In this morning’s Jolt, Jim leads off with this Telegraph item suggesting Rahm Emanuel will leave the White House by year’s end:

No source is quoted on the record, so how much stock can we put in this report from the U.K. Telegraph?: “Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, is expected to leave his job later this year after growing tired of the ‘idealism’ of Barack Obama’s inner circle.“ While this is likely to generate quite a bit of buzz, this wouldn’t really be all that surprising. Chief of staff to the president has to be one of the more stressful jobs in Washington, and in this administration, Rahm’s expected to be the enforcer, the deal broker, the air-traffic controller, the referee, the bad cop, the arm-twister, the leg-breaker, the eyeball-gouger, the hitman, the body-disposal crew, and the ballerina all at once. Burnout? This man blows his stack more regularly than Old Faithful. Allow me a moment of sympathy for the devil: For the first six months or so of the Obama presidency, Rahm’s wife and kids remained in Chicago.
A bit more interesting is the reason for the departure that the Telegraph focuses on:”Washington insiders say he will quit within six to eight months in frustration at their unwillingness to ‘bang heads together’ to get policy pushed through. . . . ‘I would bet he will go after the midterms,’ said a leading Democratic consultant in Washington. ‘Nobody thinks it’s working but they can’t get rid of him — that would look awful. He needs the right sort of job to go to but the consensus is he’ll go.’”

I figure this is likelier true than not. But then again, politicos have been saying Emanuel would leave by the end of 2010 since the beginning of 2010. And remember the spate of profiles and stories about Rahm around the time Obamacare passed? Most or all suggested Emanuel was tiring of his job — some said it was out of frustration with other senior Obama advisers, while others reported it was a desire to spend more time with his family.

Not to mention, Emanuel admitted to Charlie Rose that he wants to be mayor of Chicago all the way back in April:

Besides, as Jim suggests, presidential chiefs of staff burn out quickly. The only one of them that ever lasted an entire administration was the first, John Steelman, who stuck it out under Harry Truman for six years. In the 60 years since, chiefs of staff have averaged little more than two-and-a-half years of service. Reagan and Clinton each had four; G.H.W. Bush had three in a single term. Andrew Card’s five-year tenure under George W. Bush was an outlier.

So no, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rahm-bo left after the midterms. That’s what chiefs of staff do.