Rahm: I never believed in bipartisanship

By Greg Sargent

Is the left's enduring caricature of Rahm Emanuel -- as the primary advocate for the White House's futile and self-damaging quest for bipartisanship -- all wrong?

In a new book, Rahm claims he privately argued to Obama that he shouldn't pursue bipartisan support for health reform, because it would take too much time, instead insisting that the lesson of Clinton's failure to pass reform was that it was imperative to put a premium on getting it done quickly. That cuts strongly against the image of Rahm as the chief internal advocate of the White House's strategy of deal-making and accommodation with Republicans.

Rahm makes the claim in interviews with journalist Richard Wolffe, in his new book, "Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House," which was released today. From page 102:

Unlike his boss, Emanuel wasn't interested in looking reasonable with Republicans; he wanted to look victorious. He didn't care much for uniting red and blue America; he wanted blue America to beat its red rival... Obama was prepared to sacrifice time and political capital to make his policy bipartisan and more ambitious; Emanuel believed Obama did not have that luxury. "Time is your commodity. That answers everything," Emanuel said. "But a lot of us thought we didn't have the amount of time that was being dedicated. If you abandon the bipartisan talks you get blamed. He still wanted to try to achieve it that way. But that's one of a series of things you can look back on and be a genius about. "My job as chief of staff is to give him 180-degree advice. He hired me, as he asked, to learn from the past, or to use my knowledge from my time in Congress and in the Clinton administration. Watching '94, watching '97 when we did kids' health care, and then studying Medicare, what were the lessons? The lesson about time as a commodity is not mine, it's Lyndon Johnson's. You got X amount of time; you gotta use it."

The decision to waste time chasing bipartisan support for health reform was clearly one of the mistakes that led to health care being such a big political liability for Dems. It extended the whole mess by months and months, which gave opponents more time to demagogue the bill and scare voters and helped turn the public against the process. Rahm seems to be suggesting here that he foresaw something like this happening, and argued against the futile quest for bipartisan support, which is certainly not the view of his legacy in the White House that has endured.

UPDATE, 2:41 p.m.: Another fascinating revelation from the book details how futile it was for Obama to pursue Chuck Grassley's support.

