Wow:
Barack Obama, who ran on a platform of change and a message of bipartisanship, has tapped a Washington insider with a reputation for hardball politics to run his White House staff.
The president-elect’s selection of Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel is a significant departure from the soft-spoken, low-key aides that Obama surrounded himself with during his campaign. . . Emanuel served as a political and policy aide in the Clinton White House. . .
“No one I know is better at getting things done than Rahm Emanuel,” Obama said in a statement announcing the selection.
Indeed, Emanuel has forged a reputation as a partisan fighter.
Nicknamed “Rahmbo,” he once mailed a dead fish to a Democratic pollster who got on his bad side during a long-ago congressional race. Outraged over what he regarded as disloyal Democrats during Clinton’s first presidential campaign, he stunned dinner companions by rattling off names of the offenders, each time stabbing the restaurant table with a dinner knife and shouting, “Dead.”
UPDATE: The AP has a story with the dead-fish incident, the dinner-knife incident, and more.
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