unpopular take-
obama shoulda kept rhambo on staff. he needed an assassin.
i think esp his 1st term would have been more productive if he’d stayed on. i know lots of folks here hate him. but i never did.
he wanted to make compromises to get the aca that would have sucked. took a lot of shit for it. but i still think rahm was plugged into the power structure in a way that obama rly needed. and he would have had his foot up his ass on a lot of things where it would have been helpful.
ya know, 1 of the things that i wonder about- i have millennial kids. 1 thing about the games they played that struck me was that every party needed a couple of bad guys. you need a burglar.
i always found that interesting. a nuanced idea, imho. and rooted in the reality of the world.
and i cant say as i’ve ever seen a more dangerous burglar. i’m glad he’s not my neighbor, but…
obama should have kept him. i can see what a pita it must have been to have him in the wh.
but i cant help imagining the political corpses he would have left lyin around, and i cant help dreaming.
we all say we want a dem w a spine, but we hate them when we meet them.
= new reply since forum marked as read
so I guess it's understandable if the real man is undiscernible.
But I see someone to appreciate for what he is and why he's also deplored but never falls. Here's an at least two-dimensional view of some positives:
He's a Democrat and socially liberal and economically progressive. He's both economically competent and uses public funds as tools to address problems, especially those that have been growing for decades due to chronic underfunding. Subtracting the many places where our opinions might diverge, that's still a bottom line -- he falls on the right side of right. However pragmatic his approaches to problems, Democratic Party principles and his bosses (including voters) set boundaries that mostly contain him. And I just went and looked and found a huge dearth of claims that he's a corporate tool. He uses corporations.
He's enormously talented and capable, an achiever -- absolutely indispensable in public servants. Emanuel's been a mover and shaker behind more progressive achievements than anyone identifying as a capital-P Progressive because he applies his abilities from inside using inside power, including to help marshal outside power. I can (and have) sorta "forgiven" a lot for that. (Mind you, not something really bad like attempted election theft or mass deceit and betrayal of those who believed in him, but in this era it's important to note that Emanuel. has. never. done. anything. remotely. like. that.) But things like occasional mis- or inadequate handling of issues (Chicago has many huge, deeply embedded ones), in good part because of his record of both achievements and surviving to come through on others.
As for his style -- and that he's a liberal Democrat who can't be fit cozily into one group, can't be defined in a sentence, to me that's one of the best things about him. We always need differences, and the biggest, most important diversity to embrace is individualism in people. Few in public service epitomize "different" better than him. 
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
Rahm Emanuel
