No Wrench

The pick of Rahm Emanuel for White House COS should be sending nervous shivers down the spines of the Republican minorities in Congress. For all that Obama has talked about bi-partisanship and the need for a new politics, it is clear that he regards these new politics as being his way or the highway. For his entire campaign he has done it his way, spitting into the wind of political tradition and the heaps of advice offered by those ‘in the know’ to become one of the most unlikely presidents in American history. And he did it with a smoothness and a grace that few other candidates have ever matched. I do not expect his presidency to be any different.

Obama has an agenda: he wants to save this country, even if large parts of it do not currently recognize that it needs to be saved. His pick of Rahm says that he is going to emphatically pursue that agenda, to the detriment of those Republican (or Democratic) members of Congress who attempt to stand in his way. One thing that the primary should have taught people about the Obama team is that they are very good at calculating risk vs. reward. Obama made the most of his cash and time by investing in the exact places he needed to win to capture the momentum that ended with his nomination. I suspect he will be investing time and political pressure upon recalcitrant Senators in exactly the same way. And Rahm is going to be the sharp end of the wedge. You almost feel sorry for them.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.