Farewell Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s dud Svengali

President Barack Obama is losing his strong right arm. Dark days lie ahead, in which the president will lose traction with Congress, needlessly offend key constituencies, lose control of his legislative agenda. Why? His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is quitting the White House, maybe to try and become mayor of Chicago, certainly to cash in and make a bundle on Wall Street.

But wait! Aren't those dark days already here? Isn't the president's approval rating sinking steadily? Doesn't he face the possible loss of both houses of Congress to the Republicans? Aren't Democrats, facing uphill fights in the midterm elections, begging him to stay away and not doom them with his shadow?

All these things are true. If Rahm Emanuel has been his strong right arm and, in the fawning words of a writer for the Daily Beast,  "the man with the political grit and muscle to make the president's dreams come true", then perhaps the President will fare better across the next two years fighting with his left hand only, and with a chief advisor at his side endowed with less muscle but more brains and strategic savvy.
 
Emanuel got flattering press because he fit the cliché profile of a can-do political rough-houser, famously foul-mouthed, someone who would instruct head-in-the-clouds Obama in the  coarse political realities of Washington DC.

But by the time Obama hired him, Emanuel already had a proven record of failure. He favoured the war in Iraq, and when he was chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 he made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates, backing dismal neo-con candidates who duly plummeted to defeat, losing the Democrats seats they would otherwise have won.
 
It was the supposedly savvy Emanuel who allowed, probably encouraged, Obama to blow his first year on a health reform bill that pleased no one, to construct a poorly designed stimulus bill and to detain him from acting resolutely to save millions of Americans from losing their homes, and to bring the arrogant bankers on Wall Street to their knees.

Properly advised, Obama would not have faced, as he did recently,  the polite and therefore all the more devastating reproof of a middle-aged, middle-class black woman, Velma Hart, in a town-meting in a Washington DC suburb. Hart said: "I'm exhausted from defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now."
 
Obama has had Emanuel guiding him into one disaster after another. His predecessor in the White House,, George W. Bush, fared just as badly, if not worse at the hands of his political counselor, Karl Rove, to this day touted in the press as a past master in the dark arts of dirty politics.
 
The prime task of a political counselor is to keep his patron's polling numbers high, and enhance his political clout. Rove left his employer with ratings in the low 30s, with almost zero political capital in the bank.

As he confided then to his associates, Rove's three aims for Bush's second term were to privatise social security ­ America's public pension system - push through an Immigration Act and firm up a permanent Republican majority.

In the event, social security "reform" was the White House's prime domestic political disaster in 2005. Rove's handling of the immigration bill was so inept that Republican congressional leaders refused to talk to him and told Bush's chief of staff to send someone else. The "permanent Republican majority" turned to ashes in the polling booths in the midterm elections in 2006.

Rove's last turn as arch demon of choice was as the alleged instigator of the firing of several federal prosecutors.

Federal prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the president, so their arrivals and departures are always part of everyday political logrolling, as practised by every presidency in historical memory. As with many of Rove's political duties, this was handled with matchless incompetence and so the Democrats had a field day.
 
The best chief of staff in living memory was James Baker, a tough Texan lawyer, who served as top aide to both Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, ran both the Treasury and the State Department and finally shoe-horned George Bush Jr into the White House  amid the 2000 "spoiled vote" crisis in Florida. No one called Baker a Svengali. He was far too canny a player to have that tag hung round his beck.
 
In recent weeks Obama has been saying goodbye to two senior aides, Emanuel and Lawrence Summers, his chief White House economic advisor, another disaster. Prudent to a fault, he'll probably shirk the bold choices that could invigorate the White House in its current, beleaguered state. ·