992 election victory.”
Schoen cited specifically a meeting in Little Rock after the
election with Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and House
Speaker Tom Foley, when Clinton agreed to defer to Congress on key
elements of his legislative agenda. The subsequent lurch to the
left did incalculable damage to his presidency.
That may be one reason why Obama has chosen Emanuel, who has a
reputation for hyper-aggressiveness but has also exhibited
impatience with left-wing members of his party who have overly
ambitious ideological agendas. A likely first assignment for
Emanuel will be reminding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid that, after only two years of Democratic
control, Congress already has a lower approval rating than even
President Bush’s.
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv,
Emanuel’s father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, also gave a hint of how
Obama’s pick may repair strained relations with some Jewish
Americans worried about Obama’s past cozy ties with pro-Palestinian
academics. Dr. Emanuel said he was convinced his son’s appointment
would be good for Israel. “Obviously he will influence the
president to be pro-Israel,” he told Ma’ariv. “Why
wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab?”
To the extent Obama becomes a successful president, it will be
because he remains his own man and trusts the brilliant political
instincts that have gotten him this far, this fast. Look not just
for a presidential weekly radio address but a weekly YouTube video.
Also look for him to use Emanuel to knock heads together and make
sure every Democrat possible is following the Obama agenda and not
one of his or her own devising.
