Senior adviser David Axelrod (left) says he can see reporters and pundits trying to detect tension between himself and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
“Don’t get absorbed in the Washington finger-pointing and intrigue,” the president told his senior advisers during a recent meeting, according to one top aide.
He “certainly let us know that we should keep our eye on the ball here and not get distracted by the games of Washington,” the aide said.
The season of turmoil, which has erupted just as Obama is pushing for final health care votes that could determine his domestic legacy, is the most vivid example of how the discipline of the campaign — which prided itself on a tight-knit culture and aides who stayed aloof from the who’s-up, who’s-down obsessions of the press and the Washington political class — has frayed under stress.
“This is what Washington does — it gets itself into a tizzy,” White House senior adviser David Axelrod said, adding that the president’s team is determined to “stay tight.” “We dismiss it for what it is. There aren’t 10 people outside of Washington who give a rat’s ass about any of this. They’ve got bigger stuff to worry about, and we’re trying to worry about that. The same people who are all in a tizzy right now are the same people who called us idiots for the better part of two years.”
Yet for all their brio, Obama’s team has been proven just as susceptible to Washington’s favorite parlor games as anyone, in a way that’s caused more tension and drama inside the White House than any particular policy or political differences.
The reason these questions have exerted such a powerful effect on the Obama story line is that much of the outside critique is grounded at least partly in reality.
Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel gets criticized for biting off more than he can chew. And in fact, he manages political, policy and congressional portfolios that compete for his attention. Axelrod gets criticized for being so close to Obama for so long that he sometimes fails to appreciate and anticipate when the president's approach isn't resonating. And in fact, the message, which Axelrod often crafts, has been badly muddled at key points, primarily on health reform.
After the president’s historic win in 2008, his close aides might have been forgiven for thinking that the usual rules of politics didn’t apply to them — that they could rise above the Washington ways merely by saying they would. But upon taking office, they, too, quickly lapsed into old Washington habits, with several senior staffers sitting for flattering profiles and photo shoots that made them star players in Obama’s world.
And as the waters have grown choppy, some of the key players have taken to defending their actions in the press — which also contributes to a sense that Obama’s White House is getting pulled into the minute-by-minute tit-for-tat it swore to avoid.
Axelrod, a Chicago Tribune reporter for 10 years, said he can see reporters and pundits trying to detect tension between himself and Emanuel, which he maintains is nonexistent.
“Everybody’s on the same page,” Axelrod said in a telephone interview. “We’re determined not to allow ourselves to be distracted, but, rather, to do what we’re there to do. I probably spend three or four hours a day talking to Rahm. I talked to him this afternoon. There’s no back-channeling — we discuss openly our cut on things. And the truth is that 80 percent of the time, it’s the same. The best thing to do in any organization is to be open with each other.”
Yet even as he said he wouldn’t be distracted by the chatter, there was Axelrod, defending his performance in a front-page New York Times profile Sunday. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs defended the message man, telling POLITICO, “He’s not weary or defeated; he works hard to make sure that we are true to Obama and the commitments he made to the American people.”
Emanuel is philosophical about the coverage, according to a person familiar with his thinking, taking comfort in the strafing that James A. Baker III endured after a year as chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan, only to serve three more years and go on to run State and Treasury.
Emanuel has been singled out for praise in the press, but that led to criticism elsewhere that his allies were burnishing his image at the expense of his boss’s.
Emanuel also came up in Sunday’s Times’ profile of Axelrod, which gave Axelrod a chance to defend his relationship with the chief of staff.
“I love the people I work with, including Rahm,” Axelrod said in the phone interview. “I come to work every day, and I’m happy to see the people I work with. There’s a sense of collegiality, a sense of common purpose and a sense of commitment that I appreciate.”
Axelrod said Mark Leibovich’s article could leave the impression he was tired and had soured on Washington.
“You talk to anybody in the White House, [and] they would tell you I’m a pretty calm, consistent influence,” Axelrod said. “I’m not down. I’m the guy who’s always kind of making jokes and keeping people loose. I don’t loathe Washington, but I do loathe the pathology of Washington. There are a lot of good people in Washington. And a lot of them are my colleagues in the White House, who I’m proud of.”
And it’s not over: The New York Times magazine has an Emanuel profile by Peter Baker scheduled for publication soon. Emanuel and his brother Zeke, a health-care expert with the White House Office of Management and Budget, sat for an interview by CBS’s Katie Couric that’s scheduled to air on “60 Minutes” on March 21.
A West Wing colleague says Emanuel is “unhappy” about the coverage but “understands the town” and takes the scrutiny as unavoidable when you’re chief of staff and the White House is going through a rocky period.
“Rahm’s resilient,” the colleague said. “He’s tough. He shared the point of view that these are unnecessary distractions, and they’re disruptive. The way we deal with these things is we talk them through. Rahm told us in January [after the Massachusetts Senate election] that there were going to be efforts to divide us and that we needed to hang together.”
Another friend said Emanuel realizes he is “overexposed” and is keeping a lower profile.
A top administration official said the positive stories were not encouraged by Emanuel’s office but instead were fed by allies on Capitol Hill and throughout the government.
“Those people are really loyal, and they stick up for him,” the official said. “But I think they’re doing too good a job. They should tone it down a little bit.”
One reason the coverage has provoked so much angst in the White House is that aides know a shake-up will come eventually, and some think the Massachusetts debacle may have hastened it — or should have.
“Until Massachusetts, they thought the insularity was OK, because they could run as, ‘We’re not Washington,” said one Democratic official who works daily with the West Wing.
Friends fret that Emanuel, like the White House he runs, is overextended. He takes a very hands-on approach to legislative and political strategy, while also working the press, the Hill and K Street and appearing regularly at social events and restaurants around town. He works out at the House gym twice a week to keep up his contacts.
“Rahm was born for this job, but he’s spread too thin,” said a longtime colleague. “He possesses it all, but no one person can do what he’s trying to do.”
The articles are correct that Emanuel has been counseling a more modest course on health reform for many months. Friends say he continues to believe a much smaller bill could get broad bipartisan support if the last-ditch effort at a comprehensive package collapses.
But Emanuel bears partial responsibility for the administration’s overgrown agenda. He was an architect of the “big bang” theory of using Year One to pursue ambitious legislation on health care, energy and climate, and financial-regulatory reform.
A Democratic official recalls that when Emanuel was pushing for the text of a financial reregulation proposal during Obama’s first month in office, a harried underling objected that the draft bill could run 1,000 pages.
“Start typing,” Emanuel replied.
A Capitol Hill official who frequently receives the trademark staccato calls from Emanuel’s cell phone said that nobody in Washington “knows how to move information better than he does.”
“He offers up one nugget, and he gets two or three bits back,” the official said. “So basically you’re playing a high-stakes poker game. How many times do you pick up the phone at 7 in the morning, and it’s him? It’s everybody: operatives, reporters, members, friends around the country.”
The official said Emanuel has subtly cultivated a mythology that has made him even more effective.
“He likes people to believe that going up against him results in severe consequences,” the official said. “It’s why he spends so much time cultivating reporters — and the same with members, and K Street: If he’s valuable to you, it makes it harder for you to say something contrary.”
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