White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has always been a controversial figure--famously profane and short-tempered, and politically speaking a center-right Clinton Democrat. As of late, though, there's been a strange effort--particularly in the Washington Post--to present Emanuel as the confidant whose political advice Barack Obama has too often ignored and who offers a clear path to political rehabilitation. This only makes sense in a Beltway media that views Obama as too far to the left, and in need of Emanuel's pragmatic centrism to pull him back to the middle.

This campaign was kicked off by a February 21 Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post, headlined "Why Obama Needs Rahm at the Top." Milbank wrote: "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." What advice would that be? Milbank says:

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.

As Matthew Yglesias has noted, the odd thing about this argument is the fact that Obama's foreign policies--whatever you might think of them--are generally more popular than Obama's domestic efforts. So why should we think that not taking Emanuel's advice on security issues is the cause of Obama's political woes?

Milbank also writes that Emanuel was against the public option in the healthcare bill, but Obama listened to "Capitol Hill liberals," with disastrous results. Again, the public option remains relatively popular with the public--despite consistent demonization from the right--so it's not clear why one would think Obama would have fared better without it.

Milbank noted that Emanuel "has set up his own small press operation and outreach function"--leading to some speculation that Emanuel is either directly or indirectly the originator of this if-only-he'd-listened-to-Rahm storyline (Huffington Post, 2/21/10).

And the story lives on in today's front-page Post article (3/2/10), "Hotheaded Emanuel May Be White House Voice of Reason." According to the piece, despite Emanuel's reputation for being loud and obnoxious, "a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: healthcare reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts."

Yes, that "narrative" is "emerging"--in the Washington Post. And it's being seconded by the likes of right-wing columnist Jonah Golberg. Debates are raging about who fed the story to Milbank, but that misses the real point: The press always counsel Democrats to move to the right.

The Financial Times' Edward Luce (2/3/10) had a report last week that blamed some of the Obama administration's problems on the president's overreliance on four top advisers--particularly chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who "in addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration...has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters."

More illuminating than the article itself may be the Washington press corps' reaction to it, as described by AlterNet's Steve Clemons (2/9/10):

Mark Schmitt, executive editor of the liberal magazine the American Prospect, wrote that "Luce has written what seems to me the best and most succinct rundown of what's gone wrong in the White House, with particular attention to the role of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel." But some of the big aggregators out there--Mike Allen at Politico and ABC's the Note among others--didn't give Luce's juicy and lengthy essay any love.

Why not? Allen is a good friend of mine and tries to keep a good balance between tough-hitting political stuff, but also goes out of his way to give strokes to those in the White House he can -- particularly "Axe" -- who is a regular in Mike's daily Playbook....

But this Luce piece is unavoidably, accurately hard-hitting, and while many of the nation's top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought on the administration, they fear that the "four horsepersons of the Obama White House" will shut down and cut off access to those who give the essay "legs."'

In other words, Washington political journalists can't tell you what's going on inside the White House because then they would lose access to what's going on inside the White House.

One interesting post-election story has been the treatment of Rahm Emanuel, a center-right Clinton Democrat who will serve as Obama's chief of staff. While some Republicans claim Emanuel is too "partisan," some media defenders argue that he's not, since his politics are not all that liberal. Time magazine's Karen Tumulty explains:

The strongest signal of how that White House will operate has been Obama's pick of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel to be its chief of staff. Emanuel is a win-at-any-cost partisan but not an ideologue; in his earlier White House stint as a top aide to Clinton, he was a key figure in shepherding through the North American Free Trade Agreement, a crime bill and welfare reform--none of them popular with the Democratic Party's liberal base.

Apparently pushing for a corporate "free trade" pact and gutting public assistance for the poor are not "ideological"--they're just the sort of common sense the media like to cheer. As for the idea that pushing policies unpopular with the party base is evidence of a "win-at-any-cost" outlook--well, that depends on your definition of "win." When FAIR founder Jeff Cohen examined the Democratic Party's electoral performance in the Clinton years (L.A. Times, 4/9/00), here's what he found:

Let's do the numbers. When Clinton entered the White House, his party dominated the U.S. Senate, 57-43; the U.S. House, 258-176; the country's governorships, 30-18, and a large majority of state legislatures. Today, Republicans control the Senate, 55-45; the House, 222-211; governorships, 30-18, and almost half of state legislatures.