Longtime Newsweek senior editor and columnist Jonathan Alter, author of the bestselling book "The Promise: President Obama, Year One," which offers a vivid behind-the-scenes look at the Obama presidency, sat down with Newsmax on Thursday to share his insights into how the departure of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel will influence the Obama administration going forward. The veteran NBC contributing correspondent also discussed whether Republicans have peaked too early to sustain their momentum through the midterm elections.
Newsmax: Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was obviously the pragmatic, energetic voice in the White House. Should we be concerned that without him the administration will be pulled gravitationally to the left?
Jonathan Alter: No. And the reason why is the same reason that so much of the focus on staff is misplaced. Washington is obsessed with aides, and staff. And they are missing the point about this president. He's totally in charge and he makes all the big decisions. He's nobody's puppet. He's not the kind of guy that if you talk to him last, you're going to get your way. That's just not the way he operates. So if he goes to the left, which is entirely possible, it will not be because Rahm is not there.
There's been talk the president will tack to the center a la former President Clinton. But you think that there's a chance that even with Rahm's departure and with a GOP wave, he may decide to go left?
Alter: It depends on what you mean by going left. Is being for immigration reform going left? That was George W. Bush's plan, which had 11 Senate Republican co-sponsors, who have now flip-flopped on it... But I think the idea that it's inevitable that he's going to go in a Clintonian direction is wrong, although he is going to be pretty focused on the deficit. But he's made that clear since the end of 2009.
What's your take on Pete Rouse, the new White House chief of staff? Some Democrats wanted an outsider to come in and shake things up.
Alter: I like him a lot. I think he's just a very decent guy, a good manager, strong relations with the Senate. I think the question of whether you need an insider or an outsider is dependent on who the individuals are.
In your book you revealed that Rahm Emanuel had begged the president not to press forward on healthcare reform. In hindsight, was Emanuel right about the political damage, or was the president right?
Alter: Oh, I think the president was completely right, because there would have been a lot of damage anyway just because the economy is in bad shape. It helped to kind of poison the environment. But I think the reason Democrats are in danger of losing the Congress is because Obama hasn't made the economy good enough… and I don't think he pivoted to the economy politically as soon as he needed to. But substantively, you have to ask the question, if he hadn't done healthcare, and he had concentrated full time on the economy starting in mid-2009, would unemployment still be 9.7 percent? The answer is yes. So he did what he could on the economy, which was getting through a very large stimulus, as large as the system would allow. And supporting Ben Bernanke in shoveling money out of the Fed to prop up the economy. It's hard to think of something else he would have been able to get through. So whatever one thinks of healthcare, it's not as if it was an either/or situation, that if he hadn't done healthcare he would have been rescuing the economy. He was doing what was politically possible on the economy. And I don't think there are a lot of people who are saying, 'You know, I'd vote Democratic if it weren't for that damned healthcare thing.' It's not popular, but it's not the decisive issue.
People on the president's left said the administration didn't put enough money into the stimulus. You said they put through as much as they could have …
Alter: The left, they're just wrong. They're politically naïve. Paul Krugman kept saying the stimulus should have been bigger. I was in the Senate at the beginning of this week, I was talking people about this, and they said, 'It's just ridiculous. He had no chance of getting [Senators] Collins, Snowe, or Specter if he'd gone over a trillion dollars. Zero chance. The stimulus wouldn't have passed. So Krugman and the others can say until they're blue in the face that the stimulus wasn't big enough. It has nothing to do with reality. The reality was, there was simply no way to go higher on the total dollar amount for the stimulus. In fact, if I remember right, Snowe and Collins brought it down from $800 billion to $787 billion.
With Emanuel gone, how does President Obama manage that left-wing, post-Rahm, given the war in Afghanistan, cap and trade, and what you call that politically naïve attitude that he's faced with? How bad will it be and how does he manage that?
It's a great question. I don't have an easy answer. You're going to see some Democrats who are going to get primary challenges in 2012 … I think what you might see is him backing some blue-dogs in the primaries because, first of all, he's not hesitant about endorsing in a primary. And I don't think he has a lot of time for head-in-the-clouds liberals. So even when he's sympathetic to them on some issues, he's very pragmatic. So if he thinks they're doing some things that are weakening his presidency, he'll reach out to them but he's not going to kow-tow to them. I'll tell you where it's going to be a big issue is in education. Because for a Democrat, he's been very courageous on education. What Mitt Romney said about him caving to the unions is absurd. This is like a Nixon-to-China kind of deal. The unions are very upset with him, and they've got some civil rights organizations to carry some water. And Obama is undeterred.
The generic ballot numbers and some economic indicators are looking better for Democrats. Have the Republicans peaked too early in this election cycle?
It's possible. I'd put the odds of the GOP taking the House at about 50-50, with the odds of them taking the Senate at only about 5 percent. But I'm very wary of hard and fast predictions, because I've just been doing this too long to do that with any certainty… It may be that one difference between 2010 and 1994 is that in 1994 the Republicans stole a march on the Democrats. I do remember writing a piece in the fall of '94 saying who would become chairman of these committees if the Republicans took Congress. I was one of only a small handful of people who did that. For most people it was just a complete shock. So surprise is an advantage in politics, and when you see something coming, there are sometimes more ways to defend against it. So I actually don't think it was that smart for John Boehner to be measuring the drapes of the Speaker's office. He might still end up there. But he was getting a little bit ahead of himself over the summer.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.