As a fan of urban policy, I can certainly sympathize with Rahm Emanuel’s desire to be Mayor of Chicago. And I definitely subscribe to the Tim Fernholz theory that the Rahm as History’s Greatest Monster account of the Obama administration doesn’t really add up.

But of course one way in which my sympathy for the “big city mayor rather than senior White House staffer” view reveals itself is that here I am with my job at a national policy organization and I’m still always talking about urban policy issues. By contrast, I’ve never heard Rahm say anything about zoning or parking or barber licenses or anything else. It’s a bit odd.

Odd and—problematically for the country—typical. We tend to treat state and local politics as just a JV version of national politics. So if you like a centrist Democrat as a congressional leader or a Chief of Staff, you’ll love him as Mayor of Chicago! The reality, however, is that there’s very little overlap between the issues the federal government deals with and the issues city governments deal with. And even though each individual locality is relatively unimportant, in the aggregate state and local government has a huge impact on American life. These issues deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms and not just as proxies for national political priorities.

Apparently the administration’s jobs plan is to have a lot of profiles be written about Rahm Emanuel. But while previous pieces about which issues Emanuel’s lost out on have dwelled on episodes where liberals are likely to disagree with him on the merits, Noam Scheiber’s version of the profile contains this tidbit:

Then, in July, the White House faced a key decision. Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, probably the most important of the five committees considering health care, had spent months negotiating with his Republican counterpart, Chuck Grassley, with little to show for it. Emanuel was getting antsy. He gathered his top aides and pressed for a way to hurry the process along. The Senate labor committee had produced its own health care bill. Perhaps, Emanuel wondered, Majority Leader Harry Reid could bypass Baucus and bring it to the floor. Or maybe Baucus could just stop bargaining with Grassley and let Reid move a more partisan version of his bill.

But, in the end, Obama himself favored letting Baucus negotiate until September. (Though Axelrod stresses that the president was “just as impatient as Rahm was to get moving.”) In fairness, even internal skeptics believed a bipartisan package might be attainable. The problem was that, overlaid on a strategy based on speed and momentum, the extra two months exacted a major cost.

I think the only real question here is whether Emanuel’s favored approach was possible. It’s all well and good to say “Baucus should cut these negotiations off” but if Baucus was just determined to be stubborn, then it wouldn’t have happened no matter what Obama said. This, however, makes it sound as if the President didn’t make any serious efforts in that direction, which I think was a major mistake.

Overall, Scheiber’s profile gives the impression of a very political animal. Someone who’s crowning achievement was that House Democrats had a very good performance in 2006 when he was DCCC Chairman and who has a lot of opinions about what would or wouldn’t be politically smart. It’s important to have someone like that in an administration—you can’t take the politics out of politics—but it’s hard to be too sad that the President often winds up siding with people who offer policy-driven arguments. The pacing of health care, however, was really just an argument about politics and would have been a smart time to listen to your savvy DC political hand.

There’s an awful lot that’s strange about Dana Milbank’s column on how Rahm Emanuel is awesome and all Barack Obama’s problems stem from not listening to him. Many of these have to do with the very fact of the column’s existence. Milbank’s argument that Emanuel was right and Obama was wrong about various controversies introduces new factual claims into the public record about Emanuel’s stances on various controversies. This tends to suggest that the column was written with the Chief of Staff’s cooperation. But what kind of COS brags about how little influence he has over an administration’s decision-making? And what kind of COS complains about the President’s decision-making? It’s strange.

But this substantive call is also strange:

Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support.

Milbank deems the results of having gone for something more ambitious as “disastrous” but I don’t see what’s been disastrous about it at all. After all, way back on February 4, 2009 Obama signed a massive expansion of children’s health care into law. So it’s not as if failure to play small-ball prevented Obama from achieving the substantive goal of expanding children’s access health care. At the very worst, being ambitious prevented Obama from doing some stuff to help young adults. At the very best, being ambitious may allow Obama to achieve major reform of the American health care system. Personally, I was always skeptical about the feasibility of big picture health reform in the 111th Congress and I’ve been surprised by how successful Obama’s been.

It’s true that by trying something ambitious, Obama ran the risk of failing. But not trying merely guarantees failure. The only thing that’s different is the narrative in the press. Nobody said that George W Bush failed to reform US healthcare in a “disastrous” way, simply because he didn’t try. But the only real lesson of all this is that congressional Democrats who already voted for health reform would do well to vote yes again and pass the thing. Whether reform passes or not, everyone who voted yes wants to raise taxes to finance death panels that will give grandma’s organs to illegal aliens. But if it passes, then everyone involved in its construction is at least a strategic and tactical genius who proved the naysayers wrong. If reform dies, then everyone involved is a idiot who blundered and ruined everything.

Meanwhile, if reform does pass how long will it take for us to see an article claiming it as vindication of Rahm Emanuel’s desire to “throw long and deep” and not shy away from major challenges