November 05, 2008

Rahm Emanuel Obama chief of staff?

This is interesting, I did a Google look-up to see what kind of people Pres. Obama will surround himself with. This is an newsweek excerpt about his first choice for Chief of Staff:

Certainly, there is nothing bland about Emanuel and never has been. Although he once won a summer scholarship with the Joffrey Ballet, he preferred the combat of politics. As a Democratic Party official, he once sent a pollster who was late delivering polling results a dead fish in a box. Old Clinton hands still laugh about the night after Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election. In his book, "The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution," Chicago Tribune deputy Washington bureau chief Naftali Bendavid writes that, as about a score of them sat around a picnic table mushily declaring their love for one another, Emanuel picked up a knife and called out the names of different politicians who had "f–––ed us." After each name, Emanuel would cry out, "Dead man!"—and stab the knife into the table.

--Edited-- Turns out the first source I used was altered. This is a better link with better info.

3 comments:

- Rob said...

Good thought on checking out our upcoming execcutive leadership staff. However, Wikipedia is not the most reliable source. I followed your link and the racy parts of your post are gone from Wikipedia. They could be real or just someone's sick idea of a joke. Other sources will help ferret that out.

Unknown said...

true enough, I went back and found it had been altered, so I did a re-lookup for some of the original sources. Found a newsweek link that should stay static.

Stella by Starlight said...

Here's Emanuel's bio and, on the right-hand side of the page, his voting record. The citation is from Project Vote Smart which references Thomas, the official government voting record.

The site also provides a "Political Courage Test" where the candidate states her/his views. Of course, I haven't covered all of Congress, but Barbara Boxer is the only candidate I found who provided answers to the test questions.

I hope you find this site helpful, Lee.