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WHITE HOUSE PROFILE: Rahm Emanuel On The ‘Hot Seat’. Is Obama Ready To Cut Him Off? (The New York Times)
AS A DOZEN or so top White House officials gathered in Rahm Emanuel’s corner West Wing office one morning in early January, the president’s political director, Patrick Gaspard, reported on the latest poll numbers in Massachusetts. With less than two weeks until a special Senate election, the Republican candidate was gaining momentum — just nine percentage points behind the Democrat in a new Rasmussen survey. The Democrats were in danger of losing the seat held for nearly half a century by Senator Edward M. Kennedy
Emanuel, the provocative and profane White House chief of staff, slammed his hand down on the table and shook his head with seething exasperation. He did not yell, according to others in the meeting, but his thoughts were obvious. How had this happened? What the bleep was going on? He ordered calls made to Massachusetts and the Senate Democratic campaign committee to assess the situation. “We’ve got to get up there and take it over,” Emanuel told colleagues. As the election got closer, Emanuel and David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, arranged for President Obama to rush up to Massachusetts for a last-minute campaign trip.
It made no difference. The Republican, Scott Brown, who campaigned by driving a pickup truck around the state, was riding a tide of popular anger that would dramatically end the opening chapter of the Obama presidency. By the time Election Day arrived on Jan. 19, Emanuel tried to prepare the White House senior staff, during its 8:30 a.m. meeting in the Roosevelt Room, for the storm of second-guessing that was about to hit. “I’ve been in a White House before when we lost both the House and the Senate in ’94,” he said, according to notes taken separately by two people in the room. “In about 12 hours, we’re all going to be stupid. Like Axe says, you’re never as smart as they say you are when you win, and you’re not as stupid as they say you are when you lose. We were smart before. Now we’ll be stupid.”
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