Biden’s Chief of Staff

Roll Call is reporting that Vice President-elect Joe Biden has chosen Ron Klain as his chief of staff. A Washington lawyer known as an “influential insider,” Klain was Biden’s counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and served as Vice President Gore’s chief of staff. The pick, like Obama’s of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, is leaving some scratching their heads and wondering what all that “change” talk during the campaign was about. Not to fear: “It’s more evidence that Obama’s modus operandi is pragmatism,” The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder writes. “The secret is that Obama intends use very pragmatic, temperamentally conservative means to achieve radical—not in the Bill Ayers sense but in the huge, big, transformative sense—changes in how Washington works and how it relates to Americans.”