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REAL ESTATE Fighting for The Spoils Lawmaker and Rainmaker Rahm Emanuel Wants a Nov. By Steve Hendrix Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, October 22, 2006; D01 CHICAGO This must be how Machiavelli ate his corned beef sandwiches. Sitting in a South Side deli, Rahm Emanuel doesn't so much eat his lunch as overwhelm it with two hands and a hard stare. It's a combat glower familiar to the political opponents, reluctant donors and more than a few allies who have encountered the White House fixer-turned-Democratic-congressman in his still-young career. By most accounts, they usually didn't fare much better than the sandwich. "There's no clean way to do this," Emanuel says, not quite clearly, through a garble of onion roll. They heap the plates high at Manny's, an old-guard cafeteria popular with cops and pols. But within minutes, the football-size loaf of sliced meat and mustard is gone. Emanuel wipes his hands and picks up the BlackBerry that has been buzzing every 40 seconds or so on the Formica tabletop. "God, I always eat it too fast," he mutters as he checks an e-mail. What follows is either a soft belch or a pfitz of surprise at some new poll results from Ohio. Charging toward the biggest election day of his career, Emanuel, the 47-year-old chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, doesn't have much time for niceties. He's lost 14 pounds as the whirl of wheedling donors and lashing candidates to meet their fundraising targets has reached hurricane status in recent weeks. He rubs his jaw (and you notice that he's missing a finger; "He's driving himself to exhaustion," says Paul Begala, a friend and political compatriot since they both served on Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign and afterward in the White House. "He's like Lyndon Johnson, who finished almost every campaign in a hospital bed. As someone from Texas, I don't make that comparison lightly, but Rahm just may be our skinny, nine-fingered, Jewish, Chicago version of LBJ." If, as historians say, Johnson began his conquest of Capitol Hill with the political chits he collected as a young and triumphant chairman of the Senate campaign committee, what does next month promise for Rahm Emanuel? As the member of Congress responsible for recruiting candidates for House races, raising money and vetting strategy for dozens of districts, he's received raves from campaign connoisseurs in Washington for running a taut committee. Notably, he's nearly closed the perennial cash-on-hand gap between his team -- with $36 million in the bank at the end of September -- and its GOP counterpart. He's fielded credible candidates in districts no one had expected to be in play a year ago. And he's generally been flogging the party like a never-satisfied CEO. "He has been an amazing success any way you look at it," says congressional scholar Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. "I think it's the best operation of any chairman of either party in several years." If Democrats do take the House -- they need to gain 15 seats to do so -- Emanuel, in only his second term in Congress, stands to claim considerable credit for ending a 12-year electoral drought. That's the kind of triumph Johnson rode to the top of the Senate. "If they don't win, it will be seen as a colossal failure," says Mann. Expectations Are High In fact, Emanuel may have already fumbled the game of expectations -- they are wickedly high. With President Bush's approval ratings lodged at car-salesman levels, scandals going off like cluster bombs within the Republican caucus, and a general throw-the-bums-out restiveness in the land, even a near-miss by House Democrats will be seen as the greatest electoral choke since Dewey Didn't Defeat Truman after all. Commentators from George F Will to James Carville have already laid down rhetorical markers: An opposition party unable to capture the House in this environment should find a purpose other than electoral politics. And Emanuel knows that some Democrats would find time during their grief for a small smile at his expense. Such is the "Rahmbo" style that his sizzling passage through the campaign has left scorch marks on some colleagues. Among the singed: Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, with whom Emanuel has tangled over spending priorities; several liberal would-be candidates who say they were steamrollered by Emanuel in favor of more centrist challengers; and some members of the Congressional Black Caucus who went to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi this year with complaints about Emanuel's abrasive style and his increasing demands for them to raise money for the DCCC. "Well, I never said Rahm was a diplomat who spends a lot of time schmoozing," says Pelosi, who picked Emanuel last year to run the campaign. She tapped him over more senior lawmakers, she says, because she knew he'd be "coldblooded enough" to push the party relentlessly. And to those who came to have their feathers unruffled, she says she made it clear that Emanuel has her full support. "He's abrupt with me all the time," she adds with a laugh. A Man for Changing Times But to some observers of Chicago politics, Emanuel is less field marshal than Marshall Field (recalling the upscale department store that catered to the city's affluent classes). Emanuel was born in Chicago in 1959, the son of a doctor, and grew up in the decidedly non-working-class northern suburb of Wilmette. He's a graduate of the tony New Trier High School and a onetime ballet prodigy who was offered a scholarship with the Joffrey. A triathlete with a degree from Sarah Lawrence College, a master's in communications from Northwestern and a love of taking his children to modern dance concerts, Emanuel doesn't easily fit the stogie-gnawing stereotype of the old Chicago pol. Nor did he serve the usual ward apprenticeships in the vaunted Democratic machine. Rather, after working as a fundraiser in various campaigns, Emanuel came fully of age politically with Clinton in Washington. He had never sought elected office before running for the House of Representatives in 2002. In particular, Emanuel knew he would be an odd successor for the working-class Polish and Catholic precincts of District 5, which stretches from the lakefront to the Cook County line. "The previous congressmen from my district were named Rostenkowski, Annunzio and Blagojevich," he says. In front of Manny's, a police Segway is chained to a street sign as the officer eats his pastrami inside. The warehouse across the street is being converted into a Best Buy. "Rahm is part of the young breed that people call the new Chicago machine," says Don Rose, a longtime liberal activist who worked for Mayors Jane Byrne and Harold Washington. They know the difference between red wine and white wine. His big brother, Ezekiel, is a Harvard oncologist and bioethicist. Younger brother Ari is a high-flying agent in Los Angeles. He made news recently as the only major agent to publicly call for an industrywide shunning of Mel Gibson following the actor's drunken, anti-Semitic tirade. How many mothers have two children who have partly inspired TV characters (Josh Lyman on "The West Wing" for Rahm, Ari Gold on "Entourage" for Ari)? "People ask me what my mother put in the soup," says Ari, who talks with Rahm two or three times a day. Their father is a Jerusalem-born pediatrician who came to the United States after working for the pre-independence Israeli underground. In Chicago, he met Emanuel's mother, an X-ray technician and daughter of a local union organizer who ended up in more than one paddy wagon as a protester in the 1960s. "Politics and the civil rights movement were very much a part of our family life," says Ezekiel. "We went on Martin Luther King's march on Cicero with my mom." When Rahm was 17, he cut his finger on a meat slicer at Arby's, where he worked a summer job. It became infected, the infection spread to the bone, and a cut grew into a potentially life-threatening condition. Doctors eventually amputated the finger, and Emanuel spent eight weeks in the hospital. He says the experience made him more focused for college and beyond. "He blames me for en...
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