In his victory speech on Tuesday, President-elect Obama told the American people we must put away our partisanship. He promised to be president for all Americans. He will be a uniter not a divider.
And then he chose the most partisan Pit Bull in Congress. George Stephanopoulos wrote of Emanuel, “All I knew about Emanuel at first was that he had once mailed a dead fish to a rival political consultant. But when the former ballet dancer arrived in Little Rock and leaped onto a table to scream his staff into shape, I knew the money side would be OK.”
Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine sums Emanuel up using the analogy from "The Untouchables" movie. "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun; he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue."
The Chief of Staff is the gatekeeper to the President. The Chief of Staff sets the agenda, and decides who and what the President sees. Yuval Levin writing in NRO has this to say about the choice of Emanuel for what is arguably the most important post in any administration.
The White House chief of staff is not a chief strategist or a chief advocate. He is a manager of people and of process. Above all else, he sets the tone internally, and shapes the president’s decision process and the feel of the upper tiers of the administration. Obama is especially in need of someone who will lead him to decisions, because he appears to be intensely averse to making difficult choices—which is the essence of what the president does. His inclination is to step back and conceptualize the choice out of existence, looking reasonable but doing nothing. To overcome this, he will need a chief of staff with a sense of the gravity of the choices the president faces, and one capable of moving the staff to decision, keeping big egos satisfied and calm, and resisting the pressure to be purely reactive to momentary distractions. None of this spells Rahm Emanuel. There is definitely a place for a Rahm Emanuel type of brilliant ruthless shark in a White House staff, but not in the Chief’s office. Not a good first sign.
Joshua Green, writing in Rolling Stone in 2005 had this story to recall:
Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel's success is his legendary intensity.... Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that's Rahm for you."
The message has been sent.
Rahm's a full metal jack-ass
Replacing 401k's will be the Obama Hotel CA retirement package...
You can check out any time you like, but you can't afford to leave!