It’s official.

Rahm Emanuel is no longer the White House chief of staff.

HuffingtonPost has the story.

President Barack Obama on Friday said a bittersweet goodbye to the energetic and fierce manager of his White House, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and elevated a quiet and seasoned adviser, Pete Rouse, to the most important gate-keeping job in American politics.

“We could not have accomplished what we’ve accomplished without Rahm’s leadership,” Obama said. Emanuel is departing after nearly two grueling years to run for Chicago mayor.

The announcement was such a poorly kept secret that Obama joked it was “the least suspenseful announcement of all time,” but it represented an important moment of transition for the presidency.

The mood at the White House reflected that this was no ordinary staff change. Cabinet members and senior staff members packed the ornate East Room, a setting often reserved for visits of heads of state, for the official word that Emanuel, the hard-charging leader of the staff, was on his way out.

Here’s some background info on Rahm Emanuel:

Rahm Emanuel is a fighting policy wonk with a Jewish soul [VIDEO]

Political insight, killer in a fight, Yiddishkayt—it’s an inseparable package when it comes to Rahm Emanuel, say those who know President-elect Barack Obama’s pick to be the next White House chief of staff.

Since his days as a fundraiser and then a “political adviser”—read: enforcer—for President Bill Clinton, Emanuel has earned notoriety as a no-holds-barred politico. Accept the good with the bad because it’s of a piece, said Steve Rabinowitz, who worked with Emanuel in the Clinton White House.  READ MORE.

The Rahm Emanuel Show

It was a very strange sight.  There in The Washington Post was an article by reporter Dana Milbank making a case that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s excellent advice has been ignored by a naïve President Barack Obama and that Emanuel is the great unappreciated asset of a collapsing administration with a weak staff. Several other stories followed with the same theme, including a laudatory column by right-winger Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times, another article in the Post and yet another in The New York Times going off on the rest of the staff. While Milbank swore that Emanuel was not his source, it was obvious to anyone who knows how the Emanuel media network operates in Washington that the chief of staff’s “people” inspired this clumsy public relations blitz. READ MORE.

Video from the Emanuel roast