RAHM EMANUEL….The New York Times reports that Barack Obama has asked Rep. Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff. Ezra Klein is ambivalent about this:
If you thought the Obama administration would be all about bringing people together and would simply make sad faces when stubborn congressmen refused to come to the table, this is a clear sign otherwise. If good feelings don’t suffice, bareknuckle politics will happily be employed.
But part of Emanuel’s job will be to advise on what is politically possible. And he has always portrayed himself as a hard-headed realist on such matters, with a late-term Clintonite’s allergy to ambition. In his book The Plan, Emanuel warns Democrats away from attempting universal health insurance or comprehensive reform, and suggests they content themselves with expanding S-CHIP (he also gives a plug to his brother, Ezekiel Emanuel’s, health care plan, but says his “plan is well beyond Washington’s current reach.”). That’s not change we can believe in.
Noted without comment since I don’t really know anything about this. I just thought it was worth passing along.
UPDATE: Conservative Yuval Levin has a different take:
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] 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.
This jibes with my understanding of the CoS position too. But what do I know?
