Some liberal Democrats said that Emanuel and his team had made too many concessions to House Republicans, all of whom voted against the legislation. Meanwhile, conservatives complained that Obama had broken his pledge of bipartisan coöperation. Both
arguments infuriated Emanuel, who spent hours on the Hill during the negotiations, arranged private meetings with Obama in the Oval Office for the Republican senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter, whose votes were critical to the bill’s passage, and personally haggled over the smallest spending details during a crucial evening of bargaining that lasted until the early morning.
... As a senior aide in the Clinton White House, he successfully fought a Republican Congress to pass the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), which now provides health care for seven million kids. “I worked children’s health care,” he said. “President Clinton had pediatric care, eye, and dental, inside Medicaid. The Republicans had pediatric care, no eye and dental, outside of Medicaid. The deal Chris Jennings, Bruce Reed, and Rahm Emanuel cut for President Clinton was eye, dental, and pediatric, but the Republican way—outside of Medicaid. At that time, I was eviscerated by the left.” He slammed his fist on the desk, his voice rising. “I had sold out! Today, who are the greatest defenders of kids’ health care? The very people that opposed it when it passed,” Emanuel said. “Back then, you’d have thought I was a whore! How could we do this outside of Medicaid? They warned that it had to be in Medicaid—not that they gave a rat’s ass that the kid had eye or dental care. But, for getting it outside of Medicaid, we got kids’ eye and dental care. O.K.? That was the swap. Now, my view is that Krugman as an economist is not wrong. But in the art of the possible, of the deal, he is wrong. He couldn’t get his legislation.”
The stimulus bill was essentially held hostage to the whims of Collins, Snowe, and Specter, but if Al Franken, the apparent winner of the disputed Minnesota Senate race, had been seated in Washington, and if Ted Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer, had been regularly available to vote, the White House would have needed only one Republican to pass the measure. “No disrespect to Paul Krugman,” Emanuel went on, “but has he figured out how to seat the Minnesota senator?” (Franken’s victory is the subject of an ongoing court challenge by his opponent, Norm Coleman, which the national Republican Party has been happy to help finance.) “Write a fucking column on how to seat the son of a bitch. I would be fascinated with that column. O.K.?”
Obama’s decision to hire Emanuel says two things about his Presidency. First, like his decision to make Biden, an expert in foreign policy, his running mate, it shows that he is honest enough about what he doesn’t know to try to fill in the gaps in his own experience. There are people working for Obama who know as much as Emanuel does about the legislative process, and others who know as much as he does about running the White House, but there isn’t anybody who knows as much about both. Obama’s choice also says a great deal about the ethos of his White House. He recently characterized his team as a group of “mechanics,” which suggests an emphasis not on ideology but on details and problem-solving. In the Clinton White House, Emanuel’s specialty was helping to pass legislation that required centrist coalitions, like NAFTA, a crime bill, and welfare reform. “He’s a partisan in the sense that he’s a strong Democrat, but he’s not an ideological Democrat,” Stanley Greenberg said. “He’s not ideologically liberal. He comes out of Chicago politics, which is more transactional.”
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