Photo by Staff Sergeant Jon Soucy, US Army.
During the 2006 midterm elections, Congressman Emanuel backed candidates with military backgrounds—including veteran Major Tammy Duckworth (above), whom he supported over a popular union-backed community activist.
But rather than backing Cegelis, Emanuel recruited Tammy Duckworth, who didn’t actually live in the Sixth District. Duckworth was a veteran who had lost both her legs and had her right arm shattered in Iraq in 2004, when her helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade north of Baghdad. She was an impressive and sympathetic figure, determined not to be held back by her devastating injury. She came across as articulate, cheerful, and accessible. “Duckworth—bespectacled, wearing an American flag on her lapel, her dark hair streaked with blond—was one of Emanuel’s dream candidates,” wrote Bendavid.87
Duckworth said the war was a mistake, but she stressed support for her military brethren and the idea that the United States must stay the course in Iraq. Cegelis and her supporters were at first shocked and then disillusioned when they learned that the Democratic Party was abandoning them for Duckworth.88
With Emanuel’s backing, Duckworth earned the support of elected officials including Senators Dick Durbin and John Kerry and Congressman Mike Honda of California, who, like Duckworth, was Asian American. Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, also campaigned for Duckworth. The Illinois AFL-CIO endorsed her, though only Cegelis had been a union member—as a telephone operator with the Communications Workers of America.89
“It was an offensive outrage for Clinton, Kerry, Obama and other Senate Democrat insiders to foist Duckworth on the Sixth District, when they had a tough, strong campaigner in Cegelis,” opined Philadelphia-based Daily Kos pundit Rob Kall.90
Despite all the big-time money and endorsements, Duckworth beat Cegelis in the Democratic primary by only 4 percent. Bitter, Cegelis didn’t publicly concede until Duckworth called her, and she didn’t endorse Duckworth for two weeks. Emanuel gloated that “we took on the Communists in the party,” though in reality Cegelis’s supporters were mostly regular residents who saw Cegelis as one of their own.91
In the general election Duckworth lost by two percentage points, or 4,810 votes, to Republican Peter Roskam.92 The loss came despite the fact that Duckworth’s campaign had raised $4.56 million, compared to Roskam’s $3.44 million. (Cegelis, by contrast, had raised only $363,000 for the primary race.)93
Throughout the 2006 campaigns Emanuel had high-profile clashes with DNC chair Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor and doctor whose run for the presidency in 2004 had been propelled largely by his strong antiwar stance and pioneering online strategy. Dean criticized Emanuel for failing to back liberal and popular candidates like Cegelis. Meanwhile, Emanuel excoriated Dean for failing to put up more money for the races, especially because Republicans were greatly outspending Democrats overall. Emanuel demanded that Dean lay out $100,000 for each of forty key races in 2006, while Dean was more focused on a long-term strategy of building a Democratic base in all fifty states. Details of the leaders’ conflict were leaked to the press, and Dean supporters surmised that Emanuel was conniving to make sure Dean took the blame if Democrats did not reclaim the House.94
A few of the DCCC’s favored candidates were defeated in the Democratic primaries by opponents with genuine grassroots support and clear antiwar positions, who went on to defeat Republicans in the general election. In New Hampshire, Carol Shea-Porter, a social worker and community college teacher, won the primary by almost twenty percentage points, even though the DCCC had funded the campaign of moderate State House minority leader Jim Craig.95 In the general election, Shea-Porter beat Republican incumbent Jeb Bradley by almost 3 percent.96 Similarly, in New York’s Hudson Valley, the DCCC eschewed John Hall—an environmental activist and former lead singer of the 1970s band Orleans—in favor of attorney Judy Aydelott, a former Republican and skilled fundraiser.97 Hall got almost double Aydelott’s votes in the primary and then won the general election to take the seat.98
Ultimately Democrats won the House in a near-landslide, ending up with 233 seats to Republicans’ 202. They also retook the Senate, 51 to 49. California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House.99 Emanuel celebrated in typical fashion, jumping on a table and telling the crowd that Republicans “can go fuck themselves!”100
The Bailout
Like most congressmen, Emanuel didn’t face serious challenges to reelection once he was an incumbent, but donors still contributed generously to his campaign fund. He raised just shy of $9 million during his three-term congressional tenure. The political transparency organization Opensecrets.org listed the companies with which major donations were affiliated. (Donations didn’t come from the companies themselves but rather from political action committees, employees, owners, their immediate family members, and others connected to the companies).101 Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago-based private equity firm specializing in buyouts, topped the list. Next was the phone company AT&T, followed by the Swiss-headquartered global financial services company UBS AG, and then the New York–based global investment firm Goldman Sachs. Fifth on the list of donors was Emanuel’s old employer Dresdner, Kleinwort & Wasserstein (the investment bank had changed its name from Wasserstein Perella and Company following a 2001 buyout by the German Dresdner Bank).102
Over the course of Emanuel’s congressional career, the top five industries from which he received money were securities and investment ($1.7 million), lawyers ($756,768), the entertainment industry ($481,864), real estate ($370,460), and commercial banks ($265,500). Pro-Israel groups donated $169,700, and public sector unions—which would become his nemesis as mayor—donated $176,500. Other unions donated $109,500. Emanuel was consistently the first or second top recipient of donations from hedge funds and private equity firms for the entire House of Representatives.103 He held seats on both the Ways and Means and Financial Services committees, positions of much interest to the financial sector.104
The year that turned out to be Emanuel’s last in Congress featured legislation that showcased his deep ties to the financial sector. He played a key role in orchestrating and building political support for the controversial $700 billion bailout of banks and financial institutions including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase, meant to prevent a total economic collapse and free up credit to stimulate spending and rescue home mortgages in the seizing-up economy.105
On October 3, 2008, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act passed the House of Representatives 263 to 171, with Emanuel among the 172 Democrats voting for it.106 Four days earlier, the bailout bill had failed in the House; as the Democratic Caucus chair (and fourth-ranking congressman), Emanuel played an important role in getting fifty-eight congressmen, including thirty-three Democrats, to change their votes. 107
In the months and even years following the bank bailout, the public was largely furious with the maneuver and how it was carried out. Executives at many of the bailed-out institutions continued to give themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses and raises, and meanwhile the bailout did not result in notably increased lending or mortgage relief for regular people.108 The anger over the bailout helped spark a major shift in public consciousness, a sudden spike in the awareness of class, and the concepts of “Main Street versus Wall Street” and “the 99 percent.” It also motivated the rise of the virulently antigovernment Tea Party movement.109
“In no uncertain terms, our leaders told us anything short of saving