by Stephen Zunes

I had really wanted to celebrate Barack Obama’s remarkable victory for
a day or so before becoming cynical again. I really did.

And yet, less than 24 hours after the first polls closed, the
president-elect chose as his chief of staff–perhaps the most
powerful single position in any administration–Rahm Emanuel, one of
the most conservative Democratic members of Congress.

The chief of staff essentially acts as the president’s gatekeeper,
determining with whom he has access for advice and analysis. Obama is
known as a good listener who has been open to hearing from and
considering the perspectives of those on the Left as well as those
with a more centrist to conservative perspective. How much access he
will actually have as president to more progressive voices, however,
is now seriously in question.

Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel is a member of the so-called New
Democrat Coalition (NDC), of group of center-right pro-business
Congressional Democrats affiliated with the Democratic Leadership
Conference, which is dedicated to moving the Democratic Party away
from its more liberal and progressive base. Numbering only 58 members
out of 236 Democrats in the current House of Representatives, the NDC
has worked closely with its Republican colleagues in pushing through
and passing such legislation as those providing President Bush with
“fast-track” trade authority in order to bypass efforts by labor,
environmentalists and other public interest groups to promote fairer
trade policy.

Emanuel began his political career as a senior adviser and chief
fundraiser for the successful 1989 Chicago mayoral campaign of Richard
M. Daley to seize back City Hall from reformists who had challenged
the corrupt political machine of his father, Richard J. Daley. Emanuel
later became a senior adviser to Bill Clinton at the White House from
1993 to 1998, serving as Assistant to the President for Political
Affairs and then Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and
Strategy, and was credited with playing a major role in shifting the
Clinton administration’s foreign and domestic policy agenda to the
right. Emanuel was the single most important official involved in
pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the
bill ending Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and
Clinton’s draconian crime bill, among other legislation.

Leaving the administration in 1998, Emanuel worked as an investment
banker in Chicago, where he amassed an $18 million fortune in less
than three years prior to being elected to Congress.

As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since 2004,
Emanuel has promoted pro-war and pro-business center-right candidates
against anti-war and pro-labor candidates in the primaries, pouring
millions of dollars of donations from Democrats across the country
into the campaigns of his favored conservative minions to defeat more
progressive challengers.

Emanuel was a major supporter of the Iraq War resolution that
authorized the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, he was the only one of nine
Democratic members of Congress from Illinois who backed granting Bush
this unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of
the world that was no threat to the United States at the time. Even
more disturbingly, when asked by Tim Russert on “Meet the Press”
whether he would have voted to authorize the invasion “knowing that
there are no weapons of mass destruction,” Emanuel answered that he
indeed would have done so, effectively acknowledging that his support
for the war was not about national security, but about oil and empire.
Not surprisingly, he has also voted with the Republicans in support of
unconditional funding to continue the Iraq War and has consistently
opposed efforts by other Democrats to set a timetable for the
withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from that country and related
Congressional efforts to end the war.

At a time of record budget deficits, Emanuel has been a passionate
supporter of increased spending for the Pentagon and has resisted
efforts by fellow Democrats to trim excesses in the Bush
administration’s bloated military budget. For example, he has
repeatedly voted against amendments to cut funding for Bush’s
dangerously destabilizing missile defense and even voted against an
amendment to identify unnecessary Pentagon spending by examining the
need, relevance and cost of Cold War weapons systems designed to fight
the former Soviet Union.

A major hawk regarding Iran, Emanuel has also voted against Democratic
efforts to prevent the Bush administration from launching military
action against that country and has joined the administration in
exaggerated claims about Iran’s alleged nuclear threat. He is not
opposed to nuclear proliferation if it involves U.S. allies, however.
Emanuel has consistently voted against a series of Democratic
amendments that would have strengthened safeguards in the Bush
administration’s nuclear cooperation agreement with India to prevent
U.S. assistance from supporting India’s nuclear weapons program.

Emanuel is also a prominent hawk regarding Israel, attacking the Bush
administration from the right for criticizing Israel’s assassination
policies and other human rights abuses. He was also a prominent
supporter of Israel’s 2006 attacks on Lebanon, even challenging the
credibility of Amnesty International and other human rights groups
that reported Israeli violations of international humanitarian law.
Emanuel’s father had emigrated from Israel in the 1950s, where he had
been a member of the terrorist group Irgun, which had been responsible
for a series of attacks against Palestinian and British civilians in
mandatory Palestine during the 1940s. Rahm Emanuel himself served in a
civilian capacity as a volunteer for the Israeli army in the early
1990s.

It is unclear how serious of a blow Obama’s selection of Emanuel is to
those who hoped that Obama might actually steer the country in a more
progressive direction. It’s easy to see it as nothing less than a slap
in the face of the progressive anti-war elements of the party to whom
Obama owes his election, particularly following his selection of Sen.
Joe Biden as vice president. (See my articles on Biden:

However, this does not necessarily mean that Obama as president will
pursue nothing better than a Clintonesque center-right agenda. Someone
with Obama’s intelligence, knowledge and leadership qualities need not
be unduly restricted by the influence of his chief of staff as less
able presidents have. At the same time, this shocking appointment of
Emanuel is illustrative of the need for the progressive base that
brought him to power to not celebrate too long and to refocus our
energies into pushing hard to ensure that the change Obama promised is
something we really can believe in.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern
Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior
policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.
http://www.alternet.org/story/106189/