Thread: Rep. Emanuel Offered Chief of Staff Position

Rep. Emanuel Offered Chief of Staff Position, Officials Say
Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel has been offered the job of chief of staff to President-elect Barack Obama, Democratic officials say.

WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama chose Illinois lawmaker Rahm Emanual to be his White House chief of staff, his first selection for the new administration, Democratic officials said Wednesday.

If Emanuel accepts, the congressman would return to the White House where he served as a political and policy adviser to President Bill Clinton.

Several Democrats also said Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was actively seeking appointment as secretary of State in the new administration.

Two campaign officials said the appointment of a chief of staff was not expected for at least a day.

Instead, they said Obama would issue a written statement announcing that his transition team would be headed by John Podesta, who served as chief of staff under Clinton; Pete Rouse, who has been Obama's chief of staff in the Senate; and Valerie Jarrett, a friend of the president-elect and campaign adviser.

The officials who described the developments did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss events not yet announced.

HERE is what NUMBERS USA has to say about Rahm Emanuel:

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Looks like he flunked with a big F.

Kerry as secretary of state? lol what an interesting four years this is gonna be.

That is change we need

This appointment is more about assuring Isreal of continued support more than anything else, nothing more than postureing on obama's part. If i was Isreal right now i'd be real worried.

At this point of his political career he was known for his intensity. Notably, he reportedly told British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "This is important. Don't **** it up," prior to Blair appearing in public with Clinton for the first time after the Lewinsky scandal emerged.[10]

Emanuel is said to have "mailed a rotting fish to a former coworker after the two parted ways."[9] On the night after the Clinton election, "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."[1] His "take-no-prisoners attitude" earned him the nickname "Rahm-bo".[9]

In 1998, Emanuel served on the Chicago Housing Association board and was repeatedly accused of undermining fair and affordable housing for low-income minorities. Opponents cite incidents during which Emanuel left concerned citizens meetings in which Section 8 housing destruction was authorized, to talk on his cell phone or take early lunches.[citation needed] He has never publicly commented on his CHA years.

People who worked with Emanuel at that time "insist the once hard-charging staffer has mellowed out."[9] He left the White House to accept a well-paid position in investment banking at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in Chicago, where he worked from 1999 to 2002 and reportedly earned US$18 million.[11]

cjbl- is this like something out of the God Father - with the rotting fish and the knife in the table?

He told Prime Minister Tony Blair not to "**** it up" -

Great and this is our new Chief of Staff?

YIKES!

Change Change Change

But he never said what type of change we were getting.

Rahm Emanuel, Pitbull politician
He's a killler strategist and nonstop fundraiser, with a style one ally likens to a "toothache."
Meet the Chicago Congressman who's one of the big reasons the Democrats have a shot to retake the house. By Nina Easton
By Nina Easton, Fortune Washington bureau chief
September 25 2006: 12:57 PM EDT


(Washingion D.C) Fortune -- On a wretchedly hot August day outside the Caterpillar tractor plant in Montgomery, Ill., President Bush and the state's congressional delegation gather for the signing of the massive transportation bill. This is 2005, the calm before the Katrina storm, and a rigorous mountain-biking schedule has the President in top shape.

In off-camera chitchat with the shirt-sleeved lawmakers, Bush takes note of Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel's deep tan, prompting the 46-year-old Emanuel to boast about the miles of swimming and biking in his triathlon training schedule. Testosterone oozes into the humid air space between the two men. Bush invites Emanuel down to Texas to do some real biking. "So I said, 'I'll make you a deal, Mr. President. I'll bike if you swim.' Now he didn't exactly say swimming was a wussy sport, but you could tell.... So I said, 'Mr. President, Laura can put your water wings next to the lake. You can have your water wings.' "




At that point you might think this graduate of the Evanston School of Ballet-a man whose office features sunset photos and who has the mellow chords of David Gray playing on his iPod-would leave well enough alone. But Emanuel is hard-wired to go for the jugular: Politics Chicago-style are part of his DNA. So he sharpens his drill bit on the leader of the free world. "I said to him, 'You're not one of those tribathletes, are you, Mr. President? You know-steam, sauna, shower?'

"And Bush goes, 'That's g-o-o-d.' "

Eyes dancing, Emanuel spins that last word with a solid impersonation of the President's Midland drawl. He is recounting this story 11 months later, from an office overlooking a construction site and a freeway, four blocks from the leadership offices of the U.S. Capitol he hopes to occupy some day. He has just returned from the House floor, taut and unable to sit still, his kinetic brain consumed by an upcoming election that will affect the personal fate of both men.

Banter with a U.S. President is nothing new to Emanuel; he was at Bill Clinton's side as a political advisor inside the White House for six years and still talks strategy with him at least once a month. Now chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee-the operations center for House candidates (Washington nickname: "D-Triple C")-Emanuel is applying rugged business discipline to the Democratic Party's historic effort to wrest control of the U.S. House from the Republicans. Last year he recruited dozens of candidates to challenge GOP incumbents. This year he is holding feet to the fire to raise record amounts for the Democrats' effort.

Along the way Emanuel has widened his core of admirers-and made powerful enemies. Nervous about being swamped by Republican money this fall, he spent the summer locked in a bitter dispute with Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean over the allocation of election resources-the political equivalent of Microsoft executives arguing over how many Xboxes to ship where for the Christmas season.

In private Emanuel told off Dean. In public he's aimed similar messages at liberal financiers like George Soros for being stingy and at the leftist activists in MoveOn.org for being ineffective. "Is there anyone Rahm Emanuel isn't fighting with?" asks a MyDD blogger. A straw poll by another leftist blog, Daily Kos, gave Emanuel a 58% disapproval rating.

All this matters, of course, only if the Democrats lose. "Holy Christ, his butt is on the line," says Democratic strategist Paul Begala, who describes Emanuel's aggressive style as a "cross between a hemorrhoid and a toothache." Begala continues, "I love Rahm, but that's a small group of us. He's not a beloved figure like Tip O'Neill or Dick Gephardt. Rahm's there because they want to win."

If Emanuel does succeed in returning House Democrats to power for the first time in 12 years, it's a safe bet that this one-time investment banker will vault up the House leadership ranks and eventually be in a position to bid for the Speaker's title that Chicagoans once hoped would be held by their legendary Dan Rostenkowski.

Hillary Clinton may or may not become the party's presidential nominee. Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi may or may not remain the GOP's favorite tetherballs. But Emanuel-now only 47 years old and in a safe district-is fast emerging as a new force in the Democratic Party.

He also symbolizes the party's painful internal divisions. He is praised by Democratic strategists who think the party needs to resist moving left (nearly twice as many American voters call themselves conservative as call themselves liberal) and distrusted by some in the party's liberal wing. He considers Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman a good friend, even though Lieberman's support of the Iraq war inflamed leftist sentiment and cost him his party's nomination.

"We have two Democrats running," Emanuel says, referring to Lieberman, now campaigning as an independent, and primary winner Ned Lamont. Emanuel himself criticizes Bush's conduct of the war but not the original decision to topple Saddam Hussein.

Still, even the most liberal activists admire Emanuel's martial instincts. Borrowing Newt Gingrich's battle cry that politics is "war without blood," Emanuel has come out swinging, determined to avoid a replay of the timid, flip-flopping mess that was the 2004 campaign.

Former President Clinton told FORTUNE he considers Emanuel "one of the top political minds in Washington," a strategist who "favors the counterattack over the attack." Clinton adds: "His politics are rooted in new ideas and old-fashioned values." Former Bush economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who, as Congressional Budget Office director, worked with Emanuel, calls him the "real deal." (Like Rostenkowski, Emanuel has a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee.)

This "real deal" is not your average back-slapping, fraternity-brother brand of politician. You'll find him watching Twyla Tharp choreography, not his golf swing, even as he's calculating how to slash his opponent. "He will step into a fight and not back down easily, if at all. He doesn't mind the heat," says his equally combative little brother, Hollywood superagent Ariel Emanuel.

Emanuel has rejuvenated the hopes of House Democrats in no small part by applying the money-raising acumen he used when Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign nearly sank under the weight of Gennifer Flowers' accusations. With a penchant for networking and making deals-honed during a stint at Wasserstein Perella (which netted him more than $18 million in just over two years)-Emanuel has put the party's House campaign coffers on a par with the Republicans' for the first time in years.

Conservative Republican Tom Cole, a U.S. Representative from Oklahoma, cited Emanuel's ferocity in a recent letter to colleagues asking for their support in his own campaign to run the counterpart House GOP operation next term. "He's dangerous," says Cole, who calls Emanuel a friend. "He has a closing intensity. When he's got a political kill in sight, he's absolutely relentless." And that, says Cole, has the GOP worried this fall.

On a Tuesday afternoon in june, inside a Capitol Hill conference room, the Democratic Party's three biggest moneymen take their places around an oval table to begin a session of dialing for dollars. New York's camera-ready but frumpy senior Senator, Charles Schumer, tosses off his shoes, puts up his feet, and starts cracking jokes. Former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe walks in, all toothy grins. Emanuel, trim and 5-foot-8, by far the smallest of the trio, is by contrast hyperserious. Between donor calls he barks at staff and clicks out messages on his BlackBerry, according to people in the room.

"Hey, Tommy," Schumer deadpans into the speakerphone once superlobbyist Tommy Boggs is connected, "have I got an opportunity for you!"

"I think I'd rather have my proctologist calling," Boggs quips. The trio wants Boggs to bring in $100,000-$25,000 per donor-for an October fundraising dinner at the Clintons' Washington, D.C., home. Boggs pleads that he's already given to Schumer's senatorial committee.

"That was breakfast, Tommy," Schumer laughs. "This is dinner."

The Clinton event-to be followed by lunch with congressional leaders-is part of the Democrats' "last-minute money," a cash hoard they are building to return fire when Republicans start upping the money ante. As the fall campaign clicks into high gear, Democratic strategists say they have at least a fifty-fifty chance at taking back the House. "It's a jump shot," says Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, one of Emanuel's top DCCC lieutenants.

But Democratic prospects could easily sour if the Republicans pour in last-minute millions that they can't match. That possibility is fueling tensions between DNC chair Dean and Emanuel. One month earlier, at a meeting on Capitol Hill, Emanuel and Schumer asked Dean to match the Republican National Committee's expected outlay in the fall campaign. Dean refused to budge from what he describes as a long-term financial strategy to build up the party in all 50 states. As Dean balked at Emanuel's money demands, tempers flared, and the Chicago Congressman couldn't contain his. He stormed out, lobbing one of his famed "f-bombs" at Dean.

Within weeks, according to sources close to the fracas, Schumer was trying to reopen communication with Dean-sans the hot-tempered Emanuel-while Emanuel was firing off a letter to Dean demanding $100,000 for each of some 40 targeted races and pointing out that Gingrich's famed 1994 GOP takeover of the House was backed by $20 million in RNC funds. When news of the letter leaked to the press, anonymous Dean supporters accused Emanuel of laying the groundwork to shift the blame if the Democrats lose in November.

Emanuel's fears about being slaughtered by RNC money are legitimate. A deal he brokered with Dean in early September committed the DNC to spend $2.4 million on 40 competitive House races, while the RNC will be drawing on a war chest that will probably clock in at 25 times that size. But ego is also part of this intraparty fracas: Schumer and Emanuel are both seasoned victors-Schumer beat powerful Republican Senator Al D'Amato; Emanuel advised a winning presidential candidate before beating a Polish Catholic in a majority Polish Catholic district in his own race for Congress.

Emanuel-Schumer allies view Dean as a hand-me-down governor (he took over in Vermont when his predecessor died) of a tiny cheese state who blew up his quixotic 2004 presidential campaign by blowing through his money.

Emanuel and Schumer schmooze easily with the silk-thread Wall Street crowd. Dean is a practiced outsider. Emanuel and Schumer pride themselves not only on breaking fundraising records but on running lean operations and saying no to incumbent candidates who don't need their help.

"Chuck is tighter than a tick, and so is Rahm," says Hassan Nemazee, a New York investor who chairs national fundraising for Senate candidates. Dean behaves more like a governor, broadly doling out money to build staff and operations.

As I arrive for a July interview with Emanuel at DCCC headquarters, former Gore campaign chief Donna Brazile is standing on the sidewalk, buttonholing him. A party veteran, Brazile has seen more than her share of internal Democratic Party squabbles, and she's worried about this one.

Some party activists view Emanuel as the instigator of a feud that is dividing the party. Dean may be the object of sighs and eye-rolling by pragmatic, big-donor Democrats-the crowd that has generally signed on with Emanuel-but as a populist hero to party activists and the "netroots" he helped spawn, the former presidential candidate has his own powerful base. So Brazile tells me she is here to deliver a compromise plan she hopes will cool the fires between the two men.

Minutes later, upstairs in his office, Emanuel obliquely suggests that Dean is nearly as big an obstacle as Karl Rove to a Democratic win. "Everyone is pulling their weight," he says, with the implication that Dean-whose DNC has $11 million in cash, compared with the RNC at $43 million-is the exception.

"Eleven of our challengers have nearly, or more than, a million dollars cash on hand. In 2004 it was zero. Zero." He shoots the last word out like a golden fireworks spray, letting it settle for effect before continuing. "I have no problem with building for the long term. But I don't know another way to win when the other side has $40 million. They got a cavalry. We need a cavalry."

Yet Dean is hardly the only one on Capitol Hill annoyed with Emanuel-so are some of the House members he is horse-whipping when they fail to pay their DCCC dues. "Nothing replaces perspiration," he says of fundraising. "You set a goal and you drive toward that goal and you put everything toward it."

Every day, including weekends, he makes calls to donors, calls to candidates to remind them to call donors, callbacks if he doesn't get an answer-or if he gets the wrong one. Says Boggs: "There's no hesitancy about asking for money and then arguing with you if he thinks you're not giving enough. If you won't take his call at 4, he'll call at 4:15; if you don't take it then, he'll call at 4:30."
Emanuel wasn't the brains of his family-that was his older brother, Ezekiel, who would grow up to become an oncologist and one of the nation's leading bioethicists. Nor was he the brawn-that was younger brother Ariel, whose raw combative style is so legendary in gladiatorial Hollywood that he was the inspiration for the hyper-ruthless, Viagra-popping agent Ari Gold in the HBO series Entourage.

Rahm was the one dancing through the living room to his mother's jazz and classical music, spinning pirouettes and leaping down the stairs of his family's suburban Chicago split-level. A popular kid but not especially focused, he had none of that out-of-the-womb political ambition so evident in the lives of leaders like Bill Clinton.

And then he almost died. With high school graduation days away, Emanuel sliced his finger while working in a fast-food joint. Infection took hold after a prom-night swim in Lake Michigan. By the time this son of a pediatrician finally sought medical care, he was suffering from a severe blood and bone infection. He lay in the hospital, his temperature reaching 106. Marsha Emanuel, his mother, is a force of will-a woman who can compare the insides of the Evanston and Chicago prisons based on her three arrests at civil rights protests. But on this subject tears still well up in her hazel eyes. "We almost lost him," she says.

After a six-week battle, he recovered, losing half his finger to the infection but gaining a new sense of seriousness and purpose. "He has one of the strongest survival instincts I've ever seen," says longtime friend Mary Leslie, who attributes that inner reserve to his Israeli roots. His father, Benjamin, was born in Jerusalem, the son of pharmacists who had escaped the Russian pogroms. In the 1940s Benjamin Emanuel interrupted his medical school training in Switzerland to take part in an unsuccessful scheme to smuggle guns from Czechoslovakia to the Israeli underground. He later served as a medic in the 1948 Israeli war of independence. (Rahm would echo his father's dedication during the Gulf war: With Iraqi Scuds falling on his father's home country, he volunteered for military-vehicle-maintenance duty near the Lebanese border.)
In 1953, Dr. Emanuel's medical training brought him to the States, where he met Marsha, then an X-ray technician at Chicago's Mount Sinai hospital. They married and, after a brief return to Israel, settled down in Chicago. Dr. Emanuel's pediatrics practice on the North Side's Lincoln Avenue drew a passel of immigrants, and eventually became-with his partners-one of the largest in the city. (Decades later the "Doc's" families would turn out to vote for his son in a congressional election.)

Money was tight in the early years. The family left their first Chicago apartment because it was rat-infested. They were kicked out of their second apartment because tenants complained that the three rambunctious boys were too loud. Yet Chicago also meant a lively street life of playing hoops in the park and building go-carts in the alley with the artist who lived upstairs.

That came to an end when Rahm was 9 and their immigrant father achieved the American dream of buying a house in the suburbs, the lakeside Republican enclave of Wilmette. The boys, recalls brother Zeke, missed the city. "The suburbs never grafted on to us," he says.

The boys also joined their mother on most civil rights demonstrations within a 50-mile radius of Chicago. "I only brought the kids if I thought it was going to be peaceful, with no arrests," Marsha Emanuel insists. (Though it wasn't always predictable; she wore a dress and had a dinner party planned when she was carted off by cops for her first overnight jail term.)

Marsha's father was a burly Moldavian immigrant who arrived alone on a ship at age 10. He went on to become a union organizer. Politics-loud and argumentative-infused Marsha's childhood; her three boys got their own dose from trips in their grandfather's delivery truck.

Rahm jumped into politics right after his graduation from Sarah Lawrence College, where he promised his mother he would take advantage of the campus's stellar dance program but never did. He quickly discovered a penchant for fundraising, which he applied to campaigns for Senator Paul Simon, the DCCC, and Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley. In 1991 he joined Clinton's presidential campaign. Emanuel wowed the team from the start, opening a spigot on needed campaign funds, and after Clinton's election helped program a picture-perfect inaugural. He nabbed the plum White House position of political director.
Then he started shooting off his mouth. There was the time he rapped on a conference table to get "Lloyd's" attention. ("We were all aghast," recalls one Clinton aide, noting that even Lloyd Bentsen's wife still called the Treasury Secretary "Senator." ) He had a very public run-in with the late Senator Patrick Moynihan, who accused him of being the source of an anonymous quote that "we'll roll all over [Moynihan] if we have to" on welfare reform. (Emanuel denied saying it.) Most damaging were Emanuel's battles with Hillary Clinton loyalists, who accused him of leaks about the travel office episode.

A year after Clinton took office, Emanuel was demoted. "He was very upset," recalls Zeke. "He thought he was going to get kicked out of the White House." He didn't, and neither did he quit. Instead, Emanuel regrouped, helping lead the charge on key Clinton initiatives, including the crime bill, the assault weapons ban, and NAFTA. "He was constantly on the offense," says Begala. Emanuel planned to leave after the 1996 election, but Clinton promoted him to take George Stephanopoulos's spot as senior advisor for policy and strategy.

Still, Emanuel had political aspirations of his own, which necessitated some financial security. So in late 1998 he traded in Clinton as his boss for Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and Wall Street financier. "Money is not the be-all and end-all for him," says brother Zeke. "But he knew he needed money so that wouldn't be a problem while he was doing public service." Over a 2 1/2-year period he helped broker deals-often using political connections-for Wasserstein Perella.

According to congressional financial disclosures, he earned more than $18 million during that period. His deals included Unicom's merger with Peco Energy and venture fund GTCR Golder Rauner's purchase of SBC subsidiary SecurityLink. But friends say his compensation also benefited from two sales of the Wasserstein firm itself, first to Dresdner Bank and then to Allianz AG.

By 2002, Emanuel emerged as a wealthy man with a reputation as a battle-hardened national strategist. That year he won a tough primary race for a seat in Congress that paid $138,000. His 1994 White House demotion was ancient history.

"There are people who never lose, who never fail, and their first failure is usually a disaster," says Zeke. "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." In 2005 that's exactly what the long out-of-power Democrats decided they could use, and so they turned to Emanuel to run the DCCC.

Emanuel's in-your-face money demands make him stand out in a party that has sometimes been a little prissy about big-donor fundraising.

"Republicans understand power and that you need money to get power. Our guys don't," complains one of the party's leading funders. Colleagues say Emanuel has become adept at the care and feeding of big donors-knowing their interests, asking about their families, sending them cheesecakes from Chicago's Eli's Bakery. He's expanded the DCCC's donor base, appealing both to like-minded young financiers and big-business donors with GOP ties who are hedging their bets this fall.

Emanuel shuttles between a turn-of-the-century house in Chicago (home to his wife, Amy Rule, who works with disadvantaged youth through art programs, and their three children) and a basement apartment on Capitol Hill, where he jokingly calls himself "the hobbit." In between, he's co-authored a Democratic agenda called The Plan with former Clinton policy advisor Bruce Reed-who calls himself "one of the few people in America that Rahm doesn't yell at." The Plan reflects much of the same centrist sensibility both men displayed at the Clinton White House.

Emanuel is drawn to issues that resonate with average voters, like stem-cell research, raising the minimum wage, and a "fair, flat" income tax. While Bush was pushing his Medicare drug plan, Emanuel was pounding the administration to permit drug imports from Canada-a popular cause for families facing high prescription bills.

On Iraq, Emanuel has steered clear of the withdraw-now crowd, preferring to criticize Bush for military failures since the 2003 invasion. "The war never had to turn out this way," he told me at one of his campaign stops. In January 2005, when asked by Meet the Press's Tim Russert whether he would have voted to authorize the war-"knowing that there are no weapons of mass destruction"-Emanuel answered yes. (He didn't take office until after the vote.) "I still believe that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do, okay?" he added.

When it comes to slicing and dicing his Republican foes, Emanuel applies a Chicago pol's sensibility that recalls that famous Untouchables line: "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun; he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue." Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro describes Emanuel as a "reflection of Chicago politics, ward politics. It's local, ethnic. You're not in a tea party." Colleague Ed Markey, a veteran House member from Massachusetts, says simply, "He's not a political romantic."Mostly out of power for the past six years, the Democrats could use Emanuel's comeback instincts. So the match is a timely one.

But what's driving Emanuel crazy right now is how little control he has over the party's future-or his own. "Can we get the right candidates?" he asks. "Yes, and we busted our balls recruiting and expanding the field. Can we raise the resources? Yes. Can we help on issues? Yes." But at the end of the day, he asks, "which way will the wind blow on Iraq? On energy prices? On the Middle East?"

"For a type-A personality like me, I hate that. I hate that," he says, his voice trailing off as he spins through a Capitol building hallway. "Your fate is out of your hands."

The Enforcer
Rep. Rahm Emanuel is leading the Democratic charge to retake the House next year. Will his old-school combativeness rub off on his more timid colleagues?
JOSHUA GREENPosted Oct 20, 2005 2:44 PM

The Enforcer : Rolling Stone



The Republicans are on the ropes. There's House Majority Leader Tom DeLay: indicted for conspiracy and money laundering. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist: under investigation for insider trading. The White House's chief procurement officer: arrested on corruption charges. The head of FEMA: forced to resign in disgrace. Even President Bush himself: approval ratings at an all-time low. The question is, will the Democrats be able to take advantage of the mess the GOP has made?
The answer depends, in many ways, on Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Chicago.

For years, Emanuel was the political brains of Bill Clinton's White House. Intense to the point of ferocity, he was known for taking on the most daunting tasks -- the ones no one else wanted -- and pulling off the seemingly impossible, from banning assault weapons to beating back the Republican-led impeachment. "Clinton loved Rahm," recalls one staffer, "because he knew that if he asked Rahm to do something, he would move Heaven and Earth -- not necessarily in that order -- to get it done."

Now, as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Emanuel has taken on his biggest challenge yet: to win back the House of Representatives after more than a decade of Republican control. To pull it off, the two-term congressman will have to overcome odds far greater than those the GOP faced when Newt Gingrich engineered his historic takeover in 1994. Back then, according to a study by the National Committee for an Effective Congress, 117 seats were "marginal" -- that is, close enough to be considered competitive. Last year, thanks in large part to Republican-friendly redistricting, the number of close races shrank to only thirty-four.

Over lunch near his office in Chicago, Emanuel previews his strategy to win the fifteen seats needed to retake the House. Unlike others in the Democratic leadership who seem reluctant to criticize the president and are fearful of their own party's grass roots, Emanuel knows it will take an aggressive, all-fronts effort to prevail in next year's midterm elections. Democrats, he says, will have to raise record amounts of campaign cash, challenge the Republicans in dozens of districts, offer concrete alternatives to Bush's failed policies -- and above all, hammer home a clear and consistent message.

"We're the party of change," Emanuel tells me. "We're the party of a new direction -- a break from rampant cronyism and the status quo. Period."

If that message has a familiar ring, it may be because Republicans used essentially the same formula to seize control of the House a decade ago. Indeed, given his hard-charging reputation, Emanuel often elicits comparisons to the man who led the GOP to victory in 1994. "Rahm is the Democrats' Newt Gingrich," says Bruce Reed, who served with Emanuel in the Clinton White House. "He understands how much ideas matter, he always knows his message, he takes no prisoners and he only plays to win."

Other Clinton veterans are even more pointed about Emanuel's assets. "He's got this big old pair of brass balls, and you can just hear 'em clanking when he walks down the halls of Congress," says Paul Begala, who served with Emanuel on Clinton's staff. "The Democratic Party is full of Rhodes scholars -- Rahm is a road warrior. He's just what the Democrats need to fight back."

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."

Of the three stories, only the second is a myth -- Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army. But it's a measure of his considerable reputation as the enforcer in Clinton's White House that so many people believe it to be true. You don't earn the nickname "Rahmbo" being timid.
In person, Emanuel projects the hyperactivity of an attack dog straining at the leash. Although he swims and works out several mornings each week before most of his colleagues are out of bed, the exercise evidently does little to drain his energy -- he is constantly fidgeting, gesturing, spinning, always on the move. He's notorious for driving those around him mercilessly: When he joined Clinton's campaign team, he reportedly introduced himself by standing on a table and yelling at the staff for forty-five minutes. "We joke that someone should open a special trauma ward in Washington for people who've worked for Rahm," says Jose Cerda, a veteran staffer. Emanuel, who was reared in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago politics, makes no apologies for his style. "If I got worried about that, I'd sit beneath my desk all day," he says. "I don't."
His combativeness was practically foreordained. The second of three sons born to a pediatrician father and a civil-rights-activist mother, Rahm was raised in a middle-class family that stressed competitiveness and achievement. His older brother, Ezekiel, is a leading medical ethicist. His younger brother, Ari, is a Hollywood talent agent who served as the inspiration for Ari Gold, the fast-talking agent played by Jeremy Piven on HBO's hit series Entourage. (In a recent episode shot at a Lakers game, the lead actors sat in Ari Emanuel's $2,000 courtside seats.) "After about the sixth episode, I finally caught it," says Rahm, who himself was the model for the character Josh Lyman on The West Wing. "I called Ari the next day and said, 'Hey, I finally saw the show, and you know what? I like that guy better than I like you.'"

When Rahm was a boy, his mother forced him to take ballet lessons, and he threw himself into it with the same intensity he would later bring to politics, winning a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet. Friends jokingly theorize that his toughness is actually an outgrowth of being a ballet dancer: With that sort of thing on your resume, you had better be ready to fight if you hope to survive in Chicago politics. "The guy had been a ballet dancer in college," says Bruce Reed, "yet grown men lived in mortal fear of what he might do to them if they couldn't get the answer he wanted."

Emanuel, who has clearly come in for his share of hazing, has a ready reply. As part of a "negotiation" with his mother, he tells me, he turned down the ballet scholarship but agreed to attend Sarah Lawrence College, which has a strong dance program. "It was a great liberal-arts school, and there were four women for every guy," Emanuel reasons. "I was eighteen, so I'm allowed to think like that."

Emanuel got his political education working as a fund-raiser for Mayor Richard Daley's re-election campaign in Chicago, where he learned how to twist arms and knock heads. Donors were used to giving $5,000 -- but Daley needed more. "Rahm took it up a notch," Daley's brother William recalled several years ago. "He told many of them they easily had the ability to give twenty-five grand." When contributors didn't pony up, Emanuel would tell them he was embarrassed that they'd offered so little and hang up on them. The shocked donor would usually call back and sheepishly comply. In thirteen weeks, the thirty-year-old raised $7 million -- an unprecedented sum at the time. His fund-raising skills eventually earned him a job in the Clinton campaign.

This year, Emanuel's fund-raising for congressional candidates has been no less impressive. Through September, the DCCC had raised a record-breaking $32 million, much of it slated to support the most vulnerable Democrats -- those elected in Republican-leaning districts or looking to challenge Republican incumbents. Unlike past DCCC chairmen, who simply dispersed money without demanding anything in return, Emanuel approaches the job with the sensibility of a Mob bookie. He forces candidates in the most competitive races who receive money to sign what he calls a "Memo of Understanding," delineating exactly how many fund-raising phone calls and appearances they will make in exchange for the committee's support. To seal the pact, Emanuel then signs the memo himself. "I want to make sure everybody is doing everything they're supposed to be doing," he says.

Every Thursday at the crack of dawn, Emanuel summons staffers to DCCC headquarters to go through the day's newspapers over bagels and coffee. Then, at 8 a.m., he runs a meeting with the nine members of Congress who make up his strategy and recruitment team. The group painstakingly pores over every congressional race in the country to make sure that Emanuel's plan is on track.

Emanuel's rapid rise to DCCC chairman is unusual for a second-term congressman, and it signals the respect that Democrats have for the political skills he displayed in the Clinton White House. Like Gingrich in the early 1990s, Emanuel is trying to create a national wave of anti-Washington sentiment rooted in the mounting instances of corruption and sleaze that have piled up in the Republican-led Congress. "People aren't happy with Washington!" he shouts, echoing the attitude that Gingrich capitalized on. "Look, we should be the party outside of Washington coming to goddamn kick ass out there!"

When I mention that he sounds like Gingrich in '94, however, Emanuel glowers. He doesn't grab the steak knife sitting next to him, but he looks like he wants to. "I admire Gingrich's energy, his ideas," he allows. "When you're in the opposition, your ability to shape and define is very limited. You have to take advantage of your opponent's mistakes. He got lucky -- we made our mistakes in the Clinton White House, and he was there to take advantage of it. That's exactly what we're trying to do in 2006."

In his own voting record, Emanuel is no Gingrich-style radical. A certified member of the Beltway establishment, and a political centrist to boot, he favors incremental, family-friendly policies in the Clinton mode: tax breaks to help the middle class pay for college, incentives to encourage workers to save for retirement, re-importing drugs to lower prescription costs. He has sharply criticized the president's handling of the war in Iraq, but he doesn't agree with those who say we should pull out immediately, favoring a more gradual withdrawal based on "benchmarks" for training Iraqi troops.

Yet Emanuel has received generally positive reviews from the increasingly noisy -- and powerful -- grass roots of the Democratic Party. As leader of the DCCC, he has struck a fragile truce with the heavily liberal blogosphere and organizations such as MoveOn.org. Emanuel has hosted four "blog calls" with the pre-eminent liberal bloggers, going over congressional races and sharing DCCC strategy in an effort to bring the activist community into the fold. In July, the partnership yielded promising results when Paul Hackett, an Iraq War veteran running as a Democrat, nearly won a special election for an Ohio congressional seat in Cincinnati, the nation's most conservative major metropolitan area. "The blogs were fabulous -- absolutely fabulous -- for Hackett," Emanuel says. "In the last twelve days of the race they collected about $250,000."

For their part, bloggers and grass-roots activists support Emanuel in no small part because they hope his combativeness will rub off on his more timid colleagues. "He understands the importance of having a good relationship with Net roots," says Markos Moulitsas, who runs the influential blog Daily Kos. "If nothing else, he knows that we exist and it's not as confrontational a relationship as we had with past DCCC regimes." Nor is Moulitsas put off by Emanuel's centrist politics. "We don't give a shit," he says. "I think there's growing understanding that we can't sit and fixate on who's a moderate and who's a liberal when we're in the minority. We can worry about that when we're in the majority."

That's a view Emanuel wholeheartedly shares. "We get into this stupid argument every four years: centrists vs. leftists," he says. "That is not the argument today. It is change vs. status quo. In 1992, Bill Clinton was a change agent -- he won. In 1994, Newt Gingrich was a change agent -- he won. In 1996, Bill Clinton was a change agent to Dole and Gingrich -- he won. In 1998, Democrats represented a change from the Republican drive for impeachment -- they won. In 2000, George Bush was a credible change agent. In 2002, Democrats failed to convey change -- and they lost. I want to be about change and reform to the Republican status quo."

As part of his strategy to win back the House, Emanuel has unleashed a high-octane campaign to recruit candidates to represent the Democrats next fall. He has already put forty-one House seats "in play" -- forcing the Republicans to defend their majority district by district. On the same date in the last election cycle, the number of seats in play was three. "The way you crack the strategic imperative of not enough seats is by putting more seats in play with good candidates," Emanuel says. "And one way you do that is by broadening what people think of when they think of Democrats." Indeed, the lineup of candidates he has recruited to run next year sounds more like a GOP dream team: four military veterans, two FBI agents, a pastor, a sheriff and a former NFL quarterback, Heath Shuler. Once again, the common denominator is change. "You've got to have people that look and sound like they're not career politicians," he says.

Emanuel has made a point of letting veterans and their families know that they have a home in the Democratic Party. He erected a memorial to fallen soldiers outside his Capitol Hill office, and in June he led a bipartisan effort to read the names of those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan on the floor of the House, ensuring that their service would be memorialized in the Congressional Record. "There are more vets running this cycle as Democrats than as Republicans," Emanuel notes. "This is going to be the first election where the war is going to come home. You'll get candidates coming back who are going to win."

Emanuel takes evident pleasure in blasting his opponents. The war, he says, exposed the administration's "incompetence," while the aftermath of Katrina revealed its corruption and cronyism. "Republicans can't govern!" he shouts. "The war, energy prices, the failure with Katrina -- they have all changed the environment so that people are now unhappy with both the policy choices and the direction of the country."

But Emanuel knows Democrats will have to do more than make Republicans look bad if they hope to win back the House -- they must present a positive, forward-looking agenda of their own, one that inspires hope and confidence among voters. After DeLay was indicted, Emanuel appeared on Meet the Press and laid out several components of the agenda he believes Democrats should run on in 2006: universal college education, universal health care for anyone who works, bringing down the national debt and cutting U.S. dependence on foreign oil in half within a decade. If expanded, such policies could form the basis of a Democratic version of the Contract With America, the weapon that Gingrich wielded to such devastating effect in his campaign to take control of Congress.
"One thing I agree with Newt about," says Emanuel, "is that he knew you had to look and feel like someone voters could see in that leadership role before they'd put you there. We have to generate that feeling. We have to make people believe that if they give us the goddamn keys to the car, we're not going to hit the tree. We've already got a party that knows how to do that, and we don't need that crowd anymore."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/st ... _enforcer/

This proves that Obama will sign a Amnesty into law no matter how bad it is for America. Also one of the few things he did ever in the senate was push for a bill to give the UN more power over us. America choosed a globalest pro illigal rat, I thought 80 percent of this country wanted enforcement? I guess the American people gave the ok to these idea's.