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5

The Obama White House

Chicago erupted in all-out celebration on November 4, 2008. As the results of the presidential election came in and Obama made his stirring acceptance speech in Grant Park, the downtown streets were packed with people wearing campaign T-shirts, smiling broadly, and giving high fives to complete strangers.

In a city famous for segregation and racial tension, there was a notable coming together of people from different races. For several days after the election, the feeling lingered that a cloud of positivity and camaraderie had settled over Chicago, that past wrongs and slights had been forgotten as the city prepared to move forward under its new mantle as the hometown of the most popular man in the world.

Two days after the election Obama made his first announcement about his cabinet: his chief of staff would be “my good friend, Congressman Rahm Emanuel.”1 It was well known in Chicago circles that Emanuel and Obama had never been close.2 But the president-elect likely thought Emanuel’s skills and personality could be just what he needed for the challenges that lay ahead.

“No one I know is better at getting things done than Rahm Emanuel,” said Obama. “In just six years in Congress, he has risen to leadership, helping to craft myriad important pieces of legislation and guide them to passage. In between, Rahm spent several years in the private sector, where he worked on large and complicated financial transactions. That experience, combined with his service on the committees on Ways and Means and Banking, have given Rahm deep insights into the challenging economic issues that will be front and center for our administration.”3

Emanuel said that he was “humbled by the responsibility” Obama had given him and quoted Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”4

But many people who had been elated by Obama’s election were skeptical of and disappointed in his choice of a right-hand man. “The selection rankled many in the greater Obama orbit,” wrote Peter Baker in the New York Times Magazine. “For all the work they put in electing an apostle of hope to clean up Washington, now they were handing over the keys to a crass, cynical operator? Even if it was a sensible decision, what message did it send?”5

On the world stage, Israeli and Palestinian leaders speculated about what the choice meant for the Middle East. Emanuel kept a low profile on this front, but his father created a headache for his son with his own speculation about what Rahm’s role in the White House would mean for Israel.

“Obviously he’ll influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn’t he? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to be mopping floors at the White House,” Benjamin Emanuel told the Israeli daily Ma’ariv. Emanuel apologized for his father’s remarks and offered to meet with Arab American leaders in the future. 6

Emanuel had been offered the chief of staff job several weeks earlier and had reportedly “agonized” over whether to take it. He enjoyed his role in Congress and aspired to be the first Jewish Speaker of the House, and with kids ages nine, ten, and eleven, he was reluctant to move his family again from Chicago to Washington.7

In his book Obama’s Wars, veteran reporter Bob Woodward described Emanuel’s internal dilemma: “Emanuel, who was known for his bluster, confided to associates that the driving force in his life was fear of failure. It was as if he knew his entire career was a dangerous high-wire act and he was being forced to take the wire to new heights, requiring that he move faster and not look down. Despite his misgivings, he finally said yes.”8

Obama’s decision for chief of staff had reportedly come down to Emanuel versus Obama’s good friend Tom Daschle.9 The former Senate majority leader from South Dakota was later nominated for secretary of health and human services—until questions over his failure to pay taxes and his lobbying-related work forced him to withdraw.10 Obama had known Emanuel for years, and Emanuel’s famous pugnacious style was an interesting contrast to Obama’s measured, calm, even remote demeanor. Emanuel’s profane, sarcastic outbursts and tight smirk were quite different from Obama’s beneficent smile and lofty proclamations about hope and dreams.

At a 2005 fundraiser in Chicago, Obama had riffed on Emanuel’s dancing background, saying he had adapted Machiavelli’s The Prince as a dance “with a lot of kicks below the waist.”11

It’s entirely likely that Obama sought out this approach as a complement to his own style; he probably sensed what a hard road lay ahead and figured someone like “Rahmbo” was just what he needed to muscle through sweeping changes.

But as it turned out, Emanuel may have been a big reason Obama did not successfully pass or forcefully advocate for key things he had promised or proposed during the campaign: namely, a climate bill that put a price on carbon emissions, comprehensive immigration reform, and sweeping health-care reform with a “public option.”

“The paradox of the current situation for Obama and Emanuel has not been lost on Washington,” wrote Peter Baker in March 2010. “A visionary outsider who is relatively inexperienced and perhaps even a tad naïve about the ways of Washington captures the White House and, eager to get things done, hires the ultimate get-it-done insider to run his operation. . . . But if picking the leading practitioner of the dark arts of the capital was a Faustian bargain for Obama in the name of getting things done, why haven’t things got done?”12

The Stimulus and the Bailouts

President Obama and his chief of staff did get off to a quick start. Within his first month in office, Obama signed three major bills. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act addressed pay discrimination against women.13 A week later Obama signed a significant expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.14 And on February 17 he signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), a landmark stimulus bill meant to create jobs by funding infrastructure projects, energy efficiency, broadband expansion, and numerous other undertakings, especially “shovel-ready” tasks.15

Many progressives criticized the stimulus for being too small and including too many tax cuts, while conservatives attacked it as wasteful and unsuccessful. For years to come, pundits would debate how much good the stimulus did and how it could have been better.16 The Congressional Budget Office estimated the stimulus created or saved between half a million and 3.3 million jobs. There had been heated debate among Obama’s economic team over how big to make the stimulus. Emanuel consistently took the more conservative side of this debate, and won. When Christina Romer, chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued for a larger package—to the tune of $1 trillion—Emanuel reportedly said, “What are you smoking?”17

Emanuel also was at Obama’s side for the bailout of the auto industry, a move credited with saving it from collapse and preventing the mass outsourcing of jobs.18 During the negotiations, according to a book by former administration “car czar” Steve Rattner, Emanuel responded flippantly regarding concerns of the United Automobile Workers, the labor union representing the tens of thousands of workers who risked losing their jobs: “Fuck the UAW.”19 Interviewed after the book came out, UAW president Bob King said he was not offended. “I appreciate the Obama administration,” he told CNBC. “I appreciate what they have done for workers in general. Did they do good for the auto industry? Yes, they did. Did Rahm Emanuel play a role in that? Yes, he did. I appreciate him.”20

And of course Emanuel was one of the main voices—along with economic adviser Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—counseling the president on how to deal with the financial institutions that were on the verge of collapse. He had played a lead role during his last months in Congress in passing the unpopular bank bailout. Early in Obama’s presidency, Romer was enthusiastic about the idea of taking bold action to break up some of the banks whose reckless behavior had played a major role in causing the economic crisis. Romer was an expert in the Great Depression and the New Deal, and as Ron Suskind explained in Confidence Men, she saw an opportunity for Obama to make a bold “Rooseveltian” move that would telegraph his willingness to stand up to these financial titans. Cracking down on the banks would, she indicated, show that Obama had cast his lot with the common people. Summers also supported the idea that the big banks should be broken up by the government, and Suskind reported that Obama liked the idea. But Emanuel was stridently opposed, saying it would be politically impossible to get such a move through Congress, especially since it could cost about $700 billion on top of the bailout funds already doled out. Suskind described a long and contentious meeting from which Obama ultimately left to have dinner with his family and told the debating staff to come to a decision. Emanuel took the opportunity, as Suskind described it, to get his way and keep the big banks intact—nixing the idea of breaking them up.

“Everyone shut the fuck up,” Suskind quoted Emanuel as saying. “Listen, it’s not going to fuckin’ happen. We have no fucking credibility. So give it up. The job of everyone in this room is to move the president, when he gets back, to a solution that works.”

Suskind quoted Romer saying that Rahm “killed” and “crushed” the idea of breaking up the big banks. When Obama returned, the group agreed to a much more modest plan of focusing first on Citigroup and conducting “stress tests” on other banks, essentially leaving the status quo intact. “The president,” Suskind concluded, “had been well managed.”21

Climate Change

Although Emanuel helped beat down conservative opposition to pass the job-creating stimulus bill, he seemed to cave to industry and right-wing think tank cries about “job-killing” in relation to a climate bill that would have put a price on carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system or carbon tax.

Environmental leaders including Al Gore said it was important to pass a climate-related resolution before the December 2009 United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen if the United States wanted to take a leadership position in the crucial talks around a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.22 International cooperation was considered essential to reducing global emissions enough to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, and a number of countries had made significant progress since Kyoto was adopted in 1997, promoting cleaner energy sources and passing domestic legislation addressing the issue.23 Developed nations like the United States, which had already reaped the lion’s share of economic and social benefits from their disproportionate energy use, were supposed to take the lead in reducing emissions and guiding the global process. But without a domestic policy of its own, the United States—whose per capita carbon emissions dwarf those of most other countries except China—would have a serious deficiency of moral authority.24

In The Plan, Emanuel and Reed discussed the threat of climate change and stressed the importance of weaning the country from imported oil. They criticized President George W. Bush for withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, calling it a “foreign policy blunder” that “hurt America’s cause on other fronts.”25 But the Kyoto Protocol required each country to pass its own climate legislation—something Emanuel reportedly urged Obama not to do.

Obama promised during his campaign to address climate change, and after taking office he even created the position of “climate czar,” filled by Carol Browner, a highly respected Clinton-era EPA administrator. In June 2009 the House passed the Waxman-Markey bill (the American Clean Energy and Security Act) by a vote of 219 to 212.26 At the crucial moment Obama and Emanuel pushed hard for the bill, which would have created a cap-and-trade system and could have led to significant emissions reductions. But the legislation was doomed in the Senate; the bill died, and soon the whole idea of cap and trade or a carbon tax largely dropped off political radar screens.27

Emanuel was reportedly a major reason for the failure. Instead of muscling the bill through, he seemed to cave to pressure from industry parties, who howled that such legislation would lead to mass factory closings as power and production costs soared. Climate change was also a hot-button topic in the “culture wars,” with conservative pundits and citizens groups denying the existence of man-made climate change and framing climate legislation as an attack on freedom. The science by this point left no doubt that human-induced climate change is real, escalating, and posing a serious global threat. Experts declared that fears of dire economic consequences from putting a price on carbon were overblown, and that a carbon tax could actually help create clean energy and technology jobs and fund social programs.28 But even as the Obama administration promoted “carrots” such as tax breaks and other incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy generation, the “stick” of a price on carbon had apparently become taboo.

Eric Pooley, author of The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save Planet Earth, blamed Emanuel. “The chief of staff was an obstacle to climate action,” Pooley wrote. “Climate and energy were agenda items to him, pieces on a legislative chessboard; he was only willing to play them in ways that enhanced Obama’s larger objectives. He saw no point in squandering capital on a lost cause. The White House could claim victory if Congress passed a beefy energy bill without a cap—and never mind that doing so could torpedo Copenhagen and delay serious greenhouse-gas reductions, perhaps for many years.”29

An unnamed inside source told Pooley, “You had this incredible green cabinet of really committed people, but the only thing that really matters is what the president says—so everyone was trying to get words into his mouth. And Rahm was trying to keep the words out of his mouth.”30

The Copenhagen conference came and went without a US domestic climate policy, as did the next major UN climate conference, in Durban, South Africa, which took place after Emanuel had left the White House.

Ironically, some of the same right-wing, climate-change-denying fossil fuel interests Emanuel had essentially protected on the climate front later pounced on him for his role in a $535 million federal loan guarantee to Solyndra, a California-based solar energy company that went bankrupt. Emails indicated that Energy Department officials and others were pressured to rush the loan through without a thorough vetting process, in part because Emanuel wanted Obama involved in a publicity event that had already been scheduled.31 Throughout the 2012 presidential election campaign season, Republicans pointed to Solyndra as a supposed example of Democratic waste, blunder, and corruption. Such accusations were clearly a stretch, especially given the fact that the Solyndra loan and government support for renewable energy in general pale beside longstanding financial and political support for fossil fuels. But on a relatively minor yet interesting level, the debacle may indeed have been an example of Emanuel’s misbehavior—not his corrupt pandering to the solar industry, but his famous penchant for rushing into things while steamrolling over others’ concerns and established processes.

Health Care

Emanuel reportedly “begged” Obama not to pursue health-care reform early in his term, saying instead that the president needed to focus on jobs and the economy.32 Once the president had committed to a health-care bill, Emanuel zealously devoted his efforts to making something happen.33 But in keeping with his image as a narrowly focused pragmatist, Emanuel’s vision of health-care reform greatly angered and disappointed many who had hoped for a true overhaul.

Emanuel is often blamed for the fact that the Affordable Care Act, as the bill eventually came to be known, was more “health insurance reform” than comprehensive “health-care reform.”34

Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other, more progressive leaders initially said they felt strongly about offering a “public option”—government-sponsored insurance that would offer coverage to needy people without the profit motive, and would compete with private insurance companies. They also called for cutting health-care costs, which would theoretically make health-care more accessible to a wide range of people (though it would likely cut into profits for hospitals, drug companies, and doctors).

Obama promoted the idea of cutting costs in part through evidence-based medicine—making decisions based on studies showing which procedures and drugs really yielded the best results, and ferreting out instances where surgeries or other expensive treatments were widely used despite showing little or no better outcomes than less expensive and less invasive options. Among the leading advocates of this approach was Zeke Emanuel, Rahm’s brother, who was advising the White House on health care.35 But as described in various books and articles based on inside sources, Rahm Emanuel pushed back against comprehensive health-care reform, trying to dissuade Obama from tackling health care during the economic crisis and then advocating strenuously against a public option and in favor of a much narrower version of reform.

Emanuel was a key liaison to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and Republican leaders during the debate. He reportedly promised pharmaceutical companies that the law would not include price controls on drugs and would not allow cheaper drug imports from Canada and Europe—measures that could have been beneficial for low-income people struggling to afford medication.

As Jodi Kantor explained in her book The Obamas:

Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina, a deputy chief of staff, had cut a quiet deal with pharmaceutical industry lobbyists: in exchange for supporting the legislation, the administration would guarantee that it would cost the companies no more than $80 billion. Many White House aides were surprised and alarmed: Obama had campaigned as a reformer who would fight lobbyists and pharmaceutical companies, and now he was cutting a backroom deal with them that looked like a giveaway?36

Emanuel tried to push Obama to agree to a smaller health-care program that would add only about ten million Americans to the insurance rolls. It was dubbed “the Titanic Strategy” because it would primarily expand coverage for single women and children.37

According to Ron Suskind, Emanuel tried to shield Obama from outside advice on health-care reform, including from his friend and health-care expert Tom Daschle. Suskind quoted a longtime Washington manager saying Emanuel “convinced Obama that ‘all Rahm, all the time’ was all he needed. . . . Obama didn’t know how things were supposed to work, and Emanuel, running in every direction, wasn’t going to tell him.”38

Meanwhile, some critics argued that despite Obama’s early statements in favor of a public option, the much less comprehensive bill that eventually passed was what he “wanted in the first place,” in the words of Wisconsin Democratic senator Russ Feingold.39

“Contrary to Obama’s occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it,” wrote pundit Glenn Greenwald in Salon. “Engineering these sorts of ‘centrist,’ industry-serving compromises has been the modus operandi of both Obama and, especially, Emanuel.”40

One of the issues that stalled and nearly killed health-care reform was the debate over the use of government funds for abortion. On this point, Emanuel brokered a crucial compromise. Obama agreed to sign an executive order saying federal funding would not go to abortion in order to get congressmen to drop an amendment proposed by Michigan Democratic congressman Bart Stupak that would have included such a prohibition in the actual bill. While many abortion rights advocates decried the compromise, mainstream prochoice organizations supported it as the lesser of two evils.The right-wing blogosphere crowed that Emanuel was “pro-abortion” and that the executive order had loopholes that would allow federal funding in some situations. Emanuel later explained that the compromise was necessary to get the fourteen congressional holdout votes that were crucial for the bill to pass.41

The health-care bill hammered out during a torturous year-plus process was eventually signed by Obama on March 23, 2010. It offered significant gains for regular Americans: insurance companies could no longer bar people with pre-existing conditions, young adults could remain on their parents’ insurance until age twenty-six, and about thirty-two million more Americans would be covered.42 As noted on the White House website, 105 million Americans were relieved of lifetime dollar limits on their coverage, and insurance companies could no longer drop people when they got sick or made a mistake in paperwork.43

Watered down as it was, the bill qualified as a historic achievement, and Emanuel surely deserves some credit for making it happen. It’s impossible to know if a wider-ranging bill could have passed with more political will and a different strategy. But for people left angry and disillusioned that the reform didn’t go further, perhaps the question shouldn’t be so much about Emanuel’s approach but rather about the larger system supported by corporate influence and poisonous rhetoric—a system that meant the chief of staff could have been correct in betting this was the best the government could do.

Immigration

Immigrants’ rights groups and immigrant community leaders turned out in force to campaign for Barack Obama, including by helping people become citizens and registering new voters likely to cast their ballots for him. The alliance made sense given Obama’s family history and home base in Chicago, with its rich immigrant communities, pro-immigrant politicians, and powerful immigrant organizations. Immigrants’ rights advocates pushed Obama to promise he would tackle immigration reform within his first hundred days in office. The candidate responded in an interview with ABC that he would make immigration a priority and address it within his first year. But a year came and went, with no reform bill in sight.44 The Obama administration ultimately ended up deporting immigrants at a faster clip than President Bush had.45 Many law-abiding, hard-working immigrants were ensnared in the controversial Secure Communities program, which was supposed to remove serious criminals but instead targeted many people with traffic or minor drug offenses.46

As with climate change and the public option, the buzz on immigration was that Emanuel had dissuaded Obama from tackling it. During his time in Congress—when he reportedly advised Democrats in close races to vote for the stridently anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill—Emanuel had labeled immigration the “third rail of American politics.”47

Comprehensive immigration reform during Obama’s first year—or at any time—was a tall order, to be sure. But during Obama’s first two years there was no significant progress on smaller and more urgent pieces of the immigration puzzle, like the DREAM Act, which would offer legal residency to undocumented students who came to the country as children, or legislation to prevent undocumented parents from being deported and separated from their citizen children. (In June 2012, in the midst of his reelection campaign, Obama issued a directive blocking the deportation of youth who would have been covered by the DREAM Act.)48

During Emanuel’s mayoral campaign, his opponents would hammer him for his stance on immigration during his time in Congress and the White House. Emanuel responded that he did not “kill” the DREAM Act, as some had phrased it, and declined to discuss his private interactions with President Obama.49

The Los Angeles Times quoted Arizona Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva saying, “There’s always a sense that no matter how hard we work, to get through the White House, we have to get through Rahm. . . . I would like immigration not to be part of the chief of staff’s portfolio. It would make our ability to convince and access decision-makers in the White House a lot easier.”50

That story also quoted New Democrat Network president Simon Rosenberg saying, “It’s going to be much easier for this issue to move after Rahm Emanuel leaves the White House. . . . Rahm has a long history of a lack of sympathy for the importance of the immigration issue.”51 Indeed, in June 2013, a wide-ranging immigration reform bill—including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants—passed the Senate, though its fate in the House remained uncertain.52

Liberals Attack Emanuel

In August 2009, during a confidential White House strategy session, Emanuel met with liberal activists upset with the administration’s failure to push aggressive health-care reform. The activists were planning to run ads attacking conservative Democrats, trying to hold the party to more progressive ideals. Emanuel told them the planned ad campaign was “fucking retarded.” Months later, he apologized for the statement, acknowledging that it showed insensitivity to people with developmental disabilities.53 Though he regretted the terminology he had used, Emanuel clearly did not apologize for the attitude he’d taken with the liberal leaders. Author Jonathan Alter described Emanuel responding to the flap: “Rahm’s voice dripped with disgust for those dainty Democrats who imagined they were above politics. ‘I’m sure there are a lot of people sitting in the shade at the Aspen Institute, my brother being one of them, who will tell you what the ideal plan is,’ he said. ‘Great, fascinating. You have the art of the possible measured against the ideal.’”54

By this point, increasingly fed-up liberals and progressives were calling for Emanuel to resign.55 “The Rahm Emanuel strategy was to cut deals with power brokers in Washington and ignore what liberals wanted,” wrote Cenk Uygur, cofounder of the popular Internet show The Young Turks, who dubbed Emanuel “Barack Obama’s Dick Cheney.”56

The “Women Problem”

Many insider accounts described the Obama White House as a place where highly accomplished, spectacularly intelligent, and strong-willed people worked in an atmosphere characterized by disorganization, backbiting, jealousy, and insularity; where the potential of the immensely talented team Obama had assembled was greatly diminished by a chaotic and sometimes poisonous office culture.57

Several high-profile books and numerous articles chronicled how key initiatives, including health-care and financial reform, were bogged down by infighting among Obama’s top cabinet members and advisers, a lack of clarity over roles, and the tendency of several top staffers to steamroll over or even ignore the president’s wishes.58

Various reports said Emanuel’s mercurial and demanding personality was a constant source of tension within the White House, though also something other cabinet members and officials learned to live with. In The Escape Artists Noam Scheiber said that Emanuel demanded Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner do a “rewrite of 75 years’ worth of financial regulations” in a few weeks for a Wall Street reform bill, but “fortunately for Geithner, the dirty little secret of life under Emanuel was that if you just wait him out, his attention would soon drift to the next major obsession.”59

There was also a chronic issue dubbed the “women problem.” Obama had hired a number of highly accomplished women for top posts. Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer, “climate czar” Carol Browner, health-care reform chief Nancy-Ann DeParle, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, UN ambassador Susan Rice, and chief domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes were among the prominent women in Obama’s administration. But many of them complained they felt silenced and sidelined by a “boys’ club” culture. They said they were not asked to speak in freewheeling debates on economic and policy issues and were left out of inner-circle socializing that revolved around basketball and golf games—even though a few of the women were top athletes in their own right. Regarding both the general office culture and the particular complaints of White House women, Emanuel and economic adviser Larry Summers were frequently named as the main culprits.

Emanuel’s role in the managerial and organizational problems was often attributed to his personality—highly competitive, impulsive, rushed, unwilling to admit errors or take the time to hear others out, and focused on political gamesmanship and “winning” above all else. A controversial February 2010 piece in the Financial Times said that “the Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing,”60 and attributed that orientation to the “Fearsome Foursome” of Emanuel, senior advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, and press secretary Robert Gibbs.

On its surface the idea that an office is “campaigning” rather than “governing” might not sound like a serious problem. But the criticism got to the heart of a recurring and potentially serious critique of Emanuel, one that would become central during his time as mayor of Chicago: that he was fixated on “getting points on the board” and defeating political enemies.61

It is hard to say if Emanuel’s central role in creating and refusing to address the “women problem” was related to concrete sexism or his personality more generally. The former explanation could be bolstered by comments like one he made to a male staffer stammering over an answer: “Take your fucking tampon out and tell me what you have to say.”62 When Emanuel was asked during an interview about the women’s complaints, Suskind reported, “He was succinct. The concerns of women, he said, were a nonissue, a ‘blip.’ As to the fact that the White House’s women rather strongly disagreed with him on that point, he said, ‘I understand,’ and then laughed uproariously.”63

“This, to be sure, was the sort of problem that chiefs of staff were generally left to handle,” Suskind wrote. “In this case, the chief of staff was at the center of the problem.”64

Moving On

The never-loving relationship between Obama and Emanuel reportedly soured irreparably after a February 2010 Washington Post column by Dana Milbank, headlined “Why Obama Needs Rahm at the Top.” Milbank attributed Obama’s first-year failures to not listening to his chief of staff, and said that Emanuel’s hard-nosed, “earthy and calculating” attitude was crucial to grounding Obama’s “airy and idealistic” approach. Milbank blamed Obama for not accepting Emanuel’s proposal for very narrow health-care reform from the start; Milbank thought Emanuel’s “Titanic Strategy” would have passed easily and cleared the way to move on to other issues.65

Suskind wrote that Obama was “livid” about the column and confronted Emanuel in a tense private meeting where the chief of staff tried to smooth the waters. The larger implication was that Emanuel had a hand in the column and was trying to bolster his own image—to score points for himself—at the expense of his boss, the president of the United States. (Both Milbank and Emanuel denied this.) Suskind indicated that the incident marked a permanent rupture between the two, and that afterward the jokes and banter that had once seasoned the men’s rocky relationship were gone.66

It was widely reported that Obama wanted Emanuel out by mid-2010, if not sooner. Suskind noted that Emanuel was such a thorn in Obama’s side, his impending departure left the president feeling “oddly buoyant” on an otherwise difficult day in September 2010:

“In the past few days, he’s caught a break. The mayor of Chicago decided not to run for reelection. That means his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, will be seeking ‘other opportunities’ and the president won’t have to worry about firing him.”67