By Katrina vanden Heuvel

With an inane flourish of rhetoric, Washington is split between Friends of Rahm and Friends of Barack. "Arguably,"� The Post's Dana Milbank wrote two weeks ago, "Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter."� Judging from the maelstrom of columns, criticism, and comments Milbank unleashed (and from The Post's front-page story Tuesday that heralded Emanuel as the White House's "voice of reason"�), the operative word in Milbank's Carter comparison is "arguably."� Anointing Emanuel as the man who's keeping Obama from driving the country straight into 1978, though, is a bit far-fetched.

Doing so ignores the fact that the damage done to the Obama presidency is largely the fault of the...