Don’t blame it on Rahm

In a recent interview with CNN, senior White House adviser David Axelrod rebutted rumors that he is in a political feud with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Axelrod, a chief strategist in the Obama presidential campaign, created most of the Obama campaign's idealistic messages, including its famous slogans of "Hope" and "Change." It is not hard to imagine an idealist like Axelrod having a problem with Emanuel: the chief of staff is, as his job requires him to be, a realist and a pragmatist with a no B.S. approach to the complicated game of politics.

Not surprisingly, sources within the White House have indicated that Emanuel's pragmatism often loses out to Axelrod and company's "things-will-get-done-just-because-they-are-good-things" approach.

Inside sources have reported that in the summer of 2009, when the health care debate was starting to take shape, Emanuel insisted tirelessly that the White House wrote its own health care bill – one that Obama would sell personally to key members of Congress.

Evidently, the idealism Obama and his former campaign crew brought into the White House prevailed over Emanuel's strategy.

With his rejection of "politics as usual," Obama adopted his much-criticized "sidelines strategy" and let the debate drag on in Congress and open town hall meetings.

The result was a systematic loss of public support for health care reform and Obama himself, and the liberals' precious public option ended up going down the toilet.

The failure of idealistic politics is not unprecedented. In the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter made a point of adopting a "no-playing-politics" idealist philosophy that led to nothing but inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

The cost of Carter's idealism was the loss of a Democratic supermajority in the Senate in the middle of his term, followed by his loss of the re-election campaign to Ronald Reagan (who won in 44 states). The Democratic Senate supermajority under Obama lasted less than eight months, so this president had better hope history does not repeat itself entirely. 

Ironically, liberals upset over the healthcare charade have found a scapegoat in Rahm Emanuel. Recently, several groups in Obama's liberal base have criticized the chief of staff for his role in striking key deals with members of Congress regarding health care reform – namely limiting abortion coverage and prohibiting illegal aliens from purchasing health insurance in interstate exchanges. These liberals have pointed to these deals as evidence that it is Emanuel's pragmatism – not the idealism permeated in this administration – that is undermining progressive goals. 

Despite clear evidence that idealism has no place in politics, liberal idealists of Axelrod's "hope-that change-will-come" type have found fault in everyone but themselves: they have blamed congressional Republicans and Democrats, right and left-wing bloggers, the media, and now Rahm Emanuel for their own failure to implement a progressive agenda. 

In politics, no "change" happens just because one "hopes" it will happen. Likewise, no change happens because it is "good change."

Change happens when skilled and experienced politicians play the game of politics to implement change, and Rahm Emanuel may very well be the only politician in the White House capable of that.

As long as his pragmatism is undermined by idealism and "hope," the only "change" this country will see under Obama are Fox News's anchors becoming increasingly obnoxious.