If you remember, Rahm Emanuel noted after the 2008 election that the Obama administration should not fail to seize crises as opportunities. The administration did it with the stimulus, they’ve tried with cap and trade, and now they are trying with healthcare.

My friend Greg Mueller suggests the strategy is failing.

Obama’s “opportunity in crisis” agenda initially lost him the Republican vote he won during the election.

Fast-forward a few months and polls now show how independent voters are drifting away from the president.

As the guns of August sound over health care policy, Obama’s government takeover of health care is on the ropes and being met with grassroots intensity not seen since the immigration debate. So how are Obama and his fellow Chicago politicos in the White House confronting the dropping polls and increased angst among the electorate? They’re attacking Americans protesting at town hall meetings, attacking debate, essentially attacking free speech.

Greg rightly notes that now Republicans have an opportunity because of Obama trying to take advantage of crisis.

If so, the New York Daily News is being rather artful about it:

Meanwhile, people have been speculating with vengeance since we told you about the former Davis escort who contends Spitzer wasn’t the only governor she romped with. On Friday, when Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell’s spokesman Chuck Ardo resigned, Ardo insisted his retirement had nothing to do with Gawker and other sites putting Rendell on their short list of pols who may be Governor X. Ardo told The D.C. Write Up that Rendell is not the new luv guv - “no way, no how, no place, no time.”

Many seem to be aching for X to be Arnold Schwarzenneger. While we’re continuing to investigate the escort’s highly detailed story of her three “dates” with him, we won’t identify the chief exec with the prominent wife. But we will say this: it ain’t California’s Governator.

So Gov. Rendell’s former PR flack’s denial that his former boss patronizes prostitutes gets reported without comment - while unnamed rumors that it was actually Gov. Schwarzenegger get firmly and unequivocally debunked.  Either way, absolutely deniable on the Daily News’ part.

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Congressman Henry Waxman is in charge of developing health care overhaul legislation that can pass the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He’s not having much success, as a few moderate Democrats have insisted on cost-cutting measures. Today Waxman made clear that he’s willing to make en end-run around the moderates, and bring his radical legislation straight to the House floor.

In doing so, he made an interesting promise:

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) told reporters Friday he is prepared to bypass his committee and go straight to the House floor with a health care reform bill if he can’t get an agreement with Blue Dog Democrats.

Waxman said his preference is to reach a deal with the Blue Dogs, whom he is meeting with this afternoon, and “go forward with the markup and stand together as Democrats.”

But he added, “If we can’t, then it’s my view that we are going to have to look at perhaps bypassing the committee — I hope we don’t come to that conclusion…”

“I think this would deal with their issues,” Waxman said. “I hope they will agree to let our committee go forward with a markup and not [allow] Republicans to eviscerate the legislation.

“In fact I won’t allow that — to turn over the control of the committee to the Republicans — which is what they have threatened to do.”

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When President Obama selected Rahm Emanuel to serve as White House Chief of Staff, most commentators hailed it as a coup. We were told that Rahm was brilliant, and that his love for brass-knuckles politics would prove invaluable in moving the president’s agenda through Congress. As a veteran of the Clinton White House, he would be sure not to repeat the mistakes Clinton made early in 1993. And because Rahm had come from the House of Representatives, and had been DCCC chair when the Democrats won a majority in the House, scores of Democrats would listen to him. Love him or hate him, all were confident that Rahm would be effective.

Is it too early to ask if something went wrong?

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It’s like this administration goes out of its way to lower expectations (via Andrew Malcolm):

(They spelled the President’s name as ‘Barak Obama.’ On an official diplomatic agreement.)

This is what happens when you use spellcheck as a crutch; at a guess, somebody added “Ehud Barak” to the relevant computer’s custom dictionary a while back, thus making certain that the little red dots didn’t appear under the President’s misspelled name. And then nobody bothered to do three full re-readings of the document, using two different people. And the Chief of Staff is apparently too busy failing to live up to expectations for 2010 recruitment to live up to expectations for keeping the White House staff on its toes.

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Note: I was asked why I’m posting the full list if we’re less than 12 votes away from beating Obama on this. The reason is because over the weekend I expect the Democrats to pull some tricks and make some promises to wavering Blue Dogs. We need to keep the pressure up today so they don’t go wobbly over the weekend.

Get on the phone ASAP. The vote has not happened and it looks like it won’t until next week. Why? Because we are bringing pressure to bear and the Democrats are having a very hard time keeping a majority on the legislation.

We absolutely cannot falter on this. We must keep up the continuous pressure headed into the weekend. See the list of names below and call, call, call.

We should not be bailing out European national banks. We are less than a dozen votes away from being able to kill this. Call these members of Congress ASAP.

Call the members of Congress below. Ask each one to vote against H.R. 2346, the 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act.

Let us know in the comments what each one says.

It is bad enough that we’re bailing out domestic banks. Barack Obama now wants to bail out European banks via funding for the International Monetary Fund (”IMF”).

Humorously, there is a unique coalition forming on this because part of the legislation is also tied to war funding and the Graham-Lieberman amendment to stop the release of photos showing alleged torture. The whole thing has gotten rather convoluted. The Republicans in the House will probably vote against it en masse.

The Blue Dog Democrats are being forced to vote for it by Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi, but the pressure is only just mounting. If we mount pressure now by calling them and pinning them down, they’ll most likely change their mind and side with the GOP. There are enough of them to kill it.

Additionally, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are going to grind the Senate to a halt unless their amendment to prohibit the release of the photos gets enacted into law one way or the other. So one way or the other we’ll still get Graham-Lieberman, which is a good thing.

Call the members of Congress below. Ask each one to vote against H.R. 2346, the 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act.

Let us know in the comments what each one says.

Articles on personality conflicts do not end up getting great exposure in the New York Times by coincidence. Someone has to push the story. Someone has to give the story credibility. And someone has to get sources to talk.

That is why Larry Summers should be starting his own death watch this morning. Jackie Calmes paints a picture of a sell out hindering the economic recovery of America. With unemployment numbers coming in even higher than what Obama said they’d be if his stimulus did not pass, someone must be made the scapegoat. Scapegoat, thy name is Larry.

How do I know it is Rahm Emanuel? Well, there are a couple of reasons why I know it.

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As the scandal over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s and other top Congressional Democrats’ bald-faced lies to the American people about what and when they knew of enhanced interrogation techniques enters its second week, questions are beginning to be raised about the Obama Administration’s role in the release of information contradicting Pelosi’s account of briefings she received.  Specifically, inquiring minds are wondering whether the White House signed off on CIA Director Leon Panetta’s internal agency memo responding to Pelosi’s accusation that the CIA had misled Congress in its briefings on the techniques.

That question has been answered.  The White House knew about the memo, and alerted Pelosi that it was going public.

“The Central Intelligence Agency gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., advanced warning before CIA Chief Leon Panetta sent a memo to employees at the spy agency that countered Pelosi’s claim that the agency lied to Congress about waterboarding.

A CIA official, but not Panetta, made the call to Pelosi. [...]

The aide said Pelosi protested Panetta’s memo on the call to no avail.”

Now, new questions are raised.  Pelosi must surely be wondering why a president of her own party is allowing the release of information that will make her look bad in the press; why he is remaining silent on the issue; and why he is taking no action to try and stem the feeding frenzy surrounding her.

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The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz has let the cat out of the bag in the Post’s April 27 issue about a regularly scheduled secret media dinner attended by some of the top left-wing journalists in the country. But it isn’t just the lefty scribblers that have attended these secret, off-the-record dinners for these gatherings have each featured a guest. Rahm Emanuel, Sec. of the Treasury Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have all recently had their chance to schmooze the press and guide them with the spin desired by the White House.

So, not only does Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have secret daily phone calls with which to program the media’s coverage of the White House, now it is revealed that Emanuel and other Obama staffers have been attending secret dinners to help the press “understand” what the White House wants reported? As Kurtz says, it all sounds “rather cozy,” doesn’t it?

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Dan Balz looks at the White House’s clumsy handling of the debate over terrorist interrogation. Interestingly, there’s no hint - either from Balz’s piece or from other administration officials - that the President’s change of position was intentional. Read the piece and judge for yourself:

The legacy of George W. Bush continued to dog President Obama and his administration yesterday, as Congress divided over creating a panel to investigate the harsh interrogation techniques employed under Bush’s authorization and the White House tried to contain the controversy over the president’s decision to release Justice Department memos justifying and outlining those procedures.

Obama had hoped to put the whole matter behind him, first by banning those interrogation methods early in his presidency and then by releasing the memos last week with the proviso that no CIA official who carried out interrogations should be prosecuted.

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Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett appeared to get a “he’s blowing it” email from someone during tonight’s press conference.

On Saturday afternoon, in the midst of Chicago’s famous St. Patrick’s Day celebration with its tradition of turning of the Chicago River green, a cadre of concerned Republicans met to plan a way to capture the Congressional seat of Chicago’s 5th District, the one being vacated by Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

The candidate charged with this task is Rosanna Pulido and she only has about three weeks to do it. The special election for Emanuel’s seat is to be held as soon as April 7th.

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“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems — be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area — things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.”

Rahm Emanuel, 19 November 2008

There is an unsettling perception emerging that the Obama Administration, far from seeking to define and control the current economic crisis is actually seeking to use this crisis as a stalking horse for its legislative agenda. It is hard, for instance, to look at the trillion dollars in new spending proposed by the Obama administration that has little to do with either fixing the systemic problems which got us here or stimulating new economic activity and everything to do with expanding the scope and reach of the federal government.

One could attribute the statement by Obama’s diminutive chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to the hubris of a bare knuckles pol who knows he will be at the right hand of the most powerful man in the world. Lately, though, it there is increasing evidence that Emanuel’s statement reflects the governing philosophy of the Obama Administration.

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Remember ABC host George Stephanopoulos’s claim last Sunday that House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) was rushing to repudiate Rush Limbaugh himself, along with Limbaugh’s willingness to fight for conservative principles and for American (rather than Obaman) success?

Well, it looks like the Democratic National Committee needs to start getting in on the daily strategy calls between Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) and Obama surrogatesmainstream media figures like Stephanopoulos, because DNC executive director Jen O’Malley Dillon appears to be singing from a different sheet of music than the rest of the DNC operatives mainstream media types out there.

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Unfortunately, I have to disagree with EPU and everyone else that the Democrats picking Rush as their current target for destruction now that Dubya is back in Crawford for good “can’t possibly end well” for them. I personally think it can, and that actually, if things continue the way they’re going, we’re going to find ourselves talking about how to mitigate the damage somewhere down the line.

The main disadvantage of being a politics junkie interacting so often with other politics junkies is that you tend to forget that you’re far from the typical voter.

It’s not so much what Rush says, or the fact that he’s what the media and their menagerie of tame “Republicans” like David Brooks consider “controversial.” To me, those are all positives, especially when you add the fact that, unlike Bush, he bites back.

But ultimately the issue here is tactics and strategy. Rush hitting back, daring Barack Obama to debate him, taking Michael Steele to the woodshed, defending his “failure” comments, etc. is all well and good. Except that he’s doing it only on his show. Which, I suspect, is exactly what Rahm Emanuel and the rest of his crew were counting on.

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No, I don’t have any updates to the FBI investigation of former Congressman Mahoney (D, FL-16) and whether he used campaign funds to pay off one of his mistresses, sorry. That’s going to be a quiet kind of story until the FBI finishes said investigation; after all, Mahoney was brutally sacrificed to the media gods by the Democratic Party desperate to have that story not derail their 2008 Congressional campaign. People who may find themselves accused of anything similar, please note: don’t count on a payback for your loyalty - even if you happen to be innocent, which Mahoney was almost certainly not.

Which brings me to my next point. Rahm Emanuel. Name was linked to Mahoney’s back then - something about sanitizing the record - but nobody in the media was interested in pushing on that for very long. But now that Rep. Emanuel is COS Emanuel, and now that we’re reminded that Emanuel’s a Freddie Mac guy who entered into lucrative contracts on the DCCC’s behalf with his landlord’s polling firm (it’s claimed that it was a complete coincidence that he wasn’t paying rent), one does have to ask: what, exactly, did Rahm Emanuel have to do with Tim Mahoney’s little payoff problem?

And can we get an answer under oath? I only ask because there’s been an awful lot of Democrats Behaving Badly stories in the news lately.

Moe Lane

Crossposted at Moe Lane.

Funny how this sort of thing takes forever to make the papers. From Dick Morris and Eileen McGann:

RAHM’S ‘RENT’ IS JUST THE TIP OF ETHICS ICEBERG

[snip]

Consider: Emanuel served on the Freddie Mac board of directors during the time that the government-backed lender lied about its earnings, a leading contributor to the current economic meltdown.

The Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Agency later singled out the Freddie Mac board as contributing to the fraud in 2000 and 2001 for “failing in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention.” In other words, board members ignored the red flags waving in their faces.

The SEC later fined Freddie $50 million for its deliberate fraud in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

Meanwhile, Emanuel was paid more than $260,000 for his Freddie “service.” Plus, after he resigned from the board to run for Congress in 2002, the troubled agency’s PAC gave his campaign $25,000 - its largest single gift to a House candidate.

That’s what friends are for, isn’t it?

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McCain is raising money for his 2010 run. He’s been damn good on the stimulus issue.

On Tuesday, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee sent out a fundraising solicitation to subscribers to johnmccain.com asking for donations to his 2010 Senate re-election campaign.

Jim Gerlach (R-PA) may run for Governor in 2010:

Rep. Jim Gerlach’s (R-Pa.) possible departure from the House to run for governor in 2010 may finally be the opening that Democrats are looking for to pick up his suburban Philadelphia seat.

That’s probably not a terrible thing, though it could be a Democrat pick up. His district will probably cease to exist in 2011 after the census. Pennsylvania will lose one seat.

Read on for more race roundups.

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I read with some interest (via the Corner’s Mark Hemingway) the report that Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel never paid rent on his five year stay with Congresswoman DeLauro, who just happens to be married to a pollster…

The White House chief of staff said this week that he did not pay rent during the five years he bunked at the Capitol Hill home of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn). But that raises questions whether Emanuel reported the rent-free lodging to Congress, since DeLauro is married to pollster Stan Greenberg. And will either of the parties report what could be “imputed income” to the IRS? Reps for Emanuel and DeLauro argue that House Ethics rules allow “hospitality between colleagues.”

…who also just happens to be the Chairman of a polling company that had Rep. Emanuel and the DCCC as clients. As you can see, they’re claiming that this wasn’t a commerical transaction at all - and thus not taxable, which is suddenly a burning issue among Obama staffers. You can believe as much of that as you like, of course: for my own part, I take this as an indication that maybe John Edwards was right all along. Maybe there really are two Americas: there’s the America where people pay their taxes and disclose their income without engaging in undue shenanigans, and then there’s the America that Democratic politicians live in. Speaking as someone who lives in the first America, let me make the denizens of the second one aware of something: we tolerate this sort of thing only when times are good.

Times are not good.

Moe Lane

PS: Please, by all means: try the “but it was technically legal!” defense. That always works so well with people who don’t have a Congressman’s influence and pull.

Crossposted at Moe Lane.