The AP’s great reporter David Espo has moved a story about an early transition move by Team Obama: to approach Rahm Emanuel about possibly serving as White House chief of staff.

There are a couple of ways to look at this kind of report.The most obvious is the great Washington game of court intrigue: transitions are perfect for those who like to figure out who’s up and who’s down.Ultimately, such games don’t much matter when the next president will soon be making decisions about who is really up and down.

And for all the enthusiasm of his supporters, Barack Obama has not reached the point of making anything close to such decisions, according to several senior aides. Those same aides are deeply annoyed that transition stories are even emerging before Election Day.

However, there’s another way to look at this. While the decisions are not yet made, Obama’s efficient staff is paving the way for those decisions to come very shortly after the election, should they win next Tuesday. (McCain has his own transition team doing similar work.) That paving job includes approaching potential short lists, and Obama’s senior aides are doing nothing to deny that Rahm Emanuel has been approached.

Which leads us to two additional avenues to explore, surrounding the leaking of Emanuel’s name.

First, the story suggests that an Obama transition is going to be much harder to manage than the Obama campaign. Why? Because the campaign is run by a tight inner circle of trusted aides out of Chicago. The transition is already a sprawling effort involving several groups of Washington insiders, working out of the nation’s capital. Discipline is hard to enforce at a distance, where no single person is in full control. The culture of the campaign is not the culture of Washington.

Second, Emanuel is an ambitious and talented politician who has risen swiftly from the Clinton White House to a senior position inside the House Democratic leadership. With his political ambitions come political rivals, who may engage in strategic leaking. The profile of a congressional leader is not the same as a chief of staff, and the transition between the two can be jarring.