Come, O Come, Emanuel

Top Clinton campaign aide Harold Ickes doesn't deny Emanuel's political skills, but he says there won't be any blood feud to referee. "There's all this apocalyptic talk about a bloody convention," Ickes tells NEWSWEEK, "a raging fight over credentials—some reports have gone so far as to analogize the possibility of Chicago in 1968. This is just overwrought hype … I think this issue will be settled well before the convention." Joe Sinsheimer, an old friend of Emanuel's and onetime staffer on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tells NEWSWEEK that Emanuel can't serve as a broker because the Clintons don't totally trust him, in large part due to his alliance with Axelrod. Emanuel has always been closer to Bill than Hillary. Indeed, Hillary tried to get Emanuel fired as a White House aide in 1993 (reportedly because he was too abrasive with others), but Emanuel refused to leave until the president personally told him to pack his bags. Bill couldn't bring himself to do it. Sinsheimer says that Emanuel may have selfish reasons for wanting to stay uninvolved and avoid playing the role of party elder. "Rahm has his own ambitions," says Sinsheimer. If he runs for Speaker in four or six years, "why does he want to have 5, 10, 15 people on one side of this chasm or another mad at him over something?"

Another longtime Clinton aide, Bruce Reed, also doubts that Emanuel would play the Goldwater role. "I don't think he has any aspirations of playing peacemaker or Middle East liaison," he says, "and to me it just doesn't seem like a likely scenario." On the other hand, Reed credits Emanuel with having the qualities required. "He's a realist, he's honest, he tells it like it is," says Reed. "Rahm is extraordinarily good at getting things done." Reed describes Emanuel as "an acquired taste. I always tease him that those of us who don't hate him love him a lot."

Certainly, there is nothing bland about Emanuel and never has been. Although he once won a summer scholarship with the Joffrey Ballet, he preferred the combat of politics. As a Democratic Party official, he once sent a pollster who was late delivering polling results a dead fish in a box. Old Clinton hands still laugh about the night after Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election. In his book, "The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution," Chicago Tribune deputy Washington bureau chief Naftali Bendavid writes that, as about a score of them sat around a picnic table mushily declaring their love for one another, Emanuel picked up a knife and called out the names of different politicians who had "f–––ed us." After each name, Emanuel would cry out, "Dead man!"—and stab the knife into the table. Bendavid recounts that "Emanuel, jokingly called 'Rahmbo,' even by his mother, muscled weaker Democrats out of races in favor of stronger ones, and ridiculed the chairman of his own party."

But it's a mistake to see Emanuel as a blowhard or a bully. Heath Shuler, a former Washington Redskins quarterback, recalled to Bendavid how Emanuel recruited him to run for Congress in 2006. Shuler told Emanuel that he was worried that he would have to sacrifice family time as a congressman. "The next day," Shuler says, "Rahm calls and said, 'Hey, I just wanted to call you and tell you I'm taking my kids to school. I'll call you later.' … Then he calls me back three hours later and said, 'Hey, I just wanted you to know I stopped by my daughter's school. I'm going to lunch with her.' That was it. No conversation. He calls me a few hours later, 'I want to let you know I'm picking my kids up. I'm taking them to swim class'." This went on for two or three weeks—calls from dance recitals, swim classes, with the sounds of kids happily playing in the background—until Shuler agreed to run for Congress (he won).

Emanuel professes to be unworried about the presidential race. He's more involved pushing his favorite new policy idea—requiring school through age 19 so that everyone has to have at least one year of college or postsecondary training to bring the workforce up to snuff—than he is engaged in the jockeying between Obama and Clinton. (One senior Hillary adviser, who didn't want to be named discussing a sensitive issue, says he still calls, but never about getting Hillary to drop out.) He doesn't think the race has been too nasty, not by Chicago standards, at any rate. He notes that in his own first House race, his opponent made an issue of his Judaism by saying, "He's not one of us." But even Emanuel has his limits. "This has got to come to an end by June. It has to be over and it will be over," he says, with the authority of a man who will make it over if he has to.

With Jonathan Alter, Richard Wolffe, Martha Brant and Sarah Kliff

© 2008