Ed Luce Takes a Chunk out of Rahm Emanuel's Thigh

Looks like The Financial Times' Ed Luce has appointed himself alpha shark in the turbulent waters around Rahm Emanuel, and also (bonus!) the other three close aides who stand between the world and President Obama (I don't suppose I would be the first if I said "gang of four") (link).

I think that Luce's piece on the whole passes the test as thought-provoking and shrewd: it does seem that there is a lot of "campaign mode" about this whole Obama thingy. And even if the Cossacks work for the Tsar, still you have to face the fact that it is the Tsar who hires the Cossacks, and this guy just might have tapped the wrong Cossack. A particularly cruel stroke is, I suppose, Luce's invidious comparison of Obama to Ronald Reagan, who--okay--may not have been smart, but wasn't dumb either, and had the shrewd good sense to tap James Baker to be chief of staff. Nothing went bad wrong as long as Baker was around (it was only in the second term, when Baker decided it might be fun to run the world economy that the President found himself in the clutches of a gang that couldn't shoot straight).

But Luce's piece is at the same time an almost textbook-ready exanple of "high-level journalism" fronting for anonymous character assassination. I don't mean to say he faked it; I assume that every word is properly sourced but--hey, it's been a year. There are bound to be disappointments (come to think of it, I'm disappointed, although I don't guess Luce will be calling me). The DC metro platforms groan under the weight of briefcase-carrying technocrats who will be happy to tell you just whom the President has treated badly and who could tell him how to do it better.

It is all, in the end, a carefully crafted symphony. I mean, consider: " Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. " Looks to me like there is a vacuum ("conventional wisdom") at one end of that sentence and a black hole ("observers") at the other. Is there really anything here but a thread spun out of Luce's gizzard? Possibly not. But a more studied reading might be: this is Luce cutting a calibrated deal with an Emanuel loyalist, so as to say: look, we did our part, it was the other guys (the voters) who didn't come through. (I'm reminded of Bertolt Brecht, when he heard that the government had lost the confidence of the people--fine, said Brecht, then why doesn't the government elect a new people?)

Or for more general insight as to how it all works, consider this paragraph:

Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Obama’s health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.

(Later we have "Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary ... left cooling [his] heels.") Yep, and every one of these exemplars of abused dignity has an executive assistant, an outside lawyer/lobbyist crony, a consigliere, a consigliore, all delighted for a chance to schmooze with the man who owns such a megaphone.

And here is a particularly interesting specimen:

Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.”

Yes, it is more anonymous character assassination, but inflicted with a purpose. My guess is that it won't take Emanuel two minutes to figure out which "head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently" that might be. And maybe he is supposed to figure it out: maybe he is supposed to know who is enemy is, even while the enemy maintains the patina of deniability (will there be any more visits, I wonder?).

In the same vein, I suppose I would include:

“We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama’s campaign. “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president.”

--but here we have somebody who is trying to lob his message over the parapet and straight into the throne room itself.

And so forth. True, there are a few sourced quotations here--John Podesta, David Gergen, etc. But there boring and high minded, strictly Jim Lehrer material, ballast on the way to the saucier (and unsourced) stuff.

I could go on, but you get the drift: it is an orchestrated hit piece, instructive and even on point in its way, but still very much a part of the living process on which it pretends to report. Oh, and by the way--Luce, for all his virtues, does get off what has to be the silliest sentence of the day: "And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle." Where the hell was he during the Bush II administration, India?