Thread: Rahm Emanuel Wins Chicago Mayoral Race

Rahm Emanuel Wins Chicago Mayoral Race, Thanks Voters for a 'Humbling Victory'
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Subscribe :CHICAGO -- Rahm Emanuel decisively won Tuesday's mayoral election, becoming the city's 55th mayor.

With 98 percent of the city precincts reporting, Emanuel had 55 percent of the vote -- enough to avoid a runoff election. His main rivals were Gery Chico, with 24 percent, City Clerk Miguel del Valle, with 9 percent, and former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.) with 9 percent.

"Thank you Chicago for this humbling victory," Emanuel said. "All I can say is, you sure know how to make a guy feel at home," a wry reference to the residency challenge that at one time threatened to derail his candidacy.

"What make this victory most gratifying is that it was built on votes from every corner of the city from people who believe that a common set of challenges must be met with a common purpose," he said during a victory celebration at a union hall, flanked by his wife, Amy, his three children, and his brothers, Hollywood superagent, Ari, and Ezekiel, a White House health policy adviser.


Repeating a line from his stump speech about school safety and jobs, Emanuel talked about those challenges.
"We have not won anything until a kid can go to school thinking of their studies and not their safety," Emanuel said. And the "parent of that child is thinking about their work and not where they are going to find work."
President Obama complimented his former chief of staff, saying in a statement: "I want to extend my congratulations to Rahm Emanuel on a well-deserved victory tonight. As a Chicagoan and a friend, I couldn't be prouder. Rahm will be a terrific mayor for all the people of Chicago."
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Former White House senior adviser David Axelrod, a longtime Emanuel friend, was at the victory celebration.

"This a pretty tremendous win. The possibility was always there. I could see it, but I also felt six people in a race, it is very hard to win a clear majority like this. It is a great tribute to him and the race he won that he achieved this," Axelrod said. The Feb. 22 election was a non-partisan primary and if no one won more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two vote-getters would have competed in an April 5 runoff.

Tuesday's election marked a milestone -- Emanuel is the city's first Jewish mayor -- and the end of the long Daley era in Chicago.

The mayoral election season started with a bang on Sept. 7, 2011, when Mayor Richard M. Daley made a bombshell announcement that he would not seek a seventh term.

"The truth is, I have been thinking about this for the past several months. In the end, this is a personal decision, no more, no less," Daley said.

From his perch in the West Wing, Emanuel, who had been coy publicly about his interest in the mayor's job, immediately started to prepare for a run, staying out of the spotlight until he was ready to quit as chief of staff and return to Chicago.

Emanuel departed the White House on Oct. 1 in a lavish East Room ceremony hosted by the president and orchestrated by Emanuel. It was attended by Cabinet members and top Obama administration staffers. Obama spoke warmly about his chief of staff, and Emanuel made radio and television commercials from the event. While Obama never officially made an endorsement, giving Emanuel permission to make extensive use of the material amounted to a defacto endorsement.

For all his meticulous planning, Emanuel never considered that his moving to Washington to work for Obama would yield a challenge to his Chicago residency. But it did. He was tossed off the ballot by an Illinois Court of Appeals panel on grounds that he did not meet residency requirements to run for mayor.

But he ultimately survived the challenge -- the Illinois Supreme Court ordered him back on the ballot -- and the pictures and stories of him sitting through a circus-like residency hearing were a turning point in his campaign, portraying the abrasive Emanuel as a sympathetic character.

A prolific fundraiser, Emanuel quickly amassed a huge political war chest after leaving the White House.

He had a running start, transferring $1.1 million from his federal House fund to his city race. Between Oct. 1, when Emanuel quit as chief of staff, through Dec. 31, he raised an additional $10.5 million to Chico's $2.5 million, Braun's $445,760 and del Valle's $111,499. Each has raised more money since then, but nothing close to closing the gap with Emanuel.

Rahm Israel Emanuel, the son of an Israeli immigrant, was born Nov. 29, 1959 in Chicago. His family moved to the North Shore suburb of Wilmette when he was in elementary school. After graduating from New Trier West High School in 1977, Emanuel received an undergraduate degree from Sarah Lawrence.

Emanuel won election to the House of Representatives in 2002 with the help of Daley's political foot soldiers. For years Emanuel has been close to the mayor's brother, William Daley, who replaced him as White House chief of staff. And Emanuel has a deep friendship with Axelrod, who just stepped down as a White House senior adviser and was a key strategist for Mayor Daley before taking on Obama. Axelrod's former consulting firm made Emanuel's political commercials.

Daley, the city's 54th mayor, first ran for the job in 1983, but lost the Democratic primary to Harold Washington, who went on to become the city's first black mayor.

Daley, then the Cook County State's Attorney, tried again and took office on April 24, 1989 -- Emanuel helped him raise millions of dollars for that campaign. Daley had been reelected ever since, presiding over an increasingly complacent 50-member City Council.

In May, Daley steps down as the city's longest-serving mayor, ruling Chicago from his fifth-floor City Hall office longer than his father, Richard J. Daley.
Tagged: chicago, Chicago mayor, chicago mayoral race, Rahm Emanuel, rahm emanuel chicago mayor
More articles from Lynn Sweet »

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/02/22 ... k3%7C45753

Whyam I not surprised.

Hmmmm....

Gutierrez Blasts Emanuel On Immigration
Fri, 01/14/2011 - 19:12
Micah Maidenberg
Progress Illinois

U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, one of the leading advocates for a comprehensive immigration reform bill, said Rahm Emanuel "has not stood up for immigrants."

U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez minced no words Friday in blasting Rahm Emanuel's positions on immigration reform in recent years, saying Chicago's mayoral front-runner "took actions to harm immigrants" as a member of Congress and during his tenure as President Barack Obama's chief of staff.

"He has not stood up for immigrants. He has not moved comprehensive immigration reform forward. He has not made the right decisions, he has made political decisions," Gutierrez said. "That's not what the immigrant community deserves in the next mayor of the city of Chicago."

Gutierrez considered a run of his own for mayor before deciding to return to Washington and support Gery Chico's bid for city government's top spot.

The 4th District congressman, one of the leading voices in Washington in favor of a comprehensive immigration reform bill, revisited the tactical maneuverings he said Emanuel deployed when the so-called "Sensenbrenner bill," a piece of legislation that would have effectively criminalized undocumented immigrants, was before the GOP-controlled House in 2005. Here's Gutierrez explaining what happened:

Emanuel voted against the bill, and one of his spokespersons denied that Emanuel told vulnerable Democratic congressmen to vote for the bill, according to past news reports.

But the Sensenbrenner vote isn't the only issue that has immigrants and advocates criticizing Emanuel.

Emanuel has called immigration reform the "third rail" of American politics and argued that last year was not a good one for pushing for reform legislation. Many reformers are also furious with the deportation policy of the Obama administration (which, of course, Emanuel helped to lead); and yesterday at City Council, aldermen adopted a resolution calling for an end to deportations that break up families that include documented and undocumented immigrants.

A comprehensive immigration bill is now unlikely with the GOP in control of the House, Gutierrez said.

Gutierrez's comments came at a press conference where the Illinois Coalition for Immigration and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) released a scathing new report about the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency's "Secure Communities" program in the state.

ICIRR found that 77 percent of all immigrants arrested through July of last year in the 26 Illinois counties that participate in "Secure Communities" have no past criminal convictions.

"Secure Communities" was meant to be a new way for local law enforcement to remove dangerous criminals from the country, ICIRR's report states, by encouraging county jails to check suspects' fingerprints against immigration databases. ICE can then step in and start deportation proceedings.

"The Secure Communities program is badly broken," said Josh Hoyt, executive director of ICIRR, "deporting nannies and busboys instead of truly bad people."

Susana Ramirez, a resident of McHenry County, recounted her brush with law enforcement through Secure Communities, with Hoyt translating:

ICIRR wants the Obama administration to bring Secure Communities "in line with its original intention to identifying convicted criminals, so that ICE and local law enforcement can focus on the truly harmful, and not on immigrants who pose no threat." The organization also called on state officials to withdraw from the program.

Carol Moseley Braun and Gery Chico also expressed support for immigration reform at the ICIRR press conference today, and Miguel del Valle has been in the forefront of the mayoral contenders in blasting Emanuel's immigration positions in the past.

ICIRR's report and Gutierrez's comments came a day after Emanuel's mayoral campaign proposed creating a new fund with business and civic leaders to help so-called DREAM students -- children of undocumented immigrants who have grown up in the U.S. -- go to college.

But Gutierrez said the proposal is "too little too late."

"It's another example of Rahm the candidate's rhetoric not matching Rahm the congressman's record," he said.

http://icirr.org/en/node/5225

Good luck Chicago.


Kathyet