TOM CATS AND ROUSE

I'm not sure I'm qualified to offer an informed opinion on Pete Rouse as a (temporary? permanent?) replacement for Rahm Emanuel, but I find it significant that the job he held the longest was chief of staff to Tom Daschle -- a powerful guy who was targeted for political death by the GOP, and who didn't survive the assault.

Look, policy matters, but so does politics. Unless you're untroubled by the notion of President Palin, Huckabee, "Double Guantanamo" Romney 2.0, or Barbour (the nominee ain't gonna be the "reasonable" Thune because he voted for TARP), you want Obama to find some way, using both legislative battles and public appeals, to retain (and regain) popular support. You want him to get legislation passed that people want, or at least to be obviously trying like hell to do so. You want him to frame issues more effectively than the opposition. When Daschle was brought down in 2004, with Rouse at his side, that didn't happen.

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And this, as reported in The Washington Post, seems like a mixed blessing:

There is a reason Rouse has a reputation as a fixer. At a White House dinner Obama held for his top female advisers last fall, several of them shared stories about their colleagues, particularly Emanuel and economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers. The tales all had the same punch line, according to a person familiar with the dinner: "Either Rahm or Larry would do something horrible, and at the end of the day, Pete would come in to fix it."

By the end of the night, Obama was finishing the women's stories himself, saying, "Let me guess -- Pete fixed it."

This tells me that Rouse is a decent guy. It also tells me that, despite the best of intentions, he's an enabler. There's something dishearteningly John Hughes-y about this nice guy offering a shoulder to cry on for female Obamaites when the Big Men on Campus are acting like louts. But while he's replacing one named lout, and the other named lout is leaving, I question whether he's going to be much help if other louts step into the breach, except as an after-the-fact tension-easer. If loutishness leads to success in the White House culture, I'd prefer someone who can challenge that culture -- because I think the president is one of the people the louts can successfully dominate using muscle.