Less than a week after Barack Obama's 2008 victory, when Wall Street and General Motors were still teetering on the precipice, the president-elect's anointed gatekeeper set the administration up for a fall.
"Rule 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste," declared Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's chief of staff. "They are opportunities to do big things."
Sweeping change, fed by the campaign narrative of Mr. Obama as a transformational figure worthy of Lincoln, became the incoming administration's unofficial tagline. Expectations were suitably sized.
The irony is that within the Oval Office, Mr. Emanuel was telling his boss that change goes down best in digestible bites. Members of Congress, like most Americans, recoil at the prospect of legislative upheaval. Earn their trust first with small but meaningful steps, Mr. Emanuel argued.
The tension within the West Wing, with Mr. Emanuel pushing against the overly ambitious agenda of the President and the rest of his inner circle, was supposed to be salutary. Instead, it has produced 14 months of starts and stops. Rather than deftly seizing on the economic crisis they inherited to shape their boss's legacy, Mr. Obama's team have engulfed him in an existential crisis of their own making.
Liberal Democrats blame it all on Mr. Emanuel, a kind of Machiavellian mercenary more preoccupied with the minutiae of building congressional coalitions than with making capital-H history. His defenders counter that the wiry, expletive-happy 50-year-old is all that's preventing Mr. Obama from becoming a Democratic one-term wonder.
The head-ramming over Rahmbo, as he is known by fans and foes alike, has gone embarrassingly public in recent weeks. Suddenly, the chief of staff has become the story, with The Washington Post and The New York Times (and, soon, 60 Minutes) daily debating Mr. Emanuel's culpability for the President's fall from the pinnacle of public opinion to his current middling poll numbers.
It may be true, as Obama senior adviser David Axelrod charged this week, that "there aren't 10 people outside Washington who give a rat's ass" about the presidential palace intrigue. Most Americans, other than the Chicago voters whom Mr. Emanuel represented in Congress before taking his current White House job, likely don't know or care who he is.
Yet the debate over Mr. Emanuel is more than just an inside-the-Beltway indulgence. It is symptomatic of an administration that has lost control of its own once carefully constructed narrative and, despite several populist attempts since the disastrous (for Democrats) Massachusetts Senate race in January, has been unable to retake it.
Russell Riley, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia, reckons the attacks on Mr. Emanuel and their rebuttals by his apologists represent "the pent-up frustration" among right- and left-leaning Democrats alike at the Obama administration's failure to launch.
While Mr. Emanuel is hardly the first White House chief of staff to be blamed for his boss's problems, Prof. Riley adds that the intensity of the current criticism is "over the top. ... This particular episode does appear to me to be qualitatively different."
Mr. Obama again fired up his populist voice this week, selling his health-care reform package with a scathing attack on the insurance industry in Philadelphia on Monday. Another such diatribe is likely today when the President travels to St. Louis to push his plan, whose fate still depends on winning the support of a handful of recalcitrant Democrats in Congress.
That Mr. Obama is still shy of his legislative goals on health care, climate change and financial reform more than a year into his presidency speaks to the ongoing tension within the White House between the proponents of going big (Mr. Axelrod and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett) and the advocate of sticking to what's doable (Mr. Emanuel).
When he has opted for the former approach, Mr. Obama has overreached. His ill-considered vow to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year of taking office and his decision to try the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind in a Manhattan civilian court have only made his life harder. The moves bracketed opposition to him in Congress, as Mr. Emanuel warned they would. Now, an about-face on both counts appears all but inevitable.
Mr. Emanuel also pushed for incremental change on the health-care front. Mr. Obama instead opted for comprehensive reform, though he followed Mr. Emanuel's advice in letting Democrats in Congress work out the details and in winning over potential opponents (such as pharmaceutical companies) with side deals. Mr. Emanuel's recommendation was informed by his experience working in the White House of Bill Clinton, whose own attempt at health-care reform was undermined by a top-down approach.
But Mr. Obama's decision to go halfway on health care - following Mr. Emanuel's advice in cutting deals, but spurning it by sticking to a nearly $1-trillion reform package - satisfied no one. Once Scott Brown won the Massachusetts race, becoming the 41st Republican senator and derailing much of the Obama legislative agenda, the revolt against Mr. Emanuel erupted in public.
It started with a damaging front-page story in January in The Wall Street Journal, in which Mr. Emanuel was reported to have dismissed a strategy by liberal proponents of health-care reform to run attack ads against conservative Democrats as "f---ing retarded." It must have been true, because Mr. Emanuel (through a spokesman) publicly apologized a few days later.
The mostly one-sided criticism continued until late last month, when Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote an impassioned defence of the chief of staff, arguing that Mr. Emanuel "is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter." Ms. Jarrett and Mr. Axelrod, Mr. Milbank added, "are part of the Cult of Obama" and, hence, insufficiently objective to see it like it is.
On Monday, the Times took the exceptional step of posting a Sunday magazine piece about Mr. Emanuel on its website a full six days before its arrival in print. If the appearance of the article, which is also largely favourable toward Mr. Emanuel, didn't entirely overshadow Mr. Obama's Philadelphia speech, it certainly shared the spotlight.
The debate about Rahm shows no sign of ebbing. Democratic congressman Eric Massa, who resigned this week after reportedly sexually harassing a male aide, insisted he was forced out because he was set to vote against Mr. Obama's health-care package. He took a parting shot at Mr. Emanuel, calling him "the son of the devil's spawn," who "would sell his own mother to get a vote."
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The quotable Rahm
Rahm Emanuel doesn't always say the right thing, but he usually says it with flair. Some of his more memorable quotes:
A strong economy depends on a strong middle class, but George Bush has put the middle class in a hole, and John McCain has a plan to keep digging that hole with George Bush's shovel.
As individuals, we will be judged in our lives by the totality of our actions. Not one thing will stand out. And I think that's how we get judged by our colleagues and that's how we get judged by the good Lord.
I wake up some mornings hating me, too.
I sometimes joke, Paula, even paranoid people have enemies. [to news anchor Paula Zahn]/i>
There's no safe Republican district. You can run, but you cannot hide.
I said to him, 'You're not one of those tri-bathletes, are you, Mr. President?' You know - steam, sauna, shower?
We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually.
When people told me 'It's great to be here,' they meant at the house, not with me.