What you get when you hire a shark

Carol Marin:

If you hire a shark, does that make you a shark? If you send in an enforcer, are you, de facto, an enforcer, too?

President-elect Barack Obama, practitioner of consensus and preacher of civility, made a singular statement by choosing Rep. Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, the first hire of the new administration.

"Brilliant, hardworking, in some ways he may be a good yin to Obama's yang. But I was very surprised because he has a very different personality type from those around Obama," longtime Chicago political consultant Kitty Kurth said by phone Thursday.

"I had first met Rahm after the '88 presidential campaign, on Mayor Daley's '89 mayoral race. He was always brilliant but a complete hardball player. The first six or seven times I met him, he never remembered who I was. . . . I never had anything he needed, so he didn't need to know who I was."

There are a million stories about the 49-year-old, profane, pirouetting, ballet-trained Emanuel.

Whether it's ripping up contributions of political donors who lacked the good survival sense to write a bigger check, or mailing a dead fish to express his extreme displeasure or repeatedly stabbing a steak knife into a table to punctuate a list of Democratic politicians he was putting on a "dead" list, Rahm Emanuel mastered hardball long before Chris Matthews peddled it on TV.

Would Emanuel be displeased by the above description?

Nope. He revels in the legend.

...

He sounds pretty ruthless, but that is the Chicago way. It is also the Democrat way. Republicans need to be something besides stoic punching bags for these thugs.

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