FatherGarage.com

It is never stated openly. And certainly no one in the White House has gone on the record. But recent coverage of President Obama has implicitly asked the question in a sideways manner.

Was Rahm Emanuel to blame for the administration’s struggles?

The unspoken question has been posed in a spate of articles in the past several weeks about the successor to Mr. Emanuel, who served as Mr. Obama’s White House chief of staff for nearly two years until leaving to run for mayor of Chicago.

William Daley, the new chief of staff, has begun to put his stamp on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And his changes are inevitably reversing some of the decisions that Mr. Emanuel made.

A story by Anne E. Kornblut of The Washington Post this week described an effort by Mr. Daley’s White House to rebuild strained relationships with some members of Mr. Obama’s cabinet.

“You hear the same thing: ‘I don’t think we’re used well. I don’t think we’re consulted enough,’ ” Mr. Daley told Ms. Kornblut in an interview. “Whether it’s true or not, perception becomes reality, and I think there’s a desire to feel more part of a team.”

Mr. Daley steered well clear of pointing the finger at Mr. Emanuel. But the article makes clear that the new chief of staff is not wedded to running Mr. Obama’s White House the way Mr. Emanuel did. In fact, the story says Mr. Daley has been promising cabinet members that things will change.

A report by the Times’s Jackie Calmes offered a similar description of a White House that is ready to abandon some of Mr. Emanuel’s traditions.

The story noted that in the Emanuel era, last-minute changes to Mr. Obama’s Saturday radio addresses would keep speechwriters guessing until the last minute. That has changed under Mr. Daley, the article said.

So has the frenetic pace that Mr. Emanuel set — always by example. The story by Ms. Calmes described Mr. Emanuel as an “idea-a-minute dynamo who would dart from floor to floor trying to control matters mundane and major.”

“Rahm very much needed to do it all,” Mr. Daley told a group of reporters last month, according to the piece in The Times. “And I don’t have that need.”

It is the oldest trick in the political book: the incoming blames the outgoing. But it’s usually employed by one party against the other, as in Mr. Obama’s repeated efforts to blame his predecessor, George Bush, for the budget and foreign policy difficulties he faced in 2009.

In the case of Mr. Emanuel, there are few major policies being unwound. It is, after all, still Mr. Obama’s White House and Mr. Emanuel was charged with putting into effeect the president’s agenda — as Mr. Daley is now.

And let’s face it, a more disciplined approach to the Saturday radio address is not exactly a major change in an administration that is confronting questions about war, democracy abroad, record-setting debt and a still-fragile economy.

Rather, the new narrative about the White House has more to do with an atmosphere at the White House that appears to have changed. Pete Rouse, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers, took over briefly as chief of staff after Mr. Emanuel and before Mr. Daley’s arrival.

According to The Post story, Mr. Rouse told cabinet members, “We recognize that one thing we didn’t do well enough in the first two years was to use you.”

Interestingly, Mr. Emanuel is in a position to return the favor — just to a different Mr. Daley.

As the incoming mayor of Chicago, Mr. Emanuel will replace Richard M. Daley, the brother to the current White House chief of staff. Both men are Democrats, but part of Mr. Emanuel’s effort to establish himself as the leader of the Windy City will be to emphasize how things are going to change.

In a speech after winning the mayoral election, Mr. Emanuel walked the difficult line — praising the old, but calling for change.

“Rich Daley is the only mayor a whole generation of Chicagoans has known and an impossible act to follow,” Mr. Emanuel said, before pivoting. “Yet we have to move forward. And we know that we face serious new challenges — and overcoming them will not be easy.”

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

The Wikileaks story has spawned an understandable amount of debate. It has also proven to be a rare area of bipartisan agreement. Most responsible people — regardless of political party or ideology — believe the leaking of secret government documents is harmful to America, and must be stopped. A nation facing so many potential international [...]

The big story of the past week has involved citizen outrage over the Transportation Security Administration’s invasive body scanners, pat-downs, and heavy-handed tactics. To be sure, this is a tricky subject. We Americans, of course, do not surrender our constitutional rights simply because we enter an airport (though you wouldn’t know that if you were [...]

Breaking sharply from his defensive crouch following this month’s electoral “shellacking,” President Obama took a moment to celebrate some hard-won success on Thursday. The president championed his administration’s decision to rescue the troubled U.S. auto industry last spring, pointing to General Motors’ initial public offering (IPO) of its stock — one of the largest IPOs [...]

–Here’s Barry Ritholtz’s version of the letter Warren E. Buffett should have written to the United States government. It’s not quite so complimentary. –The Story of Monetary Policy: A Graphic Novel from The New York Federal Reserve. –Covert ops with your Blackberry. –Palin’s World. –Massachusetts: Where you want to be in the new economy. –Glencore: [...]

My colleague Bonnie Goldstein wrote an essay on these pages reminding us Gen-Xers that for all the swim lessons, college-essay-coaching and pitch-perfect birthday parties we can muster, we cannot always protect our children from catastrophe. It’s worth remembering that admonition as Elizabeth Smart takes the stand this week in the trial of Brian David Mitchell, [...]