The Outsider
by digby
Everybody’s chattering about Obama picking Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff. What does it all mean? I don’t have the faintest idea. Rahm is a political enforcer, so maybe that’s good news. It all depends on who he’s bringing the hammer down on, I suppose. We’ll have to wait and see.
I found this to be the most amusing bit of spin I’ve heard about the whole thing though:
When Emanuel led the Democrats’ efforts to take back the House in 2006, Axelrod was his chief political adviser. And, in the Obama campaign, Emanuel returned the favor. Although Axelrod tended to take a dim view of advice that was offered by Democrats dialing from a 202 area code, Emanuel’s counsel was always welcomed. “There are two branches of Washington,” one Obama adviser told me. “There’s official Washington and the pundits and the people who have spent a lifetime there and who have done things the old way. And then there are other people, like Rahm who aren’t purveyors of conventional wisdom. We don’t even consider Rahm a Washington guy.”
“This beautiful capital,” President Clinton said in his first inaugural address, “is often a place of intrigue and calculation. Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.” With that, the new president sent a clear challenge to an already suspicious Washington Establishment.
And now, five years later, here was Clinton’s trusted adviser Rahm Emanuel, finishing up a speech at a fund-raiser to fight spina bifida before a gathering that could only be described as Establishment Washington.
“There are a lot of people in America who look at what we do here in Washington with nothing but cynicism,” said Emanuel. “Heck, there are a lot of people in Washington who look at us with nothing but cynicism.” But, he went on, “there are good people here. Decent people on both sides of the political aisle and on both sides of the reporter’s notebook.”
Emanuel, unlike the president, had become part of the Washington Establishment. “This is one of those extraordinary moments,” he said at the fund-raiser, “when we come together as a community here in Washington — setting aside personal, political and professional differences.”
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