A HISTORICALLY AWFUL CHOICE:

The Gatekeeper: Rahm Emanuel on the job. (Ryan Lizza, March 2, 2009, The New Yorker)

Unlike recent chiefs of staff from the Bush and Clinton eras, who tended to be relatively quiet inside players, Emanuel is a former congressional leader, a Democratic Party power, and one of the more colorful Beltway celebrities. He is a political John McEnroe, known for both his mercurial temperament and his tactical brilliance. In the same conversation, he can be wonkish and thoughtful, blunt and profane. (When Emanuel was a teen-ager, he lost half of his right middle finger, after cutting it on a meat slicer—an accident, Obama once joked, that “rendered him practically mute.”) And, like McEnroe, Emanuel seems to employ his volcanic moments for effect, intimidating opponents and referees alike but never quite losing himself in the midst of battle. “I’ve seen Rahm scream at a candidate for office one moment and then quickly send him a cheesecake,” Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic representative from Maryland, and a friend of Emanuel’s, told me.

Emanuel has long since learned to balance his outsized personality, which has made him a subject of intrigue in Washington, with a compulsion for order, which makes him an effective manager. As a child, he attended a Jewish day school in Chicago, where students received written evaluations, instead of A’s and B’s. “My first-grade teacher,” he told me, “said two things that were very interesting: ‘Rahm likes to clean up after cleanup time is over.’ ” He pointed to his desk. “I am fastidious about it. In fact, this is messy today.” The second point was about Emanuel’s “personality being larger than life.” In the first grade. [...]

The office of chief of staff was created by Dwight Eisenhower, who redesigned the working structure of the White House along the hierarchal staff system he had learned as supreme commander of Allied forces in the Second World War. His chief of staff—though he didn’t officially use the title, because Eisenhower worried that “politicians think it sounds too military”—was Sherman Adams, who accrued enormous influence, power, and enemies. Neither John F. Kennedy nor Lyndon Johnson had a chief of staff, and largely managed the White House themselves. Richard Nixon returned to Eisenhower’s system and delegated vast managerial authority to H. R. Haldeman, the Watergate conspirator whose ironfisted management of the White House abetted Nixon’s own self-destructive behavior in office. In reaction, both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter tried to operate without chiefs of staff, but both men reversed course when the flat management structure of their respective White Houses produced staff disarray. Since Carter, every President has acknowledged the need for a strong chief of staff.

Over the years, some clear patterns about what kind of person succeeds in the job have emerged. James Pfiffner, a professor at George Mason University who has written extensively on the history of the office, cites four chiefs of staff as notable failures: Adams, Haldeman, Donald Regan, who was Ronald Reagan’s second chief of staff, and John Sununu, George H. W. Bush’s first chief of staff. “All of them got power-hungry, they alienated members of Congress, they alienated members of their own Administration, they had reputations for a lack of common civility, and they had hostile relations with the press. And each one of them resigned in disgrace and hurt their Presidents,” Pfiffner said. “Being able to be firm and tough without being obnoxious and overbearing is crucial.”

Emanuel’s début as chief of staff featured him on the Hill making deals with lawmakers—politely and with due deference, by all accounts—but a chief of staff’s primary job is to serve as the gatekeeper to the President, controlling the flow of information and people into the Oval Office. Constrict that flow too much and you deprive the President of opposing points of view; increase it too much and you drown him in extraneous detail and force him to arbitrate disputes better settled at a lower level. Emanuel saw both extremes in the Clinton White House. Clinton’s first chief of staff, Thomas (Mack) McLarty, a childhood friend from Arkansas, was known as Mack the Nice, and under his leadership the White House was chaotic. Leon Panetta, who is now Obama’s C.I.A. director and, like Emanuel, was a congressman, took over from McLarty. Arguably, he overcompensated for McLarty’s laxness, limiting access to the President so drastically that Clinton surreptitiously sought counsel outside the channels that Panetta controlled. “The President set up a parallel White House, led by Dick Morris, while Leon was chief of staff,” a former senior Clinton White House official told me. “If you clamp down too tight the principal says, ‘You’re not letting me have access to the people and the information I really want, so I’m just going to go build some other structure.’ ”

Obama’s managerial instincts tend toward a looser operation, with lots of staff and outside input. The fact that he will keep a BlackBerry to stay in touch with friends outside the West Wing fishbowl is one sign of this. (Emanuel grimaced when I mentioned his boss’s devotion to the device.) But early in his Senate career Obama also learned the perils of not having one strong manager in charge. When he arrived in Washington, in 2005, he told one of his senior aides, “My vision of this is having six smart people sitting around the table batting ideas around.” A month and a half later, tensions erupted between Obama’s Chicago staff and his Washington staff, making it difficult for them to agree on his schedule. Obama was frustrated that no single person was able to make decisions. The aide reminded him, “Don’t you remember: ‘six smart people sitting around the table’?” Obama replied, “Oh, that was six weeks ago. I’m not on that now.”

Emanuel’s task will be further complicated by what is a fairly top-heavy White House. David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime political strategist, Valerie Jarrett, a close friend and counsellor, and Pete Rouse, Obama’s Senate chief of staff, are “senior advisers,” a title that in the White House denotes a special place at the top of the hierarchy. Part of Emanuel’s job will be to stitch Obama’s old campaign hands together with powerful new figures on the policy side, such as Summers—“a dominating personality,” according to a senior White House official—and James L. Jones, a retired four-star general and Obama’s national-security adviser. In addition, Obama has created four new policy czars at the White House—for health care, energy, Native American affairs, and urban affairs—making the West Wing a more crowded place. Meanwhile, Vice-President Joseph Biden has been promised a high-level role in decision-making. Joshua Bolten, George W. Bush’s last chief of staff, told me that Emanuel has “the challenge of fitting a lot of large personalities and brains and portfolios into a relatively small space.”

Perhaps Emanuel’s greatest challenge, however, will be making the adjustment from being a prominent elected official to being a staffer. Bolten, who hosted Emanuel and eleven former chiefs of staff for breakfast at the White House in December, said, “One of the interesting bits of advice that emerged from the breakfast was that you probably shouldn’t be a political principal yourself. You need to put aside your own personality and profile and adopt one that serves your boss. I’m not saying you necessarily have to have a low profile, but it can’t really be your own independent profile. It’s got to be the profile your boss wants reflected, and it has to be a profile that does not compete with the rest of the Cabinet.”

As if it weren't bad enough that his personality is all wrong for the post, he matches the UR for lack of executive experience. It's not surprising they're off to such a bad start.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2009 9:45 AM