White House officials are preparing for Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to announce on Friday, as Congress leaves to go on the campaign trail, that he is leaving his post to run for mayor of Chicago.
Rahmbo’s likely exit is not a surprise. His mayoral aspirations are no secret.
Longtime Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s announced earlier this month that he would not seek reelection.
The former Chicagoan is not exactly known for being shy. Emanuel said in April to Charlie Rose:
One day I would like to run for mayor of the city of Chicago. … That’s always been an aspiration of mine, even when I was in the House of Representatives
When Daley announced that he was leaving, Chicago Democrats quickly began angling to replace him, pestering Emanuel to make a decision on his White House position soon, including Barack Hussein Obama himself (mm mmm mmmm).
Obama graciously said that Emanuel would make an “excellent” and “terrific” mayor, but has not said whether he will endorse him yet.
Emanuel has to declare his intent to enter the race by Nov. 22, the filing deadline in Chicago. Candidates need to collect 12,500 signatures by that day to qualify for a Feb. 22, 2011 Democratic primary. Rahmbo showed up at the White House with a reputation and political identity built as a feisty four-term former congressman from Illinois, a veteran of the Clinton administration, and a close Obama political ally from the president’s early days in Chicago.
Emanuel brought the knowledge of where the bodies are buried up on Capitol Hill to the White House when he started in January 2009, as well as a sense of loyalty to the president, who had been in his inner circle for years.
Sources close to Emanuel say that the decision on whether to run for mayor has not been easy for him, because uprooting his wife Amy and three children for the second time in as many years weighed heavily on him.
Emanuel put off his original decision to give up his seat in Congress and run the White House staff. At the time, Emanuel wanted to be the first Jewish speaker of the House, an accomplishment that now seems more likely to be achieved by Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.
After a lot of nudging by then President-elect Obama, Emanuel decided to join the administration, where he has remained for 21 months.
During his time in the West Wing, Emanuel helped guide the health care act through Congress, pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and pass financial regulation.
Gee, thanks, Rahmbo.
While others in the White House, like senior adviser David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, are full-speed ahead Progressives, Rahmbo was the one with the most realist view of Washington politics. Many progressives and liberals remain angry with him for not pushing harder, or at all, for a public option in the health care legislation, or for criminal trials for Guantanamo defendants linked to the 9/11 attacks.
Rahmbo knew that Americans do not support those ideas.
Rahmbo’s Chicago-bred political style often clashed with that of the pointy-headed professional academicians that Obama has filled his administration with.
Well-known for his brash-to-the-point-of-being-a-jerk personality, Rahmbo begins each day before sunrise, often by swimming a mile, and is perhaps the hardest worker in the White House, where the rest of the administration, including Scooter, saunter in at 9:30 a.m.
Ryan Lizza described Rahmbo this way in an article for The New Yorker:
He is a political John McEnroe, known for both his mercurial temperament and his tactical brilliance. In the same conversation, he can be wonkish and thoughtful, blunt and profane. (When Emanuel was a teen-ager, he lost half of his right middle finger, after cutting it on a meat slicer—an accident, Obama once joked, that “rendered him practically mute.”) And, like McEnroe, Emanuel seems to employ his volcanic moments for effect, intimidating opponents and referees alike but never quite losing himself in the midst of battle. “I’ve seen Rahm scream at a candidate for office one moment and then quickly send him a cheesecake,” Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic representative from Maryland, and a friend of Emanuel’s, told me.
More than any other story about Emanuel’s tactics—and there are lots of them—the tale of the “dead-fish race” came to define his public persona as a Democratic operative. He and Axelrod were working for David Swarts, a Democratic official from Erie County, New York, running an underfunded campaign for a congressional seat long held by Republicans. “We were rolling the dice on the race, just spending the money we had as it came in to try and get these numbers up,” Axelrod said. Their plan was to take a poll at the end of the contest which they hoped would show a competitive race and then use the results to help raise last-minute funds and overtake their opponent.
“The poll came back a week or two before the end, and it said we were down by seventeen,” Axelrod said. “And that was it.” According to Axelrod, Swarts’s campaign manager later studied the poll’s findings and concluded that the pollster had botched the analysis: the survey showed that Swarts was just five or six points behind. (The pollster says that the error was actually minor and quickly caught.) Axelrod added, “Had we gotten that correct poll then, we would have put our foot to the pedal. But it was too late. So Rahm, being as invested as he was in the thing, expressed himself as only Rahm can.” After the election, Emanuel and his colleagues hired a Massachusetts company called Enough Is Enough, which specialized in “creative revenge,” to send the pollster a box with a dead fish inside. Emanuel laughed mischievously when I asked him about the prank. “We had our choice of animals,” he said.
Classy.
White House press secretary “Baghdad Bob” Gibbs this month joked about one of Emanuel’s favorite phrases, summing up Rahmbo’s work ethic:
As Rahm sometimes jokes, if it’s Saturday, there’s just two more full workdays until Monday.
With just five weeks left for the White House to make a difference leading up to the worst Midterm Political Massacre in American History, the most recent ABC/Washington Post poll from early September shows the president’s approval ratings at 46 percent, with a 52 percent disapproval rate.
Other Liberal polling services show Obama at 42 % Approval.
A new incoming chief of staff could bring in energy and fresh ideas, and help the White House retool operations, as the administration picks up the pieces of what is scheduled to be a disastrous election night for Democrats. However, Obama is known for his loyalty, maintaining a tight inner circle and will not allow outsiders into his administration. That means that his next pick for chief of staff will probably come from someone with experience inside the administration and a personal relationship with him. Vice President Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain, Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina are all said to be on the list of candidates.
I wouldn’t put it past Scooter to name BFF and “fellow traveler” Valerie Jarrett to the position.
Kingsjester's Blog 
Well that will be one more job saved or created.
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What about Billy Jeff for the job?
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“Emanuel brought the knowledge of where the bodies are buried up on Capitol Hill to the White House when he started in January 2009, as well as a sense of loyalty to the president, who had been in his inner circle for years.”
Once again, KJ–in a nutshell….
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Where’s shower boy gonna live? Not in the house he owns and leases in north Chicago!
So, Orztag is gone. Rahm is headed out, so is Larry Summers. Axelrod is leaving the WH to work on the re-election campaign (why?). How many others will leave shortly after the November rebuttal? Biden? The Klingon Princess?
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