What's in Store for President Elect Barack Obama?

With a resounding 7+ million vote victory, and an electoral college landslide, at least compared the the last two Presidential Elections, will Barack Obama govern from the far left? I don't think so. Here's why:

Republicans didn't wait long to criticize President Elect Barack Obama. The caterwalling began as soon as Obama appointed Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff in Obama's first move. One would think the right-wingers would applaud the appointment. After all, one of the main charges Sarah Palin and Joe "the plumber", John McCain's top two advisors it appears, leveled at Barack Obama in the closing days of the campaign was that Obama was soft in his support of Israel.

In his first appointment, for the important job of Chief of Staff, Obama chose Rahm Emanuel, himself a jew. A man whose middle name is Israel. But the only middle name the GOP cared about was Barack Obama's, apparently. Was John McCain hiding his middle name in some nefarious plot? I believe McCain's middle name is Stanley, by the way.

The problem the GOP has with Rahm Emanuel is, according to them, is Emanuel's "partisanship" after Obama talked of bipartisanship in the campaign. Nevermind that George W. Bush talked often on that subject, but the GOP spinmeisters didn't have a problem with Bush's selection of uber-partisan GOP stalwarts such as Dick Cheney in his administration.

Of course, the real problem the GOP has with Rahm Emanuel is that Emanuel, who cut his teeth in the Clinton Administration, "takes no prisoners" when it comes to GOP smears, distortions and lies that have marked the Republican's campaign efforts the last two decades or so. While Rahm Emanuel has reportedly gone too far at times, sending a dead fish in the mail to a democrat who he thought disloyal, Emanuel is just the sort of disciplined, tough, take no crap kind of guy Obama needed to be a liason between Barack Obama's White House and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Of course, GOP partisans such as John Boehner have a problem with Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel headed the democrats' efforts to retake the majority in the House in the last two elections, handing Boehner (pronounced Bay-ner, not Boner) and his cohorts a stinging defeat.

In spite of Rahm Emanuel's supposed "partisanship", Emanuel has a reputation as more of a centrist, like his former boss Bill Clinton. It drove the GOP nuts from 1992-2000 that their efforts to falsely paint Clinton as a far leftist never resonated with the voting public.

This appointment of Rahm Emanuel signals to me that Barack Obama will try to govern from the center, or at least just slightly left of center and will not let Nancy Pelosi and other democrats on the left determine the direction of the Obama Administration