Interesting read from Jack Shafer today:

Reporters say Rahm is smart, but complain that he has a bad habit of peddling shopworn goods as scoops. ”I got along with him, but like everybody else who ever covered that place, I also hung up on him,” says David Lauter, who was in charge of the 1996 election coverage for the Los Angeles Times. ”You just want to say to him, ‘Enough,’ He’ll call you up and start spinning something about how this is the greatest thing that any President has done in the history of man.”
Howard Kurtz’s 1998 book, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine, portrays Emanuel as a tireless, conniving salesman of Clinton hoo-ha. Once, when Emanuel fed an assortment of Clinton mini-initiatives to several newspapers, USA Today put “Clinton Lays Plans for Millennium Activities” on Page One. “Next, reporters joked, they would be leaking presidential Post-it notes,” Kurtz writes.

It will be interesting to see whether the press will fawn over Obama quite as slavishly once he’s been sworn into office. One can already detect the god-cop/bad-cop dynamic being set up, with His Holiness riding his winged unicorn high up in the clouds while the thuggish Emanuel (and how great is it that The One is to be heralded by a guy named “Emanuel”? Look for a Jean-Baptiste in the cabinet) is on kneecap-breaking detail. Given Team Obama’s propensity for freezing out reporters who ask inconvenient questions and the power that the twin cravings for approval and access will exert over the media, it’s easy to imagine a permanent honeymoon.