I'm assuming that, by now, most of you will have readthis piece on HuffPo, claiming that 2 sources have told them of Rahm Emanuel's pressing Sen Reid to cave to Sen Lieberman.
Rahm Emanuel visited Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in his Capitol office on Sunday evening and personally urged him to cut a deal with recalcitrant Sen. Joe Lieberman, two Democratic sources familiar with the situation told the Huffington Post.
Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff, has long been identified as leading a faction of White House advisers who have been pushing the Senate simply to pass any health care bill, no matter how weak.
His direct message to Reid (D-Nev.), according to a source close to the negotiations: "Get it done. Just get it done."
We can't get rid of Lieberman until 2012, we can't get rid of Reid until next year, but with sufficient pressure, the architect of the death of the Public Option - Rahm Emanuel - could be gone by Christmas.
I was originally in favour of Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff - for all the ideological differences, he struck me as a pugilist and a pragmatist: a man who would get things done.
The fear, we thought in November, was not that the Republicans would pose a problem, but that the massive Democratic caucus in both chambers would prove unweildy for a new President. Rahmbo was the hardman, the strong-armer and bullyboy, who would twist some arms and keep the Democratic Party in line.
The diagnosis of the problem was reasonably accurate, but the medicine has proven to be as putrid as the disease. Rather than employing his fabled Machiavellian powers of manipulation to overcome the obstinant mules in the Senate's Democratic caucus, Emanuel has acted as an enabler only of Senate Majority Leader Reid's innate weakness.
Reid, who is not exactly 'Master of the Senate' (a la LBJ) - indeed, one suspects he would struggle to be Master of his own Barbeque Grill' - has unsurprisingly overlooked his hold over Lieberman (who only enjoys a Committee Chairmanship at Reid's largesse) and sold away the only saving grace of a Senate Healthcare Reform Bill that was as anaemic as it was long. One imagines that it wouldn't even have taken Emanuel's archetypal spittle-flecked, expletive-ridden ranting to convince him that forgetting the Medicare expansion (which Lieberman claimed to support in September) was necessary to placate the Connecticut Condependent.
Rahm Emanuel has proven himself to be little more than a Poor Man's Donald Regan. Unable to work over Senators Lieberman, Lincoln, Bayh, Nelson; unable to ensure some semblance of discipline within the Democratic Party on a manifesto pledge; unable, in short, to do the one job that he was expected to do.
I am not surprised by the venal and self-aggrandising pomposity of Lieberman. Nor am I surprised at the cowardice and insipid leadership of Reid. I am, if not surprised then, at least disappointed that Rahm Emanuel proved to be as effective as a chocolate fireguard on an issue that for 50 years Democrats had tried to radically reshape.
President Obama is perhaps not especially to blame - I can believe that he was ill-advised, surrounded by people with fewer convictions than a State Penitentiary canteen, and facing a truculent and malevolent cadre of faux-Democrats in the Senate. But Obama knows that this will enrage the Progressives, and at the very least will need to make a token peace offering to keep some of us onside. He won't want to give away anything on policy, and he won't like to admit a mistake, so let's make this as quick and painless as possible for him.
I've decided on the minimum peace offering I'd like. It won't make up for losing the public option, and it doesn't begin to repay the anger that most Kossacks are feeling, but as a small token gesture...I want the head of Rahm Emanuel on a proverbial silver platter by Christmas.
Say it's a resignation, say he wants to spend more time with his family, but this is what I want. The President can't give us Lieberman, and he won't give us Reid, but Emanuel's forced resignation is within his gift.
If nothing else, it will make the White House a more progressive place, and it might show some pragmatism-before-ideals Democrats that, even if we lose, we will extract a price which you will pay.
Who's with me?