This article provides more detail on Emanuel Rahm, Obama's influential Chief of Staff. As I see it, Obama was carefully vetted by the ruling class to head up their government. Rahm looks like his chief handler. This is the way "democracy" works in the US (and many other places).
King could have cautioned Obama, who got elected largely because he opposed the war in Iraq, that there might be problems giving so much power to Emanuel who supported the invasion and occupation. Observers were so enamored with the idea of Obama putting together a “team of rivals” that they failed to note that Emanuel’s views on the conflict in the Middle East are quite contrary to Obama’s Cairo speech about reaching out to the Islamic world.Obama did not give any power to Rahm. The latter is there to manage Obama. As progressives, we must stop looking at politics and power through the lens of conventional capitalist democratic concepts. Stop thinking about Washington politics in terms of the two capitalist parties. There are differences, but only negligible ones largely over tactics. Note that Obama's health plan, an anemic one at best, was completely stalled until he went to the primary governing board of the capitalist class--the Business Roundtable and pleaded with them. See this, this, and the other articles from the series by David DeGraw.
Overlooked was the fact that the President, so broadly supported by people working to end the war in Iraq, was placing at his right hand someone who had worked quite hard to undercut peace sentiment inside the Democratic Party.