Like a lot of political junkies, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about our new president’s first big hire: Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff. There are some things to be said about the fact that they botched the announcement, but leave that aside and consider Rep. Emanuel himself; his selection deeply concerns some conservatives but reassures others, including the folks at the Wall Street Journal—and has also provoked considerable consternation among some on the Left.For my own part, I have three thoughts on this pick. First, this means that you can take all that high-toned high-minded “new politics”/”post-partisan”/”new kind of politician”/”hope and change”/”heal the country” talk and throw it out the window. That was for the campaign, and it served its purpose; now it’s time to get real, and that’s going to look very different.Two, on balance, I think that’s a good thing, because Barack Obama is entering a very different world than the world of his campaign, and what worked then isn’t going to work now. I’ve believed for a while that the Democratic congressional leadership, the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer, have seen him not as the leader of their party but as someone they would be able to use as a figurehead for their own agenda, and that they would pull him hard to the left; of course, I’ve also believed that he would be perfectly comfortable going along with that. Rep. Emanuel is one of the nastiest partisans in Washington, but he’s also, on his record, a centrist, and hawkish for a Democrat; his selection is the first indication that Barack Obama may in fact want to govern from the center-left, rather than from the leftist positions that won him the primaries. Just as important, his appointment may well be a sign that Sen. Obama picked up on the same signs in his party that I thought I saw, and a signal that he has no intention of letting the likes of Speaker Pelosi dominate his administration—a shot across their bows to let them know that he is the president and he intends to be the president. As the WSJ put it,

As for Mr. Emanuel’s famously sharp elbows, they are as likely to be wielded against his fellow Democrats as against Republicans. With Democrats now so dominant, the fiercest fights—and the ones that really matter—will take place among Democratic factions in the White House and Capitol Hill. Mr. Emanuel can help Mr. Obama understand when he needs to ignore the pleas of the left and govern from the center.

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line echoed this when he wrote,

The ascension to the presidency of a given politician doesn’t repeal the rules of politics, one of which is that a president needs someone fierce and ruthless by his side. Whatever Obama decides to try and accomplish, he will require a key aide who answers to this description. . . .I suspect, moreover, that it is Democratic heads Emanuel will be knocking. Republican heads don’t count for much on Capitol Hill these days, and the Obama administration won’t be in much of a position to knock them, in any case.

I maintained, and maintain, that Sen. Obama has showed neither the instincts, nor the ability, nor the experience, nor quite frankly the willingness to upset people necessary to fight free of the left wing of his party and chart his own course; Rep. Emanuel gives him all of the above.And three, I agree with Jennifer Rubin:

It is quite remarkable that, even now, we are still reading the tea leaves and guessing which Obama will be taking office. The high-minded one? The Chicago pol? The ultra-liberal? The moderate? We’ll all stay tuned as, bit by bit, everyone learns who it was we just elected.

I know there are a lot of conservatives who would answer that question resoundingly in the negative; but for my part, for all the questions and concerns I have about his judgment on people and policies, I can’t help coming down with Beldar: I think he is. I may be convinced otherwise later, but I hope not.

Words of wisdom at any time, but probably now more than most, at least with respect to the 2008 election. I’m not as sanguine as Perry de Havilland of Samizdata—I confess to a full measure of unease at what’s coming—but taken all in all, I don’t know that I’d be much happier if things had gone the other way; and if I were on the other side of the political aisle, I would still regard the election results as a decidedly mixed blessing. I’ve already noted Gerard Baker’s observation in the Times that this presidential election was a bad one to win, because of the daunting challenges our nation will face over the next several years; which is part of the reason why the aforementioned Perry de Havilland is so pleased that Barack Obama won:

Unlike many, well, most of my compatriots, I am not filled with a deep sense of gloom and foreboding at the prospect of the most left wing president since FDR gaining the Whitehouse. In truth, I can see many reasons to think it may well be a far better outcome than if a Big State Republican like McCain won.Of course Obama will bring an avalanche of policies that will be truly appalling and quite wicked, of that I have no doubt, much like his predecessors in office in that respect. As the global economy continues to come unglued, everything Obama does to deal with the mounting crises will in fact make things worse. Civil liberties will be hammered, all in the name of ‘fairness’, and the flood of regulations pertaining to every aspect of life will grow into a drowning ocean.And that is actually the good news.Why? Because in truth the Republicans under John “I support the bailout” McCain would scarcely have done much better. The economic global meltdown is only just starting to roll: if you think the sub-prime mortgage crisis was the biggie, just wait until you see the fallout from the fun and frolics of the impending mess in other areas, such as debt swaps. This is all going to get worse, a lot worse, and Obama is going to do absolutely everything to dig the holes deeper. Looking back on this period ten to twenty years from now, the Republicans crying into their beer tonight will be saying “thank Christ it was not us in office then”.The lesser evil is not going to win this time and much as it may not seem that way now . . . or any time soon I suspect . . . in the long run this has a far far better chance of leading to the rebirth of a genuine pro-liberty, pro-market political culture, something which the gradual incremental surrender of recent times made impossible (such as the ‘pragmatic voting’ of people who want a smaller state for Republican candidates who ended up growing the regulatory state).Many will find the glee of the statist left over the next few days and weeks hard to endure, but to be honest I have been walking around with a grin all day. Finally the era of gradualism is over and the masks are going to come off. The USA has voted for statism and it is going to get exactly what it voted for at a juncture in history where it will very quickly be impossible to hide the cost of those votes.Obama is not the start of a new era, he is the death knell for the old one.

I tend to agree, though without quite the same assurance; which is why I have the strong suspicion that many if not most of the folks who were celebrating Tuesday night will end up rueing their victory—and perhaps Barack Obama more than anyone. Be careful what you ask for . . .

I know there are plenty of folks proclaiming a political realignment, that America is no longer a center-right nation; but I don’t believe it, for three reasons. One, I believe there’s little evidence that this election was a repudiation of conservative principles, given that the Republican Party isn’t particularly identified with conservative principles at the moment and was running a nominee who himself isn’t seen as all that conservative. (IMHO, John McCain is a lot more conservative than he’s given credit for, but he’s certainly more to the center than a true conservative standard-bearer would be.) Rather, this was the culmination of a popular repudiation of the Republican Party of the last eight years; if, from the ashes of 2006 and 2008, a new GOP arises, true to its conservative roots, led by Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty and Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy, after a period in which they are clearly not responsible for anything the federal government does, I think we’ll see a very different response from the national electorate. The root here isn’t popular disgust with conservatism, but rather popular disgust with D.C.—and the Democrats now have that all to themselves.Two, even given that, Barack Obama could only pull 52% of the vote; running to succeed the least-popular outgoing incumbent since Harry Truman, he only pulled 4 million more votes than John Kerry did four years ago, and one million more than George W. Bush did. A shift, yes, and certainly one which produced a major change in the Electoral College—but not really all that impressive a shift, given the electorate’s weariness of the Bush-era GOP. This victory gives the Democrats the opportunity to create a political realignment, either honestly or crookedly, but it does not in and of itself represent one.And three, the results of major ballot measures around the country don’t bear out the image of a country suddenly gone liberal. What they suggest, rather, is a country that’s shifted a little to the left because of disaffection with the theoretically conservative party, but by and large still thinks about the way it’s always thought.

from the Baseball Crank:

As I have said over and over: vote for the left-wing Democrat machine politician, if what you want is a left-wing Democrat machine politician, no more and no less. But really, if he wins, don’t expect anybody, a year from now, to take seriously the idea that he was ever anything else. The two-steps like this are just about concealing who he is and what he stands for.

is that the keystone of their agenda, once they have the votes to make it happen (which they probably will as of next January), will be to change the rules to make it as difficult as possible to vote them out. The Baseball Crank dubs this “partisan entrenchment”; the folks over at RedState have compiled a list of steps the Left is already advocating by which they can accomplish this. These steps would, collectively, enable unions (which are a major Democratic money source) to regain power through coercion, empower voter-registration fraud on the Left, silence conservative voices in the media, skew redistricting to favor Democrats, and, of course, put more liberals in the judiciary to suppress challenges to the other steps. Again, all of these are things which Sen. Obama and congressional Democrats are already trying to do, so it’s not as if it takes a leap of imagination to come up with this agenda: it’s taken right from the existing record. I don’t mind losing a fair election—well, no, that’s not true, I do mind, but I accept it—but I mind intensely when people (on either side, my own included) are willing to break the process just to achieve their desired outcome. The first job of our politicians, I believe, is to shepherd the process to ensure that it’s as fair as it can be to everyone, whether fairness is in the best interest of their careers or not; things like the abolition of secret ballots in union elections, or of requirements designed to prevent vote fraud, are nothing short of reprehensible.In the end, on a practical level, I’m less concerned about this than the folks at RedState are; I think the next year or two are likely to go in such a way as to produce a major backlash against the Democratic Party, which I think will overwhelm and wash away these efforts before they can produce the kind of forcible political realignment for which the likes of Nancy Pelosi are hoping. Even if not, I suspect that some, perhaps most, of the measures on RedState‘s list could be successfully challenged in the courts. One way or the other, let’s hope so—for all our sakes.

but I’m pretty sure it won’t be.We have, running for president, a man of an unusually long and clear record of integrity in political life, in John McCain—not spotless, no, but several standard deviations above the norm—versus a man who has no such record, in Barack Obama, who abandoned his pledge to take public financing, whose campaign has taken deliberate steps to enable illegal donations, whose past is still largely unexamined (and who has taken significant steps to keep it that way), and who has shown himself willing to enlist surrogates, including political supporters and government agencies, to destroy those who challenge him, if they can. It’s gotten to the point, if I were a liberal, I still wouldn’t vote for Sen. Obama—I’d be organizing a write-in campaign for Hillary Clinton.