Pitbull: Hold the Lipstick

While it's not news yet (a botched denial out of his office is likely the first in a series of transition screw-ups), Congressman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) appears to have accepted President-Elect Obama's offer to become his White House Chief of Staff. The young Illinois legislator has a reputation as a ruthless enforcer, and would likely end up playing the bad cop to President Obama's post-partisan approach. The congressman was the model for West Wing Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Lyman, and if the real man bears any resemblance to the likeness he inspired, we could be in for a rough-and-tumble few years.

Emanuel's selection is a reflex of the pragmatic Obama, much like his rejection of public funds during the campaign, and cuts somewhat against the grain of his bipartisan rhetoric. To choose a full-contact operative like Emanuel to be the primary manager of his administration is maybe a little more aggressive than I would have liked, and may signal that the progenitor of the most cohesive electoral juggernaut in American history isn't done playing hardball.

There are hints of softer, more hope-driven picks coming down the road: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been floated as a potential Environmental Protection Agency head, and there's even the somewhat strange sounding idea of having Gen. Colin Powell serve as Secretary of Education.

While shuffling a member of the Bush Administration from one cabinet post to another hardly seems to qualify as "change we can believe in," the appearance of bipartisanship and the widespread popularity of the former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs may be enough to insulate Obama from charges of hypocrisy. Time will tell; less than twenty-four hours after the race was called, the electricity in the air has yet to discharge, and much of what we hear today is probably rumor and apocrypha, which is of course to bloggers what nouns and verbs are to writers. Good to be back.