Feb 22 2010

For Your Consideration: Is Rahm on His Way Out?

Dana Milbank penned an op-ed piece in the Washington Post lavishing praise on President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. He argues that Obama needs Rahm at the top

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.

snip

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.

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Is this the sign that Rahm is out the door? Bashing other Obama insiders through Milbank is an interesting sign that he may be, according to Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks in his analysis at Huffington Post


As I was reading the article lavishing praise on Rahm Emanuel and throwing dirt on everyone else inside the White House, I kept thinking two things. First, how many leaks has Rahm given Milbank over the years? How much do they love each other? Milbank gets a cherished inside source so he can seem like he’s got the scoop on what’s happening in DC and Rahm gets a hatchet man that’ll write whatever he tells him to, I mean whatever he leaks to him as “important inside information.”

My second thought was, “Wow, what a hatchet job on Jarrett, Gibbs and Axelrod!” Since Rahm is obviously feeding this to Milbank, that is very revealing. You don’t throw these kinds of bombs unless you’ve already lost. This is an act of desperation. It’s bound to make mortal enemies of these people inside Obama’s inner circle. You can’t really work with these people anymore. That means you’re already finished there.

Prescience?

h/t Robert Cruickshank from a Tweet

Please god let this be true. I’ll pop open a bottle of champagne if Cenk is right and “Rahm is done.”

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    • TMC on February 22, 2010 at 14:45
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    for the number of doors that hit Rahm in the ass on his way to the exit. I’ll buy the champagne.

    • Edger on February 22, 2010 at 15:58
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    Andy Kroll wrote in The Washington Influence Machine:

    At the end of this summer of discontent, of death panels and unplugging poor Grandma, of birthers and astroturfers and rifle-toting picketers, the halcyon early days of the Obama administration feel increasingly like hazy, gilt-edged memories. The president’s sprawling legislative agenda — a health-care overhaul, financial regulation reform, slashing wasteful military spending, and climate change legislation legislation — is slowly grinding its way through the halls of Congress. Barack Obama’s sheen, his administration’s unflagging confidence, and all the bipartisan, post-racial aspirations have been replaced by the hard realities of Washington politicking. And with the media’s lens more tightly focused than ever on Washington’s every move and utterance 24/7, anything said a few months back feels like a lifetime ago.

    One particular statement from distant April, however, bears revisiting. The president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, then grasped not only the magnitude of what was being undertaken, but the raft of entrenched interests lining up in opposition. As he told the New York Times:

    “We’re not taking on a fight; we’re taking on a multiple-front fight because we’ve taken on a series of entrenched interests across the waterfront — from education to health care, and the defense industry, and the lobbying industry as a whole… There will be a scorecard at the end of which ones we won and which ones we didn’t, but every one of those policy challenges have been initiated by us.”

    Never short on chutzpah, Emanuel made it clear: it was Us vs. Them in a “multiple-front fight.” A “scorecard at the end” would determine winners and losers.

  3. at nakedcapitalism today:

    www.http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/…

    I pinged a Capitol Hill insider for his reaction (to Milbank’s piece on Rahm) and got this:

    “My guess is that this is Rahm’s exit memo. Rahm’s method is self-promotion through people like Dana Milbank. He’s like an executive going down with the ship using the press to shift the blame to everyone but himself.”

    Interesting comments from Yves.

    I choose not to get started on comments from Elsewhere…..(shakes head in disgust)

  4. if Obama turfs Rahm before November.

    After November, I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t.

  5. were talking about them “taking out” Obama himself in yet another people unifying false flag event.  I just rolled my eyes and thought, what is this Newsmax now.

    Psychically speaking Rahm registers as a very solid douchebag, even less “honorable” than either John Yoo, Aleberto Gonzales or Leo Strauss.  Well, if you can call pure evil “honorable”.

    • Arctor on February 23, 2010 at 03:38
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    Because the thing Rahm and Dick have in common is that they each were/are the true President. Bush and Obama are both lightweight puppets. Emmanuel and his sidekick Axelrod chose Obama and made him President and then selected Rahm as his Chief of Staff the same way Cheney decided he would make a good Veep! If you are waiting for the champagne cork to pop, it goes flat in eight years. You want Rahm out? Primary Obama in 2012!

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