Mayor 1%. Kari Lydersen

to the flap: “Rahm’s voice dripped with disgust for those dainty Democrats who imagined they were above politics. ‘I’m sure there are a lot of people sitting in the shade at the Aspen Institute, my brother being one of them, who will tell you what the ideal plan is,’ he said. ‘Great, fascinating. You have the art of the possible measured against the ideal.’”54

      By this point, increasingly fed-up liberals and progressives were calling for Emanuel to resign.55 “The Rahm Emanuel strategy was to cut deals with power brokers in Washington and ignore what liberals wanted,” wrote Cenk Uygur, cofounder of the popular Internet show The Young Turks, who dubbed Emanuel “Barack Obama’s Dick Cheney.”56

      The “Women Problem”

      Many insider accounts described the Obama White House as a place where highly accomplished, spectacularly intelligent, and strong-willed people worked in an atmosphere characterized by disorganization, backbiting, jealousy, and insularity; where the potential of the immensely talented team Obama had assembled was greatly diminished by a chaotic and sometimes poisonous office culture.57

      Several high-profile books and numerous articles chronicled how key initiatives, including health-care and financial reform, were bogged down by infighting among Obama’s top cabinet members and advisers, a lack of clarity over roles, and the tendency of several top staffers to steamroll over or even ignore the president’s wishes.58

      Various reports said Emanuel’s mercurial and demanding personality was a constant source of tension within the White House, though also something other cabinet members and officials learned to live with. In The Escape Artists Noam Scheiber said that Emanuel demanded Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner do a “rewrite of 75 years’ worth of financial regulations” in a few weeks for a Wall Street reform bill, but “fortunately for Geithner, the dirty little secret of life under Emanuel was that if you just wait him out, his attention would soon drift to the next major obsession.”59

      There was also a chronic issue dubbed the “women problem.” Obama had hired a number of highly accomplished women for top posts. Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer, “climate czar” Carol Browner, health-care reform chief Nancy-Ann DeParle, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, UN ambassador Susan Rice, and chief domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes were among the prominent women in Obama’s administration. But many of them complained they felt silenced and sidelined by a “boys’ club” culture. They said they were not asked to speak in freewheeling debates on economic and policy issues and were left out of inner-circle socializing that revolved around basketball and golf games—even though a few of the women were top athletes in their own right. Regarding both the general office culture and the particular complaints of White House women, Emanuel and economic adviser Larry Summers were frequently named as the main culprits.

      Emanuel’s role in the managerial and organizational problems was often attributed to his personality—highly competitive, impulsive, rushed, unwilling to admit errors or take the time to hear others out, and focused on political gamesmanship and “winning” above all else. A controversial February 2010 piece in the Financial Times said that “the Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing,”60 and attributed that orientation to the “Fearsome Foursome” of Emanuel, senior advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, and press secretary Robert Gibbs.

      On its surface the idea that an office is “campaigning” rather than “governing” might not sound like a serious problem. But the criticism got to the heart of a recurring and potentially serious critique of Emanuel, one that would become central during his time as mayor of Chicago: that he was fixated on “getting points on the board” and defeating political enemies.61

      It is hard to say if Emanuel’s central role in creating and refusing to address the “women problem” was related to concrete sexism or his personality more generally. The former explanation could be bolstered by comments like one he made to a male staffer stammering over an answer: “Take your fucking tampon out and tell me what you have to say.”62 When Emanuel was asked during an interview about the women’s complaints, Suskind reported, “He was succinct. The concerns of women, he said, were a nonissue, a ‘blip.’ As to the fact that the White House’s women rather strongly disagreed with him on that point, he said, ‘I understand,’ and then laughed uproariously.”63

      “This, to be sure, was the sort of problem that chiefs of staff were generally left to handle,” Suskind wrote. “In this case, the chief of staff was at the center of the problem.”64

      Moving On

      The never-loving relationship between Obama and Emanuel reportedly soured irreparably after a February 2010 Washington Post column by Dana Milbank, headlined “Why Obama Needs Rahm at the Top.” Milbank attributed Obama’s first-year failures to not listening to his chief of staff, and said that Emanuel’s hard-nosed, “earthy and calculating” attitude was crucial to grounding Obama’s “airy and idealistic” approach. Milbank blamed Obama for not accepting Emanuel’s proposal for very narrow health-care reform from the start; Milbank thought Emanuel’s “Titanic Strategy” would have passed easily and cleared the way to move on to other issues.65

      Suskind wrote that Obama was “livid” about the column and confronted Emanuel in a tense private meeting where the chief of staff tried to smooth the waters. The larger implication was that Emanuel had a hand in the column and was trying to bolster his own image—to score points for himself—at the expense of his boss, the president of the United States. (Both Milbank and Emanuel denied this.) Suskind indicated that the incident marked a permanent rupture between the two, and that afterward the jokes and banter that had once seasoned the men’s rocky relationship were gone.66

      It was widely reported that Obama wanted Emanuel out by mid-2010, if not sooner. Suskind noted that Emanuel was such a thorn in Obama’s side, his impending departure left the president feeling “oddly buoyant” on an otherwise difficult day in September 2010:

      “In the past few days, he’s caught a break. The mayor of Chicago decided not to run for reelection. That means his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, will be seeking ‘other opportunities’ and the president won’t have to worry about firing him.”67

      Photo by C. Sven.

      Rahm on a Jumbotron: Other mayoral candidates dropped out of the race as this larger-than-life figure returned to Chicago.