The Bush nostalgia of Rahm and the Beltway

The Washington script was re-written to feign disgust with Bush while still yearning for his core policies

Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
Feb. 21, 2010

When President Obama's approval ratings were still very high, we were regularly bombarded with sycophantic profiles of Rahm Emanuel that touted his vast power in the West Wing ("arguably the second most powerful man in the country," the New York Times declared last January; "perhaps the most influential White House chief of staff in a generation" with "prominence in almost everything important going on in Washington," gushed the same paper last August). But now that Obama faces serious political difficulties, and the health care debacle and his confused Terrorism approach continue to weigh him down, we are treated to the exact opposite storyline: Obama's woes are caused by his following the advice of others rather than that of his poor, ignored, powerless Chief of Staff. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank dutifully read from this Rahm-protecting (and Rahm-authored) script in his column yesterday [page down], and in doing so, voices (as he always does) conventional Beltway wisdom masquerading as quirky contrarianism:

Let us now praise Rahm Emanuel. . . . Obama's first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters. . . .

The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel's counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig's effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn't politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn't met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder's plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

The same person hailed in the NYT last August as "the principal author of Mr. Obama’s do-everything-at-once strategy" has now been transformed in Milbank's column to someone who has been unsuccessfully urging Obama to pursue a less ambitious course and a less sweeping (and "liberal") health care policy. Emanuel has also been making it known that he vehemently opposed Obama's release of the OLC torture memos, arguing that the administration should have kept them suppressed. In other words, according to Milbank's Beltway mind, Obama's failure is that he should follow Rahm's instructions to embrace Bush's defining policies (Guantanamo, military commissions, lawbreaking-shielding secrecy) even more so than Obama has already been doing.

(More here.)