Who is Rahm Emanuel?

The GOP and the intollerant are not happy. First the Dixiepulbicans. It did not take long in posting the following piece regarding the Emanuel nod, Obama’s Broken Promise. Some honeymoon. As for the fanantical, did you hear the one about the Black and the Jew in the White House? The rabid right are spinning here and here and here and . . .

Before I give you the Cliff Notes version of Emanuel, let me digress about the role of the Chief of Staff for the President of the United States. Well, it depends. The role and responsibilities of the Chief of Staff depend on the management style of the President as well as who the other senior staff advisers who surround the President. For instance, though Karl Rove was never the Chief of Staff in President Bush’s Administration, he ran the show.  While President Reagan had James Baker in the first term and Donald Regan in the second term as Chief of Staff; both of whom were very powerful. But after reading about Emanuel over the last few days, my impression is that he’ll be a strong Chief of Staff.

In a Newsweek interview, Andrew Card described the job as such:

Earn and keep the trust of the president. Those are two different statements. Don’t talk about things you shouldn’t be talking about, beyond what the president tells you. Remember that you’re serving the president and the First Lady, not a constituency. You’re not only there to help the president do his job, but you are also responsible for protecting the institution of the presidency—and sometimes, those will appear to be in conflict. Also, the White House is very good about paying attention to structure and organization, but I think the chief of staff also needs to pay attention to the psychology, emotions and needs of the president beyond policy. That could include contemplation time, time to call a friend or time to read a book. The chief of staff needs to be focused on the president’s 24-hour experience, not just his time in the Oval Office.

You have to have excellent peripheral vision, recognizing that a lot of other people in the White House will have tunnel vision. People who are experts on policy might come breathlessly into your office declaring that they’re ready to get something done, but the truth is the decision may be disconnected from the reality of connecting with Congress, or the United Nations, or even the American people. Just because the policy wonks are ready doesn’t mean the climate is receptive to the debate.

By now you have probably read that Emanuel, a Congressman from Chicago, is a hard-charger, a pit-bull, skull-cracker, foul-mouthed, and an ex-ballet dancer. The hyphens are important, my friends, the hyphens are important. From a Rolling Stone profile aptly called The Enforcer:

Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel’s success is his legendary intensity. There’s the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There’s the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there’s the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting “Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!” and plunging the knife into the table after every name. “When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,” one campaign veteran recalls. “It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you.”

Rahm is one of three sons to an immigrant peditriacian father and civil-rights activist mother who settled in Chicago. His brother Ezekiel is a leading bioethicist while his brother Ari is a Hollywood agent who is the model for Ari Gold on Entourage. (BTW, Josh Lyman from West Wing is modelled on Rahm in his days with the Clinton White House). Emanuel grew up practicing to be a ballet dancer and he was a good one at that. At one point in his teenage years, he sliced his middle finger which then got infected and he almost died. He graduated from Sarah Lawarence and did some political work and fundraising for Senator Paul Simon (the guy with the bow tie) and Mayor Daley.

Emanuel’s big break came when he was picked to the the Director of Finance for a Southern governor from a small state. Forbes magazine said that his work in fund raising for the then Governor Clinton was instrumental in Clinton making it through the difficult primaries of ’92.  After Clinton’s first inauguration, Emanuel was in The White House and was demoted a year later. He feared for his job. However, through his intense work-ethic and his ability to get the job done, he soon replace George Stephanapolis in ’96 as Cllinton’s senior advisor for policy and strategy. Clinton said of Emauel that he is “one of the top political minds in Washington.” He left the Clinton White House for Wasserstin Perella, an investment bank, and made some $18 million dollars in 2 1/2 years.

His brother said of the family and Rahm in particular regarding their work ethic:

There are people who never lose, who never fail, and their first failure is usually a disaster. That is not characteristic of Rahm or anyone else in our family. What we’re very good at-and what Rahm is very good at-is coming back. Persistence and picking yourself up off the floor and working harder and learning lessons from getting kicked in the teeth.

After making, what we would all have to call, some serious money, Emanuel went back into public service as a Congressman from the 5th District of Illinois in 2002. Emanuel quickly moved up the Democratic Congressional leadership and ran Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2005 which was largely responsible for the Democratic House gains in 2006.

And now we get to this week. President-elect Obama has asked Rahm Emanuel to be his Chief of Staff and Emanuel has accepted. There is no doubt that Emanuel has many enemies many of which include both Republicans and Democrats. Joe Scarbrough has cried out that Emanuel’s appointment is the beginning of partisan warfare by the Obama Administration. And, as I mentioned at the top of this post, the Republican National Committee is none to happy. Howard Fineman of Newsweek said it best on Hardball the other night, and I’m paraphrasing here, “The Republicans don’t like Emanuel because he wins”.

What I like about Emanuel is his experience. I believe he has learned many lessons while in Washington, he understands policy and he knows how the West Wing and Capitol Hill work. In a March 2001 opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Emanuel gave some unsought-for-advice to the new Bush Administration which could be a road map of how the Obama Administration will act in the upcoming year.

One lesson that Bush should take from his immediate predecessor is that first impressions count, and they take a lot of work to correct.

The Clinton administration’s early missteps–gays in the military, health care–gave the impression that we were more liberal than we had said we were. These were big mistakes, ones we and our party paid for dearly in 1994.

It took another two years for Clinton to move back to the political center and to prove he had meant what he said about reforming the Democratic Party. On issues such as free trade, welfare reform and criminal justice, Clinton opposed key constituencies in his own party. His willingness to challenge and overrule narrow party interests in favor of the national interest was essential to turning around his political fortunes. It was the price of modernizing our party and taking back the middle ground we had long ceded to our opponents.