“Don’t get absorbed in the Washington finger-pointing and intrigue,” the president told his senior advisers during a recent meeting, according to one top aide.

He “certainly let us know that we should keep our eye on the ball here and not get distracted by the games of Washington,” the aide said.

The season of turmoil, which has erupted just as Obama is pushing for final health care votes that could determine his domestic legacy, is the most vivid example of how the discipline of the campaign — which prided itself on a tight-knit culture and aides who stayed aloof from the who’s-up, who’s-down obsessions of the press and the Washington political class — has frayed under stress.

“This is what Washington does — it gets itself into a tizzy,” White House senior adviser David Axelrod said, adding that the president’s team is determined to “stay tight.” “We dismiss it for what it is. There aren’t 10 people outside of Washington who give a rat’s ass about any of this. They’ve got bigger stuff to worry about, and we’re trying to worry about that. The same people who are all in a tizzy right now are the same people who called us idiots for the better part of two years.”

Yet for all their brio, Obama’s team has been proven just as susceptible to Washington’s favorite parlor games as anyone, in a way that’s caused more tension and drama inside the White House than any particular policy or political differences.

The reason these questions have exerted such a powerful effect on the Obama story line is that much of the outside critique is grounded at least partly in reality.

Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel gets criticized for biting off more than he can chew. And in fact, he manages political, policy and congressional portfolios that compete for his attention.  Axelrod gets criticized for being so close to Obama for so long that he sometimes fails to appreciate and anticipate when the president’s approach isn’t resonating. And in fact, the message, which Axelrod often crafts, has been badly muddled at key points, primarily on health reform.

After the president’s historic win in 2008, his close aides might have been forgiven for thinking that the usual rules of politics didn’t apply to them — that they could rise above the Washington ways merely by saying they would. But upon taking office, they, too, quickly lapsed into old Washington habits, with several senior staffers sitting for flattering profiles and photo shoots that made them star players in Obama’s world.

And as the waters have grown choppy, some of the key players have taken to defending their actions in the press — which also contributes to a sense that Obama’s White House is getting pulled into the minute-by-minute tit-for-tat it swore to avoid.

Axelrod, a Chicago Tribune reporter for 10 years, said he can see reporters and pundits trying to detect tension between himself and Emanuel, which he maintains is nonexistent.

“Everybody’s on the same page,” Axelrod said in a telephone interview. “We’re determined not to allow ourselves to be distracted, but, rather, to do what we’re there to do. I probably spend three or four hours a day talking to Rahm. I talked to him this afternoon. There’s no back-channeling — we discuss openly our cut on things. And the truth is that 80 percent of the time, it’s the same. The best thing to do in any organization is to be open with each other.”