Black Swan Lakeside
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 22, 2011
CHICAGO
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Can Tiny Dancer lift up the City of Big Shoulders?
He thinks so. Even coiled with nervous anticipation and bundled in Patagonia on a snowy election day, Rahm Emanuel retained his Black Swan panache.
He was 10 minutes early, as usual, for an 8 a.m. campaign stop at the 65th Street El on the South Side. Commuters streaming through were already calling Emanuel “Mr. Mayor,” or simply Rahm, explaining which parking meters on the Lakefront they wanted fixed or what predatory lending on the South Side they needed stopped.
“You can do it!” yelled Lynetta Spears, 38, a tall, African-American woman.
Surrounded by his three adorable — and adoring — children, Emanuel pointed at Spears intensely, Jerry Maguire-style.
“Barack Obama trusts him,” Spears told me. “Rahm’s a good guy.”
She shrugged off the caricature of the 51-year-old Emanuel as The Enforcer who stabs steak knives into tables swearing vengeance and sends dead fish to those who cross him.
“Everyone has a temper,” she said breezily.
Chicago is a city, as H.L. Mencken wrote, that is “alive from snout to tail.” Which is a pretty good description of the electrified Emanuel as well; even his handshake feels hot. His campaign spots allude to that profane Rahmbo style that Andy Samberg parodies on “Saturday Night Live.”
“He’s not gonna take any guff,” a blue-collar guy vowed in one ad.
The wiry and buff former White House chief of staff, who was known around the West Wing as “Tiny Dancer,” was falsely accused of being a carpetbagger for the years he spent in Washington as a Clinton and Obama aide and Illinois congressman. Now he’s such a celebrity here, he goes by only one name — on his yard signs, in his ads and even in his opponent’s attack ad.
Rahm sometimes refers to himself as Rahm. “If their strategy was to get Rahm to explode,” he said of his motley crew of foes, “they’ve built a strategy based on something I control.”
Emanuel ran a disciplined and genial campaign, even showing patience during a ridiculous 12-hour hearing on whether he was really a resident of Chicago and qualified to run for mayor — a dust-up that followed an odd tenant’s refusal to vacate Rahm’s North Side house, which stirred up political trouble. Rahm rebutted that he and his wife, Amy Rule, still had stuff stored at his house, including Amy’s wedding dress.
“I said as a joke that if the hearing went into 13 hours, I was going to put the wedding dress on,” he said with a grin, as he hopscotched around the city scooping up last-minute votes.
When I asked what revenge he is plotting against his scheming tenant, Emanuel looked mischievous but bit his tongue. Of course, as Jon Stewart notes, the only thing scarier than Rahm Emanuel angry “is Rahm Emanuel smiling through his anger.”
Can a city famous for its beefy pols, mobsters and steakhouse politicking handle a Sarah Lawrence College graduate who wore tights, eats organic, swims and does yoga, a lithe spirit who has more facility with Martha Graham’s version of “Apollo” than the Bulls’ place in their division?
“I’ll eat grass-fed steaks,” he smiles. “Hey, I love steak, though I’ve cut down. My grandfather was a truck driver for Scandinavian Meats. I’m not interested in changing the culture of this city. I’m interested in changing how we do business.”
He knows it took awhile for Chicagoans to warm up to him. “The members that represented my district before me were Dan Rostenkowski, Roman Pucinski, Frank Annunzio, Mike Flanagan and Rod Blagojevich,” he said. “And along comes a guy named Rahm Israel Emanuel. I don’t know if I was loved, but they knew whose side I was on.”
He had hoped to become the first Jewish speaker of the House, but now he is destined to become the first Jewish mayor of Chicago.
“For me, as Rahm Emanuel, the grandson of Herman Smulivitz, who came to this city in 1917 from the Russian-Romanian border as a 13-year-old to leave the pogroms, and son of Benjamin Emanuel, who came here in 1959 from Israel to start a medical practice, there’s a personal sense of accomplishment,” he said, after polishing off a half-corned-beef, half-pastrami sandwich at the legendary Manny’s deli.
The other two members of the most competitive sibling trio on earth — his brothers Zeke, the oncologist, and Ari, the Hollywood agent — flew to Chicago to come to their brother’s victory party. David Axelrod, who has moved back here to help organize the president’s re-election run, was also on hand, even though it was his birthday.
“My birthday present,” Axelrod said, “will be a nine-and-a-half fingered mayor.”
