Rahm Emanuel will be the next mayor of Chicago. It’s a thankless job, but it should render him basically irrelevant on the national stage. Of course, if Obama needs any dead people’s votes, I’m sure Rahm can take care of it. But it will be hard for him to continue to infect Jane Hamsher with brain-fever. He’s going to be the mayor of our third biggest city and I couldn’t care less. If Obama hadn’t tapped him to be his chief of staff, we’d be working to make Rahm the Speaker of the House right now. Think about it.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
If Obama hadn’t tapped him to be his chief of staff, we’d be working to make Rahm the Speaker of the House right now. Think about it.
Not yet. Even though Hoyer and Emanuel are both corrupt Blue Dogs, I wonder how Emanuel would have forced Hoyer out if November’s results were the same. That Nancy Pelosi has kept Hoyer on ice is probably the most interesting thing to me about the past year or so.
Half the Blue Dogs lost their seats, but every Dem elected in 2006 owes something to Rahm. He would have leap-frogged Pelosi without any effort.
Yeah .. but a lot of those that lost were from 2006 .. more than leapfrogging Pelosi .. I would have laughed if he leapfrogged Steny .. just because Steny wants so bad to be Speaker too
So if he wants to have the longevity of Richard J. Sr. in office, he’ll now have to be an administrator. Will the garbage be picked up, streets cleaned, streets repaired, fire and police responsive to citizens?
If so, you might see some public facility named after hizzonner. The Rahm Emmanuel Bridge. The Rahm Emmanuel Expressway. The Rahm Emmanuel Airport. The Rahm Emmanuel Waste Disposal Facility….one of those.
And that’s how he’ll be remembered. Chicago mayors tend not to run for higher office. Life must be too good in Daley Plaza.
So basically either he does a good job and he has a job essentially for life or he does a lousy job, they boot him at the next opportunity, and he’s done in elected politics. That sounds suspiciously like a win-win scenario in my book.
Of course, I imagine that the transition from “Mayor” to “Federal Lobbyist” is less encumbered than the transition from “elected official” to “Federal Lobbyist” or the transition from “Presidential Staff” to “Federal Lobbyist”. So even if he’s a failure at the mayor gig he can probably seamlessly transition into a lobbyist position at the end of his term. There are still plenty of people in DC who will owe him favors – probably for the rest of his life.
I didn’t vote for him, but hope he uses some of that clout and aggression to get some of the money for Chicago that the (Dem controlled) state legislature has been holding hostage. For all his flaws and mistakes, I think Daley really did love Chicago in his fashion. I don’t expect to ever believe that of Rahm. We’ll see.
As to longevity, I fully expect Rahm to be running for senator, if not president, in 8 years or less.
Jane Hamsher’s brain-fever has no cure. She’s beyond hope.
Does this mean that Jane is gonna start calling you names again?
You mean she stopped?
Can somebody explain why Rahm wanted to be mayor of Chicago in the first place?
Why not? He grew up there. He’s ambitious.
Sure, being mayor of a big city like Chicago brings a lot of power and influence, but it doesn’t seem particularly to lead anywhere in terms of a political career. I remember hearing somewhere a long time ago that no mayor of New York City had ever been successful in national politics. And that was long before that jerk Giuliani tried it. Also, the journey from inside the beltway back to Chicago also struck me as unusual, if not unprecedented. I’m definitely talking about what I think, not what I know, so if anybody has counter-examples, please enlighten me.
Mayor of Chicago strikes me as something like being king of a city state in renaissance Italy –pretty fun if you are in to the whole power/wealth thing, and are good at watching your back.
“If I were the mayor, I’d …” Well yes, that may be the answer — that in fact, what Rahm really wanted was to one day be mayor of Chicago. He just took an unusual route to get there.
It’s a chance to make a visible difference and be praised for it. Cities are the last potentially manageable public entities in the US of A.