Given that the Telegraph report came out yesterday afternoon, it’s amazing that they’ve gone to the trouble of denying it before the start of business hours today. And to Fox, no less.

The White House Monday dismissed reports that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel plans to leave his post after becoming frustrated with the Obama administration as “ludicrous.”

[snip]

In response to the report, a senior White House official told Fox News the “ludicrous” story was “not worth looking into.”

Well, it’s not really amazing. The Telegraph article was fairly compelling – I was planning to write about it anyway – in that it claimed that the Chief of Staff was burning out, unhappy with the effect DC was having on his kids, and interested in running for Mayor of Chicago. All three of these are certainly believable; and two years seems to be about the normal amount of time for somebody to hold this position anyway. Add to all of this the minor detail that Rahm Emanuel is a horrible Chief of Staff (something that even the Telegraph doesn’t really want to explicitly admit, but which is made fairly clear in that article) and there’s no non-political reason to call the story ‘ludicrous.’

Politically speaking, of course, it would look very, very bad for the White House if it got out that the man who designed the Democrats’ 2006/2008 Congressional strategy was planning to announce his resignation just after that Congressional strategy crashes, burns, ignites, explodes, and seeps toxic polysyllabic chemicals into the groundwater this November.  Not that a strategy of blustering denial will do anything except kick the can down the road for another four months, but they’ll worry about that later.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.