Who is Rahm Emanuel?

Barack Obama is bringing change.

He's setting a new tone in Washington.

He's transforming politics. He's transforming the nation. He's transforming the world.

So he picked Rahm Emanuel to be his Chief of Staff.

WASHINGTON -- While President-elect Barack Obama enjoyed a few days with his family after a hard-fought election, speculation swirled in the nation's capital around potential administration appointees.

Obama pivoted quickly to begin filling out his team on Wednesday, selecting hard-charging Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff while aides stepped up the pace of transition work that had been cloaked in pre-election secrecy.

Several Democrats confirmed that Emanuel had been offered the job. While it was not clear he had accepted, a rejection would amount to an unlikely public snub of the new president-elect within hours of an electoral college landslide.

...In offering the post of White House chief of staff to Emanuel, Obama turned to a fellow Chicago politician with a far different style from his own, a man known for his bluntness as well as his single-minded determination.

Emanuel was a political and policy aide in Bill Clinton's White House. Leaving that, he turned to investment banking, then won a Chicago-area House seat six years ago. In Congress, he moved quickly into the leadership. As chairman of the Democratic campaign committee in 2006, he played an instrumental role in restoring his party to power after 12 years in the minority.

Emanuel maintained neutrality during the long primary battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, not surprising given his long-standing ties to the former first lady and his Illinois connections with Obama.

To say that Emauel is known for his "bluntness" is an understatement.

From the Chicago Tribune's archives, November 12, 2006:

Rahm Emanuel was seething.

He was hurtling down an asphalt road in upstate New York on the 47th trip of his ferocious campaign to win back the House. A lecture, even from his friend James Carville, was the last thing he needed.

In just 12 days, Emanuel's quest would end in a historic victory--a triumph that almost no one believed possible when he accepted the challenge nearly two years ago--or in colossal failure.

And here were Carville and pollster Stan Greenberg telling him he had to make each of his handpicked candidates shift from attack mode and strike a conciliatory note in their final campaign ads.

"James. No James, YOU LISTEN," Emanuel barked into a cell phone, about to release a string of profane invectives more intense than usual. "Can you listen for one [expletive] minute? I'm working these campaigns all the time. The campaigns all have different textures."

His wiry body tensed, his voice breaking with stress. Emanuel shouted, "If you don't like what you see, I highly recommend you pick up the ... phone and do it yourself."

The moment captured Rahm in full, a portrait in power of a brutally effective taskmaster.

...Democrats had blanched at hardball. Emanuel, jokingly called "Rahmbo" even by his mother, muscled weaker Democrats out of races in favor of stronger ones, and ridiculed the chairman of his own party.

...In a world where congressmen refer to each other as "my distinguished colleague," Emanuel, 46, is sometimes unable to get through a single sentence without several obscenities. His politics are centrist, but his style is extremist. The top of his right middle finger was severed when he was a teenager, adding to his aura of toughness--especially when he extends that middle finger, which he does with some regularity.

Obama picked a thug to be his Chief of Staff, a guy with a "killer instinct."

...Emanuel's thin, unimposing frame still hints at the teen and college years devoted to ballet; his voice sometimes screeches, and his words can get jumbled in public speeches.

But his political style--honed in Chicago and on the presidential campaign trail with Clinton--isn't gentle or uncertain. His reputation as a political street fighter inspires respect and more than a little fear.

Ballet?

Hmm.

A balletic street fighter. How very West Side Story!

As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emanuel was ruthless.

...He knew he was despised. "Look, this is not for the fainthearted," Emanuel said. "Their job is important to them, and I am seen as a threat to their job security. And that's life. And I didn't come here to win a popularity contest with them."

He added, "I wake up some mornings hating me too."

How does Obama the healer, the transformational figure, choose a thug like Emanuel?

Central to Emanuel's ability to unnerve his political enemies is his fierce intensity, a quality that wasn't initially apparent as he grew up on the North Shore of Chicago. He played peacemaker between his older brother Ezekiel and his younger brother Ari, and he pirouetted around the house. "Ari would be wrestling, Zeke would be pondering deep thoughts, and Rahmmy would be leaping down the stairs and doing ballet dance twirls," his mother, Marsha, recalled.

Ari even got the top bunk bed when he and Rahm shared a room, even though Rahm was older and could have laid claim to it. "I was physically stronger," Ari Emanuel explained.

But when their parents sent Rahm to study ballet, his single-mindedness emerged. "Intense would be a word I would have used even then," said Kerry Hubata, his former ballet teacher. "I've seen kids with physical talent but didn't work as hard. Others, who weren't as gifted physically but had the desire and didn't mind the pain, succeeded more. He had the drive."

That drive only increased when Emanuel suffered an accident just before his 1977 graduation from New Trier West High School. Working at an Arby's, Emanuel badly cut the middle finger of his right hand. He insisted on going to prom festivities anyway, including a swim in Lake Michigan, and the finger became badly infected. Emanuel, his family recalled, lay near death in Children's Memorial Hospital with a fever of 106 degrees, as antibiotics were pumped into him. In the end, doctors removed half his finger.

Yuck! I'm not thinking Arby's.

...Emanuel was constantly on the phone to candidates--coaching, reassuring, tormenting. In an August call to candidate Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, Emanuel promised that Bill Clinton would help him raise money. "Joe Sestak, this is your rabbi, Rahm," he intoned playfully. "Clinton. I'm close to having him do an event for you in Philly. ... Clinton will put his arm around you and say, `He's my man.'"

In a fairly typical sign-off, he concluded another call to Sestak: "Don't [mess] it up or ... I'll kill you. All right, I love you. Bye."

When Emanuel proved victorious in 2006 and the Democrats took the majority in the House, the street fighting ballet dancer gloated.

...[A]t that moment, Emanuel would not, could not censor his glee, or restrain his distaste for the defeated Republicans.

"Since my kids are gone, I can say it: They can go ---- themselves!"

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Barack Obama's Chief of Staff.

As "Rahmbo" would say, "Republicans, you can go f--- yourselves."

Welcome to Obama's Washington.
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On a related note: Bipartisan outreach promised

After most "change" elections, the winners are quick to claim a powerful mandate for their boldest ideas and fondest ambitions.

But in the aftermath of Barack Obama's lopsided Electoral College victory Tuesday, many top Democrats were sending a different signal, seeking to tone down the loftiest expectations facing the president-elect and vowing to govern with bipartisan outreach and pragmatic restraint.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday that "a new president coming in, in my view, must take the country down the middle, solve the problems, to gain the confidence to take us more strongly in a new direction."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the mandate delivered by voters Tuesday was not "for any political party or any ideology, but a mandate to get over those things that divide us and focus on getting things done."

Such carefully calibrated talk is already making some on the party's left uneasy. Liberal activist Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future argued Wednesday that given the crises the country faces, the danger isn't over-reaching, but "under-reaching."

And some Republicans are skeptical about the centrist sounds they're hearing.

"I think he's lowering expectations right now to lull people into believing he's going to be a coalition builder. I don't see that," said Tommy Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor and Bush cabinet member.

Right. The Dems are going to make good on their promise to "govern with bipartisan outreach and pragmatic restraint."

Of course meanwhile, the Republicans can go f--- themselves.

What's the difference between a pit bull and Rahm Emanuel?

Nothing.

Except the ballet tights.
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Rahm Emanuel: The Enforcer

Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel's success is his legendary intensity. There's the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There's the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there's the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that's Rahm for you."

Of the three stories, only the second is a myth -- Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army.

Scary. Seriously.