Photo by Kevin Gebhardt.
Rahm Emanuel may lack Bill Clinton’s charm, but he shares Clinton’s New Democrat politics.
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The Enforcer— The Clinton Years
Benjamin Emanuel thought his son was crazy.
It was November 1991, and Rahm was planning to leave Chicago for Arkansas, where he would work on the presidential campaign of William Jefferson Clinton, a Southern governor whom the elder Emanuel had never even heard of. “He thought maybe somebody needed to check the medication cabinet,” Rahm later said in an interview.1
Since working on Daley’s campaign, Emanuel had continued to do political advising and strategy out of Chicago.2 He co-founded a company called the Research Group, which specialized in opposition research—essentially digging up information on political opponents or unearthing comments they’d made in the past that would be controversial or damaging in the current context.3 These nuggets would be aired in the media and political ads or featured in direct-mail campaigns targeted to voters who would be particularly incensed by the news.4
Emanuel was recruited to join the Clinton campaign by David Wilhelm, with whom he’d worked on David Robinson’s congressional campaign.5 Emanuel had seen Clinton speak at events related to Chicago public housing in early 1991, and he had been highly impressed with the Arkansas governor’s “New Democratic centrism.”6 The affection was mutual. Two decades later in Chicago, Clinton said he was taken with Emanuel right from the start and could tell he was “an executive by nature.”7
“First of all, I liked him because our campaign was broke and he was a genius at raising money—even as a young person without any money himself,” Clinton was quoted saying in the Chicago Sun-Times. “I liked him because people said I was too young to run for president and I was too ambitious and Rahm made me look laid-back and passive.”8
Emanuel reportedly descended on Little Rock like a tornado, berating local advisers and fundraisers for their small-town ways. He once jumped on a table to lecture the staff for forty-five minutes about their practice of not working on Sundays and other failings.9 When Emanuel arrived, the Clinton campaign had raised $600,000. Emanuel set up a whirlwind of twenty-six fundraising events in twenty days, and by the end of the primary season the take, not counting federal matching funds, was $17 million.10 The final tally was a record $70 million.11Esquire magazine described Emanuel during that campaign as a “heat-seeking missile of a principal fundraiser, a brash wunderkind who collected millions for the candidate.”12
As a senior adviser to Clinton at the age of thirty-two, Emanuel persuaded Clinton to prioritize fundraising, even to the extent of delaying campaigning in New Hampshire. The strategy proved sound, as Clinton’s primary rival, Paul Tsongas, ultimately backed out of the race citing lack of funds.13 Strong financial reserves helped Clinton ride out scandals over his relationship with Gennifer Flowers and his dodging the draft for the Vietnam War, because he was able to flood the airwaves with ads to mitigate the accusations.
A now-famous Emanuel moment came during the final stretch of Clinton’s 1992 race, at a Little Rock restaurant and campaign hangout called Doe’s. Emanuel performed a diatribe against prominent Democrats he thought had betrayed Clinton during the campaign. He called out each name one by one, in between stabbing a steak knife into the table and yelling, “Dead!”14
Once in the White House, Clinton appointed Emanuel to be his political director. Colleagues referred to him simply as “The Enforcer.”15 But Emanuel was forced out of the job after just six months because of conflicts with various staff and, perhaps most important, with First Lady Hillary Clinton.16 As author Naftali Bendavid described it, on the day Emanuel’s then-fiancée, Amy Rule, moved to Washington to join him, Clinton’s chief of staff, Mack McLarty, told Emanuel he was fired. Emanuel simply refused to leave unless Clinton told him personally, and “the president, unable to fire the man who arguably had saved his candidacy, relented. Instead, Emanuel was knocked down to ‘director of special projects.’”17
NAFTA
After his demotion, Emanuel had a chance to get back into Clinton’s good graces with a formidable challenge: joining special counsel Bill Daley, brother of Richard M. Daley, in pushing Congress to approve the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement. Daley was dubbed the “NAFTA czar,” and Emanuel would be his right-hand man in what Businessweek described as a “bloody fight” that “pitted friend against friend and allied the Administration with Republicans and Big Business.”18
NAFTA had been signed by President George H. W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney in 1992, but each country’s legislative branch still had to ratify the agreement. Many Democrats opposed the trade agreement, as did an international movement of trade unionists, human rights advocates, and progressive economists. NAFTA was also unpopular among the general public, who worried about the impact on US jobs. So legislators in both parties feared consequences if they voted for it.
NAFTA backers said it would stimulate trade and bolster the Mexican and US economies by reducing and eliminating tariffs and breaking down other trade barriers. Among other things, the agreement was supposed to create massive demand in Mexico for US exports, which proponents promised would result in thousands of new manufacturing jobs in the United States.
Opponents were convinced that NAFTA would just mean profit for corporations while sending countless US jobs south of the border and undercutting labor and environmental protections in all three countries. Billionaire businessman Ross Perot, who had gotten a whopping 19 percent of the popular vote as an independent candidate in the 1992 presidential election, warned of a “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Mexico.19
But Clinton was a strong supporter of free trade, and he was determined to implement the trade agreement, dubbed the “Lazarus Project” because it was so politically difficult.
“Nobody wanted to touch NAFTA,” Emanuel told Chicago political writer Carol Felsenthal.20 So he and Bill Daley threw all their political and rhetorical weight at the challenge. Side agreements were negotiated that were supposed to address concerns about labor and environmental issues, though these agreements proceeded in chaotic fits and starts and—critics argued—lacked strong enforcement measures. Republicans extracted from Clinton a promise that in the next election cycle, he would “personally repudiate” any NAFTA-related attacks on legislators of either party who had voted for the agreement.21
AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland attacked Clinton for that promise, and warned that Democrats who voted for NAFTA would risk losing the support of state labor federations in future elections.22 In turn, Clinton denounced organized labor for using “roughshod, muscle-bound tactics” to fight NAFTA—a notable attack by a Democratic president on a traditional Democratic power base.23
After thirteen hours of debate, the House of Representatives passed NAFTA on November 18, 1993, with a surprisingly wide margin of 234 to 200.24 The Senate then passed it sixty-one to thirty-eight, and Clinton signed the bill on December 8. Tellingly, a majority of Democrats voted against the bill in both houses. (In the House, 156 Democrats voted against the bill versus 102 for it; and in the Senate, twenty-eight Democrats voted against it versus twenty-seven for it.)25
Years later, in 1997, Emanuel told a Chicago Tribune reporter that passing NAFTA was one of his proudest political moments, and his prized possessions included a photo taken with Clinton after the legislation passed.26
The White House seriously alienated organized labor by supporting the initiative. The AFL-CIO announced it would cut off funding Democratic campaign committees for at least three months in retaliation.27 The respected progressive magazine The Nation blamed Clinton’s “demoral[izing] his base with NAFTA” in part for the Republican Revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 midterm elections.28
The worst fears of NAFTA opponents were essentially realized over the next decade, as documented