The Enforcer( Rep. Rahm Emanuel is leading the Democratic charge to retake the House next year)

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? By JOSHUA GREEN

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."

Fitzy still might....seems there is some shady dealings in Chicago that have his name attached some where down the line...

I don't recall the whole story...but it was here on FR a while back.

Look, every even year spring, the ratmedia runs stories about how the rats will take back the Congress. Aint happened. Won't happen. Rahm who? is just the latest rat to come out of a safe district talking tough. Big deal.
What's he going to campaign on? 200 rat candidates saying "I'm the Democrat and he's not", just won't get it done.

Maybe the GOP should start acting like conservatives.

That's the only solution.

I won't be at all surprised if they lose their majority, simply because of they way they've been acting.

In 1992, Bill Clinton was a change agent -- he won. In 1994,

Bulsheeet, it was jerk Perrot who put Klintoon in power!!! Geting sick of this Clinton won!!

"We're the party of change," Emanuel tells me.

crats are the party of change alright. When they get their way with taxes and regulation all you have left is change.

"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.

That sounds so... so... gay!

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Well, considering Rahm Emanuel is a trained ballet dancer, and has a rather "petite" figure, folks probably have to put in quite an effort to make him appear formidable.

But yeah, Begala seems to be trying waaaaaay too hard to try and portray Emanuel as an intimidating person. That just sounds ridiculous.

The first time I heard of that expression was when I read it on some dude's airbrushed T-shirt in a shopping mall. He didn't seem to happy when I busted out laughing.

Considering how poorly the GOP Congress is treating its base, I would not be surprised if the lost the House outright.

I can find no compelling reason to vote for them, other than "they aren't Democrats" (but they ACT like Big SPending Democrats, so what's the difference?)

Panic in the Streets
Since Oct 16, 2005

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Well, considering Rahm Emanuel is a trained ballet dancer, and has a rather "petite" figure, folks probably have to put in quite an effort to make him appear formidable.

So maybe he is a peach on a grapevine.

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Oh of course, since I'm opposed to Bushs Big Government programs, I must be a troll.

Get real dude, tons of people around here are extremely unhappy with Bush and his Big Government programs and Harriet Miers.

Sound like a retread to me. I've seen that time and time again in my nearly 5 years of posting here.

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beating back the Republican-led impeachment

This was daunting? Beating back republican senators? Geez, that's like scaring off a few squirrels. Scowling at a pubbie senator causes yellow underpants syndrome.

Paul Begala: "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,"...."The Democratic Party is full of Rhodes scholars -- Rahm is a road warrior.

Whatever else you may think of him, Begala is always good for clever quotes.

Considering how poorly the GOP Congress is treating its base, I would not be surprised if the lost the House outright.

I would. They would have to botch things very badly, both legislatively as well as campaigns, to lose more than 5-10 seats.

If they get in gear on borders and budget, the GOP will gain seats. And you'll notice that's exactly what they're doing. When DeLay returns, I think we'll finally see him lead tht charge.

I think the Senate is the place to watch. I don't see any rosy GOP picture there unless we see them take firm action on borders and budget. And the Miers thing will be as big as any other factor. A Miers on the Court as a liberal will be a big blow to the GOP's appeal to the base. If she's confirmed and a clear conservative, they'll be okay on that front.

Both House and Senate could face additional problems if there are big losses in Iraq. But that seems a long shot to me. Unless our losses escalate sharply just before the election, Iraq won't affect the election much.

"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."

That's no more true of the Democrats than it is of the Republicans. Try another line, Rahm.

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