Downside: It's long-ish.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/magazine/07congress-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hpVERY interesting connecting of political dots. EDIT: While the chess analogy might be getting a bit played out, it's hard to escape that picture, after reading this article.
A smattering:
Obama has people on the INSIDE of both houses of Congress:
"Part of Biden’s White House portfolio is to act as unofficial ambassador to the Senate, carrying information back and forth between his old colleagues and his new boss. During the recent debate over the budget, he walked onto the Senate floor and plopped himself down, uninvited, next to Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who as chairman of the powerful Finance Committee will be a central figure in the coming health care debates. Biden asked Baucus what he needed from the White House in order to get a health care bill through his committee, according to both men, and then the talkative Biden spent the better part of a half-hour simply listening quietly, promising as he left the chamber (“I give my word as a Biden,” he likes to say) to faithfully relay Baucus’s thoughts to the president. It was the kind of exchange that rarely took place in 1993, and it is a large part of why Obama’s team is optimistic about succeeding where Clinton failed."
"Emanuel has taken an unusually personal role in handling Congress. One of the first things he did as chief of staff was to give out his cellphone number to every Democratic senator (and some Republicans too), and he occasionally pops up on the House floor, jawing with one member or another. Like Biden, he still exercises on the Hill, at the House gym, mostly so he can jog next to members who might have a question or some new rumor to share. Emanuel’s wife and three children are still back in Chicago (they arrive in Washington later this month), and his social calendar is taken up by dinners with former House colleagues on both sides of the aisle, often at one of the trendy downtown restaurants he favors."
Obama is TACTICAL down to the nits:
"Of all the assets the White House has at its disposal, of course, none are more valuable than a three-dimensional president with a 60-plus-percent approval rating. Emanuel and I had been talking for just a few minutes when his office door suddenly burst open and the president strode in. I hadn’t seen Obama since interviewing him last September on the day when the stock market crashed (John McCain crashed soon after), so I congratulated him belatedly, and he chatted amiably for a few minutes, appearing entirely untroubled in the midst of the myriad crises facing his administration. Fumbling clumsily to button my suit coat as I stood in his presence, I was reminded of how different it is to talk with someone who has actually assumed the historical weight of the presidency, even if you’ve spoken with him before. Emanuel knows this phenomenon is as real for senators and congressmen as it is for reporters, which is why he choreographs the same kind of “spontaneous” drop-bys when members comes to see him. “I’ll have a lunch here, and he’ll come by to say hi to Susan Collins the way he came by to see you,” Emanuel told me after Obama departed, referring to the senator from Maine. “It’s an efficient use of his time.”"
Obama is THE BOSS:
"A hallmark of Obama’s style, in these early months, has been to meet with key senators alone, without the phalanx of aides who almost always attend Oval Office meetings. Three senators with whom I spoke, including Baucus, had been impressed by this tactic; it implies equality between the branches of government and enables Obama to establish personal relationships more quickly than he otherwise might. (“You been hunting lately?” Obama asked Ben Nelson when the Nebraska senator walked into the Oval Office and found himself, much to his surprise, alone with the president.) Advisers, of course, generally hate for their bosses to meet by themselves; the general rule among aides is that you should never leave politicians in a room alone where they might say or agree to something that can’t easily be reversed. When I asked Emanuel if he would prefer that the president have someone around while negotiating with individual lawmakers, he smiled tightly. “I prefer whatever he prefers,” the chief of staff said, sounding uncharacteristically diplomatic."
Obama keeps on WINNING:
"EMANUEL MAY HAVE been the one doing the shouting, but the House and Senate negotiators have reserved most of their rancor for one another. As a result, friction between House and Senate Democrats now seems to have reached a point where they might want to build their own virtual fence down the middle of the rotunda. And yet Obama has, thus far, gotten more or less what he wants out of the deal. Far from finding his path obstructed by centrist senators, in fact, Obama seems to be running a sophisticated game in which those senators are actually doing him a significant political favor. Thanks to them, Obama doesn’t have to pick any fights over spending or ideology with the liberal leaders in the House or with outside interest groups on the left, even when he thinks they’ve given in to excesses that will serve as fodder for his conservative critics. Rather, he simply encourages the House to go wild, and then he relies on centrists in the Senate to do the unpleasant work of scaling back the legislation, which yields a more politically palatable bill and one that’s probably more in keeping with his own essentially pragmatic philosophy anyway. And while House and Senate leaders may end up wanting to throttle one another, Obama gets to play the reluctant arbiter between the two, rather than actually having to challenge his base."
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