There’s a fascinating story buried inside today’s Wall Street Journal about the negotiations inside the White House around the health-care proposal Obama unveiled yesterday (and that Republicans have essentially already rejected). According to this anonymously sourced report — which cites “one person close to the White House deliberations” — the version the president is putting before the GOP, and the nation, represents a “victory for those in the White House who want to press ahead with ambitious legislation,” and a rebuttal to the small-change crowd pressing for what they called “a skinny bill.”

Chief among the skinny kids is WH Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who seems to favor of passage of a health care bill — any health care bill, regardless of if it does anyone any good — as more important than achieving the goals most Democrats agree on: insuring the millions of uninsured; regulating the profits of health care insurers; eliminating the pre-existing conditions clause that allows insurers to reject those that need insurance the most.

I was among those excited by Emanuel’s appointment to chief of staff, at least at first. A lot of the president’s Chicago team seemed too wonky and not sufficiently wise to the ways of insider Washington. Rahm had the rep — he was combative and obscene; he sent an opponent a dead fish once and was nothing if not willing to fight.

But fight for what? If the change Obama promised (and has been hard-pressed to deliver, due as much to Republican intransigence as discombobulation on the Democrats’ part) is going to be worth anything, especially when it comes to a system as big and broken as health care, it’s going to have to be painful for some people — which is why insurers, and even some doctors and pharmaceutical companies are crying about the president’s proposal (which is essentially a more liberal version of the Senate bill, even though it still does not include the public option).

Emanuel and the skinny bill crowd want the passage to be painless; they just care about getting the numbers on the board, it seems. In Ryan Lizza’s 2009 New Yorker profile, Emanuel famously bashed Paul Krugman’s criticism of giving the GOP tax cuts to pass the stimulus bill. “How many bills has he passed?” he sneered of the Times columnist — unconsciously echoing Joseph Stalin’s remark about the Pope, “How many divisions has he got?”

You can imagine the chief of staff grabbing his manhood and saying, “I got your moral authority right here!” But it seems the president has gone with the conscience crowd on this one, and is not simply weighing the chances of getting a bill passed (slim, even via “reconciliation”) but is asking the question: Why are we here if not to fight for what’s right?

This time, anyway.