The Limits of Rahmism

Emanuel, the provocative and profane White House chief of staff, slammed his hand down on the table and shook his head with seething exasperation. He did not yell, according to others in the meeting, but his thoughts were obvious. How had this happened? What the bleep was going on? He ordered calls made to Massachusetts and the Senate Democratic campaign committee to assess the situation. “We’ve got to get up there and take it over,” Emanuel told colleagues. As the election got closer, Emanuel and David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, arranged for President Obama to rush up to Massachusetts for a last-minute campaign trip.

It made no difference. The Republican, Scott Brown, who campaigned by driving a pickup truck around the state, was riding a tide of popular anger that would dramatically end the opening chapter of the Obama presidency. By the time Election Day arrived on Jan. 19, Emanuel tried to prepare the White House senior staff, during its 8:30 a.m. meeting in the Roosevelt Room, for the storm of second-guessing that was about to hit. “I’ve been in a White House before when we lost both the House and the Senate in ’94,” he said, according to notes taken separately by two people in the room. “In about 12 hours, we’re all going to be stupid. Like Axe says, you’re never as smart as they say you are when you win, and you’re not as stupid as they say you are when you lose. We were smart before. Now we’ll be stupid.”

The stupid season has arrived for Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, the unlikely tandem of inspirational leader and legislative mechanic that was supposed to enact the most expansive domestic program since the Great Society. After the debacle in Massachusetts that cost Democrats their supermajority in the Senate, Washington has engaged in a favorite exercise, conducting the autopsy before the body is actually dead. How had it come to this? How did the president’s legislative drive drag on for so long that the surprise loss of a Senate seat could unravel it? Did Obama make a mistake by disregarding his top adviser’s counsel? Or was it Emanuel who failed to execute the president’s strategy? Was it both, or perhaps neither?

As Emanuel put it the morning of the Massachusetts election, the final judgments will depend on the final results. If the president and his chief of staff manage to salvage their ambitious campaign to overhaul health care in the next few weeks — a proposition the White House privately put at 51 percent as the month began, according to an official — then, as Emanuel said, they will be seen as smart all over again. But that 49 percent chance of failure could devastate Obama’s presidency, weaken Democrats heading into the fall midterm elections and trigger an even fiercer, more debilitating round of finger-pointing inside the administration.

The paradox of the current situation for Obama and Emanuel has not been lost on Washington. A visionary outsider who is relatively inexperienced and perhaps even a tad naïve about the ways of Washington captures the White House and, eager to get things done, hires the ultimate get-it-done insider to run his operation. Obama was enough of a student of history to avoid repeating the mistakes of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who came to reform the capital and installed friends from home who did not truly understand it as their top White House aides. But if picking the leading practitioner of the dark arts of the capital was a Faustian bargain for Obama in the name of getting things done, why haven’t things got done?

By the end of his first year, Obama expected to have revamped the nation’s health care system, restructured its energy industry to curb climate change, reined in Wall Street with a new regulatory structure, closed the prison at Guantánamo Bay, signed an arms-control treaty with Russia, begun rapprochement with Iran and jump-started the Middle East peace process. Instead, the president’s approval ratings have fallen by more than 20 percentage points, unemployment remains higher than even the worst initial White House forecasts and much of the president’s agenda is stalled. Most significant, the fate of Obama’s signature health care initiative is uncertain. “What looked like it was going to be a huge achievement for 2009 became a huge challenge for 2010,” Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director under Obama, told me. “Obviously, the landscape looks a lot different heading into the second year.”

If Emanuel’s philosophy is to put points on the board, to take what you can get and then cut a deal, to make everything negotiable except success, then the White House is testing the limits of Rahmism. For 14 months, the president has struggled with the balance between that pragmatism and the idealism of his campaign. At times, he disregarded Emanuel’s advice to scale back his goals, particularly on health care. At others, he has sacrificed campaign positions in hopes of achieving a compromise. “There’s a constant tension between the need to get things done within the system as it is and the commitment to change the system,” Axelrod told me last month. “Finding that line at any given moment is really, really difficult.”