Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He’s the town’s resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama administration.

But a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: health-care reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts.

A series of columns and in-depth press reports over the past few weeks have established a narrative that is bound to dog the White House–that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel knows best, the rest of the administration is not listening, and he is at his wit’s end trying to convince President Obama and his Chicago buddies to dial back their ambitions for the sake of the president’s agenda and political harmony.

It’s Rahmbo vs. the Obamanator. At least that’s the chatter that’s getting louder by the minute in Washington.

A series of columns and in-depth press reports over the past few weeks has hinted at such a slugfest, and the talk is bound to dog the White House for quite a while, especially if there’s any truth to it.

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was compelled for the first time to respond to the chatter. He said the president “absolutely” has confidence in his chief of staff, and he dismissed speculation of a rift between the two as part of the usual lineup of Washington “parlor games”–which he suggested were being played out of sheer boredom in the vacuum of the football off-season.

“Anybody that works in or around this building knows that there’s nobody working harder on passing the president’s agenda than the chief of staff,” Gibbs said.

Asked whether Emanuel was “burnishing his reputation” via the press at everybody else’s expense, Gibbs responded, “I don’t believe he is, no.”

Whether or not Gibbs could have been more forceful in his response, he was reluctantly addressing the possibility that both Obama and Emanuel are crossing paths with the one person in the world they don’t want to cross paths with. The two Chicagoans–one a former U.S. senator and the other a former U.S. representative–have larger-than-life personalities and egos, and each could make life very difficult for the other.

Gibbs addressed the chatter after The Washington Post published a lengthy piece Tuesday examining how the explosive, hard-nosed, profanity-dealing chief of staff could be the “voice of reason” in the White House, quoting anonymous sources who supported the hypothesis that Emanuel knows best.

“I don’t think the White House has listened to him enough,” an unnamed House Democrat told the Post, arguing that the White House seems “tone-deaf” to the kind of electoral concerns Emanuel is known to handle well. (Case in point, Obama suggested last week that Democrats should suck up their re-election concerns and vote for health care reform regardless of the upcoming midterm elections.)