Rahm Emanuel Out as Chief of Staff; Send Off Included a ... Dead Fish

Rahm Emanuel left his position as Obama's Chief of Staff to run for Mayor of Chicago. His friends gave him a dead Asian carp as a going away present.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/10/a-teary-emanuel-gets-dead-fish-at-white-house-send-off.html

"At the 8:30 staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room this morning, departing chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was given a gift by Council of Economic Advisers chair Austan Goolsbee: a dead Asian carp.

This was an allusion to the Emanuel legend of his sending a dead fish to a pollster for whom he didn’t care, replicating the scene from The Godfather when the Corleones were alerted of Luca Brasi’s death with a dead fish wrapped in Brasi’s bullet-proof vest. The specific species was a reference to Emanuel’s focus as a member of Congress and White House chief of staff on the aggressive, invasive Asian carp, bane of the Great Lakes, a plankton-devouring creature heading towards Chicago.
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Emanuel opened the package, which was wrapped in copies of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune.

“This is a dead fish!” he said.

Goolsbee: “To most people, it looks like a dead fish. But to a future mayor of Chicago, it looks like a dead Asian Carp. And you’ll be happy to know that it wasn’t easy to find one of these”

Said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “In Chicago, this is how friends say goodbye.”"