Ezra Klein: Blame Rahm?

[wyldwolf]

It's a bit weird to see so much blame accruing to Rahm Emanuel for the administration's woes. Emanuel wasn't part of the campaign team. He was brought in to help govern. In that capacity, his primary job was shepherding the administration's agenda through the legislative process. Ugly as that process was, Emanuel -- and more to the point, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi -- did a fairly masterful job at it. In the Senate, Democrats got all 60 of their members to sign onto the same large, controversial bill. That's a legislative achievement unheralded in modern times. Bill Clinton didn't manage it on any bills of this size and scope, and neither did George W. Bush.

Then the game changed, and unexpectedly. Ted Kennedy's death wasn't unpredictable, but the loss of his seat was certainly a surprise. It wasn't, however, a surprise that's easy to track back to Emanuel.

If the administration has failed at anything, it's been holding public support for its bills. But that's not really Emanuel's job. That's where David Axelrod and the rest of the political team come into play. But it's not obvious that much can be done on this front. The best thing that could've happened to health-care reform was that Congress stuck to the timetable that Emanuel and the White House originally set. Once they decided not to do that -- and no Jedi mind tricks from the White House chief of staff were going to dissuade them -- the ugly and endless process was certain to erode support for the bill.

I'm not an Emanuel fan, as it happens. In most of my reporting, he was not particularly pleased with doing a big health-care reform bill in the first place, and at multiple steps along the way, he's argued for scaling it back dramatically. But his personal opinions aside, I'm not sure what else he could've done in shepherding the bill through the process. And if Martha Coakley hadn't insisted on mocking Red Sox fans, health-care reform might well have been signed by now and the White House would've pivoted to a more populist argument about jobs and banks while being able to brag about the largest legislative achievement since Lyndon Johnson.

Bad luck has left them in a very different place than that, and a lot of people want someone to blame. But given the precise contours of Emanuel's job -- keep the White House running smoothly and help craft its strategy with Congress -- I'm not convinced that he's the right guy. What's clearly the case is that his strategy stopped being suited for the circumstances the day Scott Brown won the election. But after a week of readjustment, the White House seems to be doing what it can to take control of the process, and I'd say it's too early to tell whether its new approach will work.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/blame_rahm.html

[Clio the Leo]

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