White House tensions

Ballet Rahmbert

The gossip surrounding the president’s chief of staff is getting out of hand

Nothing succeeds like success

“LET me tell you a story about Rahm Emanuel. I was a congressman in my first eight weeks, and I was in the congressional gym, and I went down and I worked out and I went into the showers. I’m sitting there showering, naked as a jaybird and here comes Rahm Emanuel not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me because I wasn’t going to vote for the president’s budget. Do you know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man?”

So, on television on March 8th, said Eric Massa, a Democratic congressman from New York who faced a spot of bother in Congress after allegations of groping a male staffer and has now resigned. Sources in the White House say the encounter with Barack Obama’s chief of staff never happened. No matter. True or not, the story is in character: Mr Emanuel is famous for being the president’s most pugnacious panjandrum and congressional and media manipulator, and proud of it to boot. Just as Britain’s affable Tony Blair took care to keep a foul-mouthed master of dark arts, Alastair Campbell, at his side, so is it the calling of Mr Emanuel to bludgeon underlings at the White House and former colleagues in Congress into obeying his master’s commandments.

Which was fine, so long as the bludgeoning produced. In Mr Obama’s first year, the White House looked as cool and disciplined as the president himself. Lately, however, voters and Congress have veered off message, electing a Republican senator in Massachusetts and threatening to drive a stake through the health reform Mr Obama had put at the heart of his first term. An iron law of politics holds that at times of political unravelling the fixer becomes the scapegoat and the planter of stories turns into the story itself. Fed by leaks galore, the newspapers have lit up with tales of rifts great and small between Mr Emanuel and his colleagues. Even the grey lady is bestirring herself: the New York Times this week ran an article of nearly 8,000 words on Mr Emanuel and his woes.

In hard times, friends fall out. And Mr Emanuel, who worked in the Clinton White House, has never been as close to the president as David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett and the rest of the Chicago coterie who campaigned with Mr Obama. Mr Emanuel’s enemies blame him for trimming the president’s ambitions. His defenders say it is a pity Mr Obama did not heed his chief of staff’s warnings against overreach. As to the inevitable question of whether Mr Emanuel will manage to keep his job, you read the answer here first: if health reform survives, so will he.