Via TPM, Rahm Emanuel last night went in front of business leaders at a Wall St. Journal event and challenged them to get behind what Emanuel implied would be an agenda not of incremental change, but of sweeping change.

President-elect Barack Obama's incoming White House chief of staff challenged chief executives and other business leaders Tuesday night to join the new administration in a push for universal health care, saying incremental increases in coverage won't be acceptable.

"When it gets rough out there, a lot of business leaders get out of the car and say, 'We're OK with minor reform.' I'm challenging you today, we're going to have to do big, serious things," Rahm Emanuel said, speaking to The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, a conference convened to elicit corporate opinion on the challenges facing the new president. [...]

He stressed that the new administration would "throw long and deep," taking advantage of the economic crisis to push wholesale changes in health care, taxes, financial re-regulation and energy. "The American people in two successive elections have voted for change, and change cannot be allowed to die on the doorsteps of Washington," Mr. Emanuel said.

This might be as close to "I earned political capital and I'm going to spend it" as Obama ever gets but it seems to me to be sending the same signal and it's good to see. The Republicans will try to throw Obama's promise to reach across the aisle and his message of reconciliation around his neck, calling anything he does that remotely has any Republican opposition as "partisan" and "divisive" and the big question for me is to what extent will Obama be cowed by that (see the Lieberman situation.) As Josh noted earlier, Republicans are particularly afraid of card check and will go to the mattresses to fight the Employee Free Choice Act, but the fact is that passing this legislation, which Obama promised to sign on several occasions, should not be difficult. Every Democrat (except Johnson who was out,) both Independents and even Arlen Specter (R-PA) voted for cloture when it came up for a vote last year. Now that Obama has a clear mandate and 7 new Senators (at least) to add to his majority, a cloture vote in early 2009 could very well clear the 60 vote hurdle. The fact is that the Obama agenda is a mainstream agenda that the American people have voted for overwhelmingly 2 cycles in a row, it's not leftwing (if only...), it's not partisan (wish it were...) or divisive, even if Republicans intend to dig in their heels. Emanuel, by sort of raising expectations in this way, is sending the first sign that the Obama administration intends to pursue that agenda aggressively and spend that political capital that the President-elect earned 2 weeks ago.

Ben Smith has video of Rahm's speech.

Update [2008-11-19 16:30:56 by Todd Beeton]:Ezra Klein calls Obama's choice of Tom Daschle to head up HHS yet another sign that Obama intends to go long on health care:

This is huge news, and the clearest evidence yet that Obama means to pursue comprehensive health reform. You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players. You tap him because you understand that health care reform runs through the Senate. And he accepts because he has been assured that you mean to attempt health care reform. [...]

The choice of Daschle suggests that the Obama team has learned those lessons well. Magaziner and Clinton signaled that the Clinton administration viewed health care as a policy problem. For them, the key to success was the genius of the policy team. Daschle signals that the Obama administration view health care as a political problem. The key to success is votes. And Daschle is a guy whose last job was lining up votes. He is also a guy who has recently written a book on health reform. Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis should now be on every health wonk's reading list. Among other things, his book argues that reform must be comprehensive, as we can no longer afford incrementalism or inaction, and that the real problem with health care reform is, well, Congress.