He has also been at odds with minority caucuses within the Democratic fold in the House. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus say he does not pay attention to their issues. Hispanic lawmakers blame him for a provision inserted into the Senate health care legislation that would bar illegal immigrants from buying policies on new insurance exchanges even with their own money, and they complain that he is not putting any energy behind liberalizing immigration laws. “There are strong feelings about Rahm Emanuel among members of the Hispanic caucus,” Representative Nydia Velázquez of New York, the head of the caucus, told me. “People feel Rahm Emanuel has not been helpful in moving forward. He’s always about the numbers. He’s always about being the pragmatist. He’s always about winning.”

More loyal, personally at least, have been the members of the class of 2006 that he helped bring into office, many of them in traditionally conservative districts. Even those who disagreed with Emanuel vouch for him. “It’s unfair for people to point the finger solely at him,” says Altmire, the congressman who voted against health care. “There’s a lot of blame to go around when things like this happen. Everybody’s looking for a scapegoat.” And it is clear that Emanuel has these members’ interests at heart as he measures how far to push. He hears all the time from moderates in the House worried about the direction the president is leading them. “We call him up and say, ‘Hey, Rahm, you’ve got to push this back to the middle,’ ” Representative Heath Shuler of North Carolina told me. “He always says: ‘I hear you. I hear everything you’re saying. I’m doing everything I can.’ ”

In a way, this is a problem of his own creation. Had he not helped so many moderates win their elections in 2006, perhaps he would not have to cater to them so much, or so the theory goes. On the other hand, he and his allies point out, without those moderates, Democrats might not even control the House, making the point moot. “I analogize Rahm to Gumby: he’s got the White House grabbing both hands, both Houses grabbing both legs, all pulling in different directions,” Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida congresswoman and chief deputy whip, says. “He’s really being pulled between the bold views of the president and the mechanical reality of the Congress, which is very incremental and often slow.”

AS FRENETIC AS Emanuel is, the pace and the struggle are wearing on him in a way that friends do not recall seeing before. His nature is to be involved in everything — “Rahm can do everybody’s job and some days does,” says another White House official. While Obama has made a point of organizing his own schedule to be family-friendly, Emanuel is often at the office when the president arrives and still there when he leaves. A friend recalled a dinner party just before Christmas when Emanuel seemed on the verge of exhaustion. “He was just lying on the sofa on a Saturday night, saying, ‘I’m so tired, I’m so tired,’ ” the friend told me. The setbacks and the mounting attacks have only worsened since then. “I can see it in his eyes,” says Shuler, who runs into him at the House gym, where Emanuel still works out as early as 5:30 most mornings. “It’s taking a toll on him.”

For Emanuel, the last two months have been particularly frustrating. He finished last year boasting that Obama had the most productive first year of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and now he hears all the time about Obama’s lost first year. Emanuel for months has reminded anyone who would listen of a succession of victories that, he laments, have gone largely overlooked — besides the stimulus, he points to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act expanding the right of women to sue over pay inequities; new authority for the federal government to regulate tobacco products and advertising; broader consumer protections for credit-card users; and expansion of health care coverage for children in low-income families. All of which is true enough, but they all passed in the first half of last year. It is far harder to name examples of major legislation signed into law in the past nine months.

Ever since the Massachusetts election upended their plans, Obama and Emanuel have tried to find a new path. At first, Obama sounded populist themes, hoping to tap into the anger that propelled Scott Brown to victory. But Emanuel worried that the tone was too sharp and organized a series of encounters with business leaders and business journalists to position the president more carefully as someone who shares voters’ frustration but also supports economic growth and the free market. Emanuel is said to figure that Americans still mostly like Obama and think he is on their side. “He is not seen as part of the Washington problem,” says a senior White House official. “In fact, if anything, he is seen as trying to clean it up, and the question about him is does he have the swat to get it done.” Emanuel tells colleagues that the outsider brand represents Obama’s most powerful asset, and protecting it is Emanuel’s top political priority.

To guard that reputation, Obama has spent more time traveling outside the Beltway and trying unconventional things like engaging Republicans in live televised discussions about health care and other issues. The hope is that voters will appreciate his seriousness. If at the same time, he triangulates between Congressional Republicans and Democrats a little, just as Clinton did when Emanuel was in his White House, so be it. The newfound drive for bipartisan cooperation, of course, is as much tactical as anything else. To be sure, if Republicans suddenly signed onto Obama’s legislative priorities, he would be happy to have them. But the main point is to look bipartisan to the public, particularly the independents drifting away from Democrats since Obama’s inauguration. “Rahm thinks bipartisanship is a way to get what you want — to fake bipartisanship to get what you want,” a senior administration official told me. “He understands that’s a better way to get things done than to be nakedly partisan.”