Howard Kurtz on Rahm Emanuel's Openness to the Media

None of this would be remarkable, except for the fact that Emanuel serves as the fulcrum of a frenetic West Wing, controlling access to the president, helping to shape the daily message and constantly lobbying his former colleagues on the Hill. Yet he somehow finds time to stay in constant touch with a sizable group of journalists, both on the phone and through a series of off-the-record restaurant dinners. Emanuel has also hosted off-the-record gatherings of columnists and Sunday show hosts in his White House office, or on his outdoor portico.

Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman says Emanuel "enjoys jousting with the press and the idea that he understands our tribal rituals. There's no more political being in Washington than Rahm, so you can get a quicker read on a situation just by checking his barometric pressure. Are you going to get the inside story of what's going on behind closed doors? Absolutely not. But you don't go to Rahm for that."

Emanuel would comment only with an e-mail, and a rather dull one at that: "I've always believed it is important to be in close communication with journalists." He called Washington reporters "professionals who take very seriously their responsibility to act as a go-between for the American people and their government."

He honed his media-management skills as a top adviser in the last Democratic White House. Emanuel would play off the competitive instincts of reporters, once leaking a story about AIDS policy to The Post to penalize the Times for dragging its feet on the story, another time calling network officials to knock down a critical Boston Globe report. No speech or initiative was too small for him to give it to a news outlet in advance in exchange for better play.

Emanuel came to view journalists as a constituency group, like members of Congress, that had to be stroked. He called Tim Russert every week, either to complain about NBC's coverage of Bill Clinton or suggest topics for "Meet the Press."

Conservative critics also got the Rahm treatment. After Michael Kelly, then the New Republic's editor, called Clinton a "shocking liar," Emanuel took him to lunch. Emanuel called Times columnist William Safire "Uncle Bill" and had him over for dinner, despite his having called Hillary Clinton a "congenital liar."

Against this backdrop, Emanuel's courtship of Brooks, a conservative who has at times been sympathetic to Obama, is hardly surprising. In March, after Brooks wrote that Obama had turned out to be another big-spending liberal, he found himself talking to Emanuel, two other top officials and the president, which produced a follow-up column crediting the White House with making a "sophisticated and fact-based" case.

Brooks says he had a half-dozen dinners with Emanuel during his congressional days and now considers him a policy maven as well as political tactician. "He's comfortable with journalists," Brooks says. "He provides real information without giving too much away. With some people you just get the spin; he does go beyond that."

In May, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne was invited to Axelrod's office for a liberal columnists' briefing on Obama's plan to close Guantanamo Bay. Upon leaving, he bumped into Brooks, who had been among center-right columnists getting the treatment in Emanuel's office -- an arrangement Dionne found "a little too cute." The president dropped by both gatherings.

"Rahm always has several stories he wants to sell," Dionne says. "There's a candor within his sales pitch. He will try to sell you a line, but he is transparent that he's doing that."

In 2006, as Emanuel was helping Democrats win back the House, he gave the Chicago Tribune exclusive access to his expletive-filled strategy sessions and private fundraisers. Of his hardball tactics, Emanuel said: "I wake up some mornings hating me, too."

These days he talks most frequently to former Clinton colleagues, such as George Stephanopoulos, now ABC's chief Washington correspondent, and the reporters who covered him in Congress.

"We trade gossip about the Hill, the campaign, proposals," Begala says. "Maybe he's trying to push me one way or another. It's not really in his job description to work the press, but he's never going to stop."