The Executive to Be

As President-Elect Obama continues to announce the various officials he will be filling his administration with he gives an increasing indication of what type of executive he will be. His appointment of Congressman Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff is particularly noticeable given his reputation as a cutthroat (though not exceedingly ideological) partisan. This is a conspicuous difference from the image of trans-partisan healer the President-Elect has heretofore fashioned for himself.

Perhaps fitting in with a pattern of the man, some of the subordinates he surrounded himself with as a candidate and the underlying tone and behavior of his campaign didn't precisely fit in with his overall narrative either. His closest aide, David Axelrod, was "an expert at clandestine political attacks," Mark Hemingway writes. "According to BusinessWeek, he is the 'master of "Astro-turfing'" – the art of planting messages on the Internet and elsewhere to make it look like there's a grassroots movement supporting your position."

Further, when a Chicago radio station planned to interview NR writer Stanley Kurtz about the PE's ties to Bill Ayers the Obama campaign sent an action wire to Chicago supporters urging them to pressure the station into dropping the interview. The campaign also tried to use various government agencies to shut down organizations running ads critical of the PE.

While it may be a stretch to call these tactics the beginning of a thugocracy, they are something slightly less than savory. While the campaign and now the administration plays ball in the mud – slinging it around without inhibition – the executive himself conveniently remains disassociated, keeping his hands clean while others get theirs dirty. Call it a kind of good cop/bad cop dynamic, as the editors of National Review have.

Whatever it is, it is not befitting an American president and his administration (especially when the PE and so many of his supporters railed against shadows on the wall of Bush administration malfeasance).

Hopefully the early indicia never bear their poisoned fruit.