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Barack's Enforcer
The president-elect's new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel—a pro business quasi neocon whose middle name is Israel—gives the lie to the wildest myths Obama's opponents spread about him in the campaign.
UPDATE: Emanuel has accepted Obama's offer, Politico reports.
President-elect Barack Obama’s offer to Rahm Emanuel of the job of chief of staff tells more about how he intends to run the White House than his uplifting campaign rhetoric about post-partisan niceness. The selection of Emanuel signals that he apparently wants to operate with ideological moderation, speed and skull-cracking political toughness.
“Rahm Emanuel is a preternatural political force, a man of extraordinary intelligence, skill and toughness who has learned about politics and policy on the streets of Chicago and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. A fascinating choice for Obama as White House Chief of Staff,” Thomas E. Mann, the W. Averell Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Daily Beast Wednesday.
Will Emanuel be content to sit on the sidelines and simply enforce President Obama’s policy without trying to influence it?
Among other things, Obama’s pick of Rahm Israel Emanuel, whose father is of Israeli origin, gives the lie to an endless wild myths that political enemies have tirelessly spread during the campaign that he was supposed to be a closest America-hater and no doubt anti-Semite because of his Kenyan background and boyhood in Indonesia. Emanuel, nicknamed “Rahmbo” by his colleagues, is a quasi neo-con hawk on foreign policy, tough champion of the war on terror, and advocate of crackdowns on crime. Obama was accused of being a “socialist” and hater of big business, but Emanuel was managing director in the Chicago office of a major global investment bank, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, where he made millions.
The notion that Obama would prove too naïve for the wicked ways of Washington and quail before the alleged leftist agenda of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is belied by the bold choice of Emanuel.
Making Emanuel chief of staff—and putting the word out the day after his historic election victory—tells Washington that Obama is going to push through his political and policy agenda Chicago-style—not the San Francisco way. For Emanuel is going to be Obama’s Karl Rove and John Sununu, Sr. combined.
Far from deferring to Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Emanuel’s job description will centrally involve negotiating and even reining in the congressional leadership—through sweetness and light or arm-twisting. Although only 48, a year older than the president-elect, his experience is already vast. He is competent, forceful, confident, and abrasive. He is a triathelete and has won a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet. One brother, Ari, is a forceful, confident and abrasive Hollywood agent who is the prototype for the HBO series Entourage. Another brother, Ezekiel, is a bioethicist at the Harvard Medical School.
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As was always the case, one must look at Obama's actions not his words. Emanuel's behavior was so negative during the bailout negotiations. He's nothing more than an attack dog.
The choice resonates. An attack dog is exactly what Obama needs to keep a giddy Democratic congress in check and on point as he pushes through his agenda and negotiates the minefield that is the economic meltdown.Thank goodness THIS pit bull comes with a pedigree
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A perfect choice! Kind Barack needs an ass-kicker (good cop, bad cop) to get the job done. Love Rahm! And he's a stone fox (not that that's relevant, but if we're going to have to see his face in the paper, it's nice that it's a good one).
Obama's choice of Emanuel signals that a President Obama will promote his platform in an aggressive, competent, and rigorously partisan fashion. Which is exactly what you should do when you have a mandate like the one given by the voters on November 6th. Let the games begin.
The decision has its pluses and minuses. Getting a hard-knuckles negotiator is great. Getting someone who is going to manipulate the policy to their own ends is not necessarily great. He got it virulently wrong on the war and the 50-state strategy, and was too proud to admit it. I'm hoping that the aloof Obama can keep him in check, though.
As an dual citizen watching this from Canada I have been watching the election with the same excitement as when I lived in the US.
I am so thrilled to read about the bright, eloquent and tough people Obama is choosing to help him live up to his promise.
Obama's no shrinking violet himself--he can handle Emanuel. Great choice, President-elect Obama!
Can't wait to see what these two guys will do
Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel's success is his legendary intensity. There's the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him....And there's the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, 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."
Source: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/8091986/the_enforcer/
This is going to be very interesting indeed.
hope that doesn't mean a continuation of the disastrous neocon foreign policies of GW Bush, this would be a real shame, because the world had enough of these belligerent war mongering neocons
The appointment of Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff is reminiscent of Justice Arthur Goldberg resigning his JFK-appointed seat on the Supreme Court in 1965 to serve as LBJ's lapdog as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Ambassadors, like the White House staff, serve at the pleasure of the President.
Justice Goldberg, 57 years old at the time, may have hoped eventually to get re-appointed to the Court so he acquiesced to the request of a very persuasive president with a then overwhelming electoral mandate. His surprising resignation from the Court to serve in the executive branch demonstrated how a politically astute president can de-fang a potentially contentious powerful force in another branch of government without a head-to-head confrontation.
Could it be that Obama took his cue from LBJ, one of the 20th century's most cunning political tacticians?While LBJ may have needed liberal justices on the Supreme Court to prevent interference with his Great Society programs, he could not long abide an analogous potential check to the unconstitutional extension of executive power that a war conducted solely by executive fiat requires.
President Obama will need a cooperative Congress to implement his very progressive agenda. Emanuel, a strong, independent congressional leader with a rapidly growing power base of his own, would never again be as compliant as now with the wishes of the president-elect. There will never be a better time than now for Obama, basking in the glow of his wildly popular mandate, to co-opt the legislative arm of our government by neutralizing what would likely be a most obstreperous check to his executive power.Welcome to the White House, Mr. Emanuel. Too bad about the power you had to give up to get there. Nice move, Mr. President.
I think this was a good pick for Obama, and being that I voted for McCain it's moves like these that build my confidence in our new president. I think the choice of a tough insider that knows the DC machine is great, plus I despise Pelosi and Emanuel's distance from her is thrilling.
Another Sunbeam for the Unitary Executive. The Neo Cons have brought us such wonderful things and it will be refreshing to have brawny Chicago Democrat Neocons instead of the mincing variety from the decrepit center of Empire.
Thank you.
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