With Rahm Emanuel being offered chief of staff and Larry Summers possibly reprising his role as Treasury Secretary, a lot of liberals I know are beginning to worry that the Obama administration will simply prove a retread of the Clinton administration. And it's a fair concern. But when thinking that through, you have to ask yourself if the failures of the Clinton administration were primarily ideological or primarily political. There's one school of thought that brands them unambitious centrists and understands the failures of and lack of lasting legacy as a consequence of insufficient ideological audacity. Then there's another that sees an administration that entered without Washington experience, endured a string of political failures (most notably health care), lost the Congress, and thus had no choice but to clip their own wings and play a defensive game against the Republican Revolution. The truth is probably in the middle, but I'd say it's a bit closer to the latter than the former. If Clinton had passed health care, he would be remembered, today, as one of the 20th Century's great leaders. The 1994 midterm elections would have been much closer. If the 1994 midterm elections had been much closer, he would have had the votes for other large priorities. And so on down the line. But he did not pass health reform. And his failure was in no small part a political failure driven by an inexperienced staff and an insufficient respect for the primacy of politics -- as opposed to policy -- in legislative reform. The question with folks like Emanuel and Summers is which lesson Obama is suggesting he's learned. One lesson is that the politics comes first. Summers knows how to run, and work within, the Treasury Department. Emanuel knows how to get things done in both the executive branch and the Congress. Both could be seen as ruthless doers, embodiments of a political style that understands you must master Washington to pass your agenda. Or you could situate them in the eventual ideology of late-term Clintonism -- the idea that safety was in the center, and grand projects were to be feared. The question, in other words, is whether Summers and Emanuel an effort to avoid the mistakes that forced the Clinton administration into a constrained second term or a quiet admission of the realist wisdom in the second-term strategy. My hunch, given Obama's public statements and the reality of the political moment, is that we're looking at the former. But it's hard to know.
