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Rahm the Enforcer
By: Julie Mason
Examiner White House Correspondent
December 28, 2008
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He throws cells phones. He once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him. At a dinner to celebrate Bill Clinton’s 1992 election, Emanuel repeatedly stabbed the table with a steak knife, shouting the names of his political enemies. Journalists have trouble quoting him, because his routine utterances are replete with profanity.
“Rahm is a little intense,” Barack Obama once said.
As even Emanuel concedes, “I wake up some mornings hating me, too.”
Emanuel’s political intensity has a darker side. His numerous contacts with disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s office to push various candidates for Obama’s open Senate seat put him inside the lines of an unseemly political scandal.
The Obama transition team last week cleared itself of wrongdoing in the matter, but it’s unlikely that its report is the last word on the federal government’s wide-ranging public corruption investigation.
“Part of his portfolio is dealmaking, being sure people are doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson said of Emanuel. “The assumption is that Obama’s team will stay clean in this, but if there’s a stumble, it will be in Rahm’s shop.”
For now, Emanuel’s combative style helps make him the perfect man for his new job: chief of staff to President-elect Obama.
Emanuel, 49, will play the enforcer role of controlling access and information through the Oval Office door. He will need to have an intuitive sense of what the new president wants and needs, while staying oblivious to the hurt feelings of people he turns away.
“The chief of staff is the ‘no’ person, and he is the one who takes the blame for the president,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor at Towson University and an expert on presidential transition.
It will be especially tricky playing gatekeeper for Obama, of whom so much is expected and so much will be asked.
“You have to know who the president wants in the room,” Kumar said.
A former Clinton administration senior adviser and fourth-ranking Democratic leader in the House, Emanuel has been a political operator on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
“I have loved the time I spent in the House, both the successes and the setbacks,” Emanuel said recently.
Of his House colleagues, Emanuel added, “They have taught me invaluable lessons — even a few lessons in humility, believe it or not.”
A three-term congressman and skilled fundraiser and partisan, Emanuel was 2006 chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and helped his party win a majority in the House.
In addition to serving as in-house gatekeeper, the White House chief of staff is often the president’s point man with Cabinet members and lawmakers.
Some critics, notably Republican House leaders, criticized Obama’s choice of Emanuel for the job, saying Emanuel’s history of partisan politics is out of step with Obama’s promises to work across the aisle.
Rep. Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who served with Emanuel on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, said Republican “nerves may be too raw” for Emanuel to be an effective surrogate for Obama with the GOP caucus.
But with a stronger Democratic majority preparing to test the limits of their power on the House side, Emanuel’s leadership experience and role in helping many of them get elected could serve Obama’s interest in governing from the center, Brady said.
“Rahm is possibly the only person over there who can keep House Democrats between the lines,” Brady said. “You could see it on the House floor when they were crafting legislation, he was the one moving the conference back to the center.”
Influence like that could bode well for the incoming president’s ambitious policy agenda, notably a massive public works program aimed at creating jobs and improving the economy through a federal government spending program.
Obama also is expected to push a universal health care initiative, which was one of Emanuel’s priorities when he worked in the Clinton White House.
“No one I know is better at getting things done,” Obama said of Emanuel.
In the Clinton administration, Emanuel earned the nickname “Rahmbo” for his aggressive style. He is said to be the model for the character Josh Lyman on “The West Wing.”
Translating his force of personality into velvet-fist efficiency in the real West Wing will be a key challenge for Emanuel, whose dossier now includes hiring, firing, and deciding whether Obama should get his information in bullet points or executive summary.
“One thing Rahm has going for him is a sense that the president really supports him,” said Stephen Hess, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution whose latest book, “What Do We Do Now,” is a road map for presidential transitions.
“His temperament is an issue, but of course everybody is trying to be generous,” Hess said. “Nobody in Washington is willing to slam somebody who is going to be that powerful.”
Even so, Emanuel may find the message discipline of the Obama administration a tough adjustment after his freewheeling days in Congress and the Clinton administration.
In her 2007 book about the Clintons, “For Love of Politics,” Sally Bedell Smith describes an incident in which an unnamed Clinton administration official colorfully denigrates then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, at the time one of Washington’s most powerful Democrats, after Moynihan criticized Clinton’s transition.
“Big deal,” a ‘top administration official’ told Time magazine, adding, “he’s not one of us … he couldn’t obstruct us even if he wanted to. The gridlock is broken. It’s all Democratic now. We’ll roll right over him if we have to.”
Emanuel called the senator’s office after the story appeared, promising to fire whoever gave the quote to Time. A horrified Clinton echoed the promise, saying “We know it was someone who didn’t know us.”
But as the late senator’s personal papers showed, Emanuel’s promise was disingenuous, to say the least. At a dinner with the Time reporter, Moynihan was told that the “big deal” quote came from none other than Emanuel.
During much of the current presidential transition, Emanuel, who like Obama still lives in Chicago, has been keeping a low profile.
Declaring that “now is a time for unity,” he made a round of conciliatory, closed-door chats with Republican leaders on Capitol Hill.
“We would like and welcome their ideas, on a host of fronts, be that in the area of education, health care, taxes, energy policy, national security,” Emanuel said. “Give us those ideas, as we are formulating what we’re going to do in the Obama administration.”
Emanuel is close friends with Obama and with David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist and incoming White House senior adviser. The trio is expected to comprise the new administration’s central axis of power.
Before accepting the chief of staff job, Emanuel expressed reservations about how the demands of the new administration would affect his wife and three children. In taking the job, he also gave up a long-cherished dream of becoming speaker of the House.
“I know what a privilege it is to serve in the White House, and am humbled by the responsibility we owe the American people,” Emanuel said in accepting Obama’s offer. “I’m leaving a job I love to join your White House for one simple reason: Like the record amount of voters who cast their ballot over the last month, I want to do everything I can to help deliver the change America needs.”
