The sun is just rising as Rahm Emanuel takes to the sidewalk under the Brown Line stop at Addison. He’ll be there for over an hour, his gloveless hands raw from the cold, greeting the commuters dashing for their trains.
He even pretty much sat out the greatest political campaign of the last 20 years–Harold Washington’s 1983 mayoral race. As he recalls, he voted for Richard M. Daley over Washington in the Democratic primary. “But then,” he says, “I voted for Washington over [Bernie] Epton in the general.”
Clinton clearly appreciated those talents. And why not? Emanuel raised about $71 million for Clinton’s first presidential campaign, keeping the money flowing during the dark days of the New Hampshire primary, when Clinton was mired in the Gennifer Flowers sex scandal. After Clinton won he tabbed Emanuel to organize his inauguration, then hired him to work in the White House as a chief strategist.
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Mother Jones called him “arrogant, rash and power hungry” and described how he once “sent a rotting fish to a former coworker with whom he had parted ways.” Later in that article an unnamed colleague said, “Nobody says he’s dumb, but everyone says he’s an asshole.” He’d let the Mother Jones writer see his impatience, snapping rubber bands, tapping pencils, and shifting in his seat. He said he saw no point in joining a feeble journalistic expedition to find profound meaning in his life. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but if I want introspection, I’m gonna pay a hundred dollars an hour.”
The result was a wasted presidency, at least in the eyes of many progressives. As presidential scholars James MacGregor Burns and Georgia Sorenson write in their book Dead Center: Clinton-Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation, Clinton abandoned many of his campaign promises, particularly his national health-care plan, which he couldn’t pass even though the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during his first two years in office. “Facing an ideological party, he could not be ideological because he was a transactional broker who was not always persistent and skillful enough to make his dealing stick, and was a would-be transforming leader without the deep conviction necessary to that strategy,” Burns and Sorenson write. “No wonder some Americans considered him neither a fox nor a lion, but a chameleon.”
His reasons were simple. He says he wanted to serve the public, and he thought he’d be good. “I know the system–I know how it works,” he says. “I knew I would be effective, and I knew I wanted to serve. My parents had always taught us the importance of public service. I just didn’t know where. It’s not like I had mapped this whole thing out.”
Of course, there was still the problem of his pit-bull reputation. “Rahm has a lot of strengths as a fund-raiser and a deal maker that are not necessarily enamoring,” says one of his advisers. “Now, I could make the argument–and I think a lot of people would agree–that the district really could use a hard-ass in Congress looking out for its interests. But that’s not an easy sell.”
