Slow On The Pick Up

 Is this NYT's profile old enough to be nostalgic? Probably not.  The situation has gotten worse since March but the game is still the same.  I am BIG on Rahm Emanuel.  He's the greatest political character right now.  He also seems to know exactly what he's doing and I think the problem is that no one wants to let him off his leash and do it.  No he is not some idealist who tries to fight the big fight.  But those guys often fail or at least end up creating a lot more problems.  Rahm wants to win. 

 "EVEN TODAY, Emanuel sometimes has a hard time talking about the Massachusetts election. Asked recently by a visitor what happened, Emanuel simply sighed and said: “I can’t. I don’t have enough medication.” The debacle unleashed a lot of pent-up frustration within the party at Emanuel — and by extension, though less viscerally, at Obama. Liberal activists told The Wall Street Journal that Emanuel had berated them at a private strategy meeting by calling their tactics “retarded” (along with another word), touching off a firestorm that led him to apologize to the head of the Special Olympics. Lost amid the focus on the so-called R-word was the context of the discussion. Emanuel was scolding the activists for running television advertisements against moderate Democrats who were not supporting the public option, neatly encapsulating the central tension between their philosophies of governing. The activists were willing to go to war even with Democrats for a policy idea they deeply cared about, while Emanuel saw that as ridiculously counterproductive."

"...Emanuel wants to jam a wedge into the fissure inside the Republican Party between, as he frames it, the descending wing that believes in small government and the ascending wing that believes in no government. Republicans lose, in this theory, whether they cooperate with Obama or not. “We’ve got to drive the ball at them,” a senior White House official told me. “Driving the ball at them, making them pick between small government and no government, putting them in their responsibility-and-accountability box. You walk away? You’re walking away from responsibility, and the public’s angry at you. You participate? Your base hates you.""