Beef in the Obama White House?

A recent NYT Magazine piece highlights the role of Valerie Jarrett, Obama friend and advisor, inside the current White House. Fascinating, as it is, it speaks quietly of tensions within Obama's staff. They include the following gem about the relationship between Chief attack dog Rahm Emmanuel and Jarrett during the transition between Bush and Obama regimes:

Rahm Emanuel himself visited the West Wing to confer with his counterpart, the Bush chief of staff Joshua Bolten. In the course of their conversation, Bolten told Emanuel that Jarrett had been by, looking at office space.

Emanuel was not happy to learn this. He confronted Jarrett, and today he says: “There was a misunderstanding. . . . It wasn’t a dust-up.” As it would develop, Pete Rouse and Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, assigned Jarrett the airy second-floor office suite formerly commandeered by Karl Rove and before that the first lady, Hillary Clinton. But Emanuel’s reaction, at bottom, had little to do with West Wing real estate. Instead, it conveyed the understandable wariness with which the other top Obama advisers greeted the only one among them who could claim to be a close personal friend of both the president and the first lady.

It's the kind of article that shows you what everyone would have been talking about about how the Obama campaign "fell apart" had someone else won the 2008 race. For example, I mean like this piece on Hilary's campaign, complete with leaked memos.

Most interesting for me is how "loyalty" is a word so easily thrown around in this White House, just as it was in W's 8 years, when it came to talk surrounding his advisors.