Copyright theatlantic
The laws of political journalism dictate that any profile of Rahm Emanuel—who is all but declaring a 2028 presidential run—must crackle with Rahm Anecdotes that capture the propulsive, relentless behavior of a man who’s slugged his way through the political Thunderdome for four decades. For example: the dead fish he sent to a Democratic pollster he blamed for misjudging a House race, accompanied by a note that read: “It’s been awful working with you. Love, Rahm.” Or the celebratory dinner in Little Rock, Arkansas, after Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, when Emanuel repeatedly stabbed the table with a steak knife as he named those who’d betrayed the campaign and decreed them, one after the other, “Dead! Dead! Dead!” Or the nameplate on his desk in the White House, when he was Barack Obama’s first chief of staff: Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself, a gift from his two brothers—Zeke, a prominent bioethicist, and Ari, a Hollywood superagent. (The nameplate was short-lived; Michelle Obama didn’t like it.) But this profile, Emanuel informed me, will not be one of those profiles. “One: Distinguish the caricature from the character,” he told me, reading from a scrap of paper with a short list of what I must understand about him. “I get all the caricature—I played into it or whatever—but there’s principle behind it. I don’t just fight for the sport of fight.” I had arrived a few minutes early for our 8 a.m. breakfast at the Park Hyatt in Washington, D.C., but Emanuel, who hates being late, was already seated in his crisp white button-down and dark-blue jeans. He’d begun his day at 5:30 a.m. with 50 minutes on the hotel’s stationary bike, 20 minutes of weights, and now nearly seven minutes of instructing me on how to properly do my job. Over black coffee and Greek yogurt with berries, he continued outlining what should be in my profile: He had helped vanquish many a Republican—particularly as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 midterms—but Republicans still like him. As proof, he pulled up recent emails from two congressional Republicans, both committee chairmen, praising his potential 2028 bid. He would later show me another, from a Republican senator, complimenting his stint as ambassador to Japan. (Emanuel seemed to think that these private niceties forecast a broad appeal with voters.) He also noted that unaffiliated voters can cast ballots in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, which could be the first state to pass judgment in 2028. Finally, Emanuel ran through the ways in which he had been ahead of the rest of the country as mayor of Chicago, from 2011 to 2019. Under his leadership, he said, Chicago was among the first U.S. cities to sue pharmaceutical companies over opioids. It was a pioneer in universal prekindergarten and free community college. He made Chicago a top destination for corporate relocation, and traveled to Europe and Asia to drum up foreign investment in the city. And he devoted his second mayoral inaugural address, in 2015, to the plight of “lost and unconnected young men,” well before it became the topic du jour. Although Emanuel says that he will not make a decision on running until next year, he is publicly and privately gearing up for a presidential campaign. You may have seen and heard more of Emanuel these past few months than you ever did when he was in elected or appointed office. He was on Megyn Kelly’s show, where he broke with progressives over transgender issues (“Can a man become a woman? … No.”). While testifying before a House committee on China, Emanuel said that, as Joe Biden’s ambassador to Japan, he strengthened ties among Tokyo, Washington, Manila, and Seoul, as a bulwark against China. And he appeared on so many podcasts—hosted by David Axelrod, Dana Bash, Hugh Hewitt, Hasan Minhaj, Gavin Newsom, Kara Swisher, Bari Weiss—that I began to wonder if Spotify should just add a Rahm Emanuel channel. He’s clearly pitching himself to America as a politically incorrect, tell-it-like-it-is fighter. And over the course of several weeks this summer and early fall, he pitched himself to me as someone who can muscle the American dream back into reality for the middle class. Having served all three living Democratic presidents, Emanuel has been a key player in nearly every major victory, defeat, negotiation, controversy, and innovation of the modern Democratic Party. But as he gears up for one final act, Democrats will have to ask themselves: Is Rahm Emanuel precisely what the party needs right now—as it flounders through the Donald Trump era—or is he exactly whom the party wants to leave behind? He wound down his breakfast talking points in typical Rahm fashion: pretending not to care while caring a great deal. “I am a political animal, full stop. But I’m equally a policy animal,” he told me. “I don’t give a fuck what else you say.” The summer he was 17—shortly after he turned down a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet in favor of Sarah Lawrence College—Emanuel sliced open his finger working at an Arby’s in the northern suburbs of Chicago. He was cleaning the metal meat-shaving machine, and cleaved his right middle finger down to the bone. He bandaged it up and finished his shift, unaware that a piece of meat was lodged under the skin, and then proceeded to splash around in Lake Michigan with friends. The ensuing infection left him hospitalized for weeks and near death twice, his older brother, Zeke, told me. At one point, doctors debated between further antibiotic treatment, which had no guarantee of success, and amputation, which was more likely to solve the problem. “He’s like, ‘Take it off!’” Zeke said. “‘I want to live, and I’m not going to let the two knuckles on my finger stop me.’” The story became part of the Rahm Emanuel shtick. There was never any, “‘Woe is me, I can’t play racquet sports’ or whatever the fuck,” Zeke said. I spoke with nearly 50 of Emanuel’s friends, allies, former colleagues, rivals, skeptics, haters, and fellow Democratic operatives, some of whom requested anonymity not only to share their candid views but also to avoid his infamous wrath. (One person remembered how, after Emanuel’s first House primary race, he held a yearslong grudge against EMILY’s List for helping his female rival—despite the fact that this is the exact purpose of EMILY’s List.) They all told me similar stories of his relentless drive to survive and win, and how he helped shape our modern politics. In 1992, as Bill Clinton’s finance director, Emanuel prioritized large donor events to raise money; the cash helped Clinton survive the Gennifer Flowers scandal, which threatened to derail his campaign early in the primaries. In the White House, Emanuel was part of the team that pushed NAFTA and the 1994 crime bill through Congress; both achievements would later haunt 21st-century Democrats. Hillary Clinton tried to have him fired—she reportedly disdained his aggressive style of doing business—but Emanuel refused to leave, and accepted a demotion instead. “I said, ‘Come back to Chicago, man; it’s over.’ He said, ‘No, I’m not going,’” Axelrod told me. “Because he cannot fail. He won’t accept failure.” Emanuel clawed his way back to a senior-adviser position. Mythmaking profiles followed, and they are time capsules of Emanuel’s prescient sense of voter moods. As one administration staffer put it to The New Republic in 1997: “Rahm felt that Americans believed too many people were coming into this country, too many foreigners, so he wanted to show the administration returning people, deporting them, putting up bigger fences, sending them back.” In the Clinton White House, Emanuel took on assignments that, in his words, “nobody wanted to touch.” He helped Clinton implement Operation Gatekeeper, aimed at halting illegal immigration near San Diego. He fielded 3 a.m. calls from Clinton as he whipped votes for two major gun-control laws: the Brady Bill in 1993 (which passed just eight days before NAFTA) and the assault-weapons ban in 1994. He negotiated the final specifics of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which extended health care to millions. He also helped hash out the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 with a Republican-controlled Congress, and the first of Clinton’s two increases of the federal minimum wage. This was the Democratic Party of the 1990s: a heady run of accomplishment, through combat and compromise with a pre-Trump GOP, even as Clinton was hounded by right-wing inquisitors. Emanuel followed his first tour of the White House with a stint in investment banking. Mergers and acquisitions, though, didn’t have the thrill of politics. Emanuel was elected to the House in 2002, to represent the North Side of Chicago. As chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, he wrested the chamber from Republican control for the first time in 12 years, and gave Democrats a 31-seat majority. He did so with a then-controversial recruitment strategy: enlisting candidates (veterans, athletes, sheriffs) with beliefs (pro-gun, anti-abortion) that fit their swing districts instead of party purity tests. Critics claim that these ephemeral victories in purple districts seeded longer-term defeat for the party; Emanuel says that his goal was to deliver the speaker’s gavel to a Democrat, and that he enabled the election of the first female speaker of the House. Emanuel wants results, in other words. And he can detonate when he doesn’t get them. Multiple members of Emanuel’s 2006 DCCC team told me the same story: In June of that year, after Democrats lost a special election in California, he called his team into his office and began shouting. “We. Worked. Too. Hard. To. Lose. Races. Like. This,” he said, crushing a water bottle in one hand and rattling a chair with the other. “You. Worked. Too. Hard. To. Lose. Races. Like. This.” Someone laughed at Emanuel’s tantrum, prompting him to declare, “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I am going to kill every last motherfucking one of you.” (One of his nicknames is “Rahmbo.”) Emanuel had hoped to become the first Jewish speaker, but the incoming president Obama asked him to be his chief of staff. “No fucking way,” Emanuel told him, hesitant to put his family through another grueling tour of White House duty. But Obama was persistent in wanting Emanuel’s expertise and temperament. “With an economic crisis to tackle and what I suspected might be a limited window to get my agenda through a Democratically controlled Congress, I was convinced that his pile-driver style was exactly what I needed,” Obama wrote in his memoir A Promised Land. Emanuel helped Obama prevent the recession they’d inherited from slipping into a depression. The Obama administration bailed out the auto industry, which Emanuel had urged it to do, but let bankers off the hook, even as Emanuel privately advocated “Old Testament justice.” And he was instrumental in whipping votes for and negotiating the minutiae of the Affordable Care Act, once racing from his son’s bar mitzvah, after the challah and wine, to the White House to tackle final concerns with holdout Democrats. (“I told Obama, ‘You owe me. You promised it would not be like this, and this is exactly what it is,’” Emanuel told me, still miffed about the work-life imbalance.) The health-care package changed the American economy and millions of lives—and also became an eternal political cudgel. Even the most recent government shutdown hinges, in part, on ACA subsidies. GOP officials are making “a political mistake and a policy mistake,” Emanuel told me. “It reinforces the brand that Republicans don’t care about people.” Emanuel’s most potent weapon—both for himself and for his party—may be his sheer relentlessness, which he can calibrate to be either scorched-earth or supple. As Biden’s ambassador to Japan, he once asked to join a meeting between the president and the Japanese prime minister. The National Security Council nixed Emanuel’s request; such small, high-level meetings typically would not include an ambassador. Yet when Biden and his aides showed up, there was Emanuel, waiting alongside the Japanese delegation, which he had persuaded to bring him. The question now is whether he can sweet-talk—or bulldoze—his way into the room yet again. The case against Rahm Emanuel, according to critics: He’s not progressive enough. His only ideology is winning. He’s more of a tactician, less of a principal (though he’s long exuded main-character energy). He’s too short (he claims 5 foot 8) or too old, at least for voters who want to get away from septuagenarian presidents (he’ll be 69 on Inauguration Day 2029). He has a problem with Black voters, stemming from his mayorship (more on that in a bit). He’s too Jewish; his middle name is Israel, though he has called Benjamin Netanyahu’s “collective punishment” of Gazans morally and politically “bankrupt” and previously confronted the prime minister over Israeli settlements (Haaretz reported that Netanyahu dubbed Emanuel a “self-hating Jew,” though the prime minister has denied this). The biggest knock against Emanuel may be that he’s too enmeshed with the Democratic Party of the past to emerge as its future. Emanuel is “a relic” who made Democrats cave to Big Pharma when writing the Affordable Care Act, Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me. Green’s group was among those Emanuel called “fucking retarded” for considering running ads against conservative Democrats who were reluctant to support the ACA. To Emanuel, the Democratic Party has morphed from a big-tent results machine into a circular firing squad of activists. Emanuel is “the exact wrong answer” to what the Democratic Party needs right now, because he prioritizes corporate interests, says Cenk Uygur, a co-host of the progressive news program The Young Turks. Uygur believes that Emanuel’s power stems from his friendly relationships with the donor class and political reporters, who’ve been ornamenting his reputation for decades. “In almost all the profiles, I read about how charming Rahm Emanuel is,” Uygur told me, but “from our perspective, all we see is a disastrous ogre, not this charming Shrek guy.” Regarding his stance on transgender rights, Parker Molloy wrote in The New Republic in July that Emanuel is “picking on the people least able to defend themselves and calling it pragmatism.” Emanuel told me that he’ll protect the most vulnerable—as mayor, he ensured that Chicagoans could use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity—while not focusing on trans issues. “Sound is not always fury,” he often says, meaning the loudest voices do not always amplify the foremost issues. Or, as he put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month: “We’ve spent the past five years debating pronouns without noticing that too many students can’t tell you what a pronoun is.” Some progressives, especially in Chicago, are unwilling to forget or forgive the central test of his mayorship. In October 2014, weeks before Emanuel kicked off his reelection campaign, a Black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer. Video of the shooting wasn’t released until 13 months later. McDonald had not lunged at officers, as the police-union spokesperson had claimed; he’d been shot in the back while walking away. The incident ignited national outrage and accusations of a cover-up by the Chicago Police Department and Emanuel, and some former constituents are still angry. It remains a stain on Emanuel’s legacy, and would be easy fodder for any 2028 opponent. “He’s the mayor. He could have just released it,” Tracy Siska, the executive director of the Chicago Justice Project, told me. “The Chicago police had murdered a Black kid for no reason in front of a bunch of cops, and no one did a damn thing.” Emanuel has said that he needed to let the official process play out. “If the mayor weighs in, you’re basically compromising those investigations,” he told me, adding that his intervention could have jeopardized the prosecution of the shooter, who was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder. Shortly after the video was released, Emanuel delivered an emotional apology before the Chicago City Council, his voice cracking as he accepted responsibility for the tragedy. He ultimately pushed through several reforms, including body-worn cameras for all police and a more timely video-release policy. He apologized to and earned the support of Marvin Hunter, McDonald’s great-uncle and a Chicago pastor who served as the family’s representative. The two regularly speak, and Hunter endorsed Emanuel during his confirmation process to be ambassador. “There is more to this individual than the caricature that is presented in the public,” Hunter wrote to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2021. “I felt what is in his heart and I know him to be a decent and honorable man who is willing to listen, eager to learn and show a deep level of compassion.” For as prickly as he can be, Emanuel is skilled at smoothing things over. As mayor, he closed 50 underperforming Chicago schools, in mainly Black and Latino neighborhoods. Janice Jackson, who became the CEO of Chicago Public Schools after the closures, told me that the schools needed to be closed—because of declining enrollment and budgetary shortfalls—but communities reeled at the speed of the decision and the brusqueness of the execution. Later in Emanuel’s tenure, when he was further consolidating high schools, he did more community outreach, and with a more empathetic tone. “Did I learn something? Yeah, of course I did,” he told me, when I asked about the changed approach. Emanuel points to data from Stanford showing that Chicago-public-school students under his tenure appeared to be learning faster than those in any other of the 100 largest school districts in the country. As Jackson told me, “I have never met an elected official who cares more about education.” Emanuel does care. Even if he doesn’t always seem caring. I felt this duality myself as I spent time with him. One humid Tuesday evening in July, I wobbled up to CNN’s D.C. studio on an electric scooter, with no helmet. Emanuel was early for our appointment, as usual, and from the look on his face, I could tell that he was waiting with a reprimand. “You have three kids,” Emanuel said, with a mix of stern disappointment and genuine concern, pointing to my unprotected head. “What are you doing?” This was the paternal, less visible side of Emanuel that I’d heard about: the steady husband who, when his kids were younger, prioritized family dinners with his wife of 31 years, Amy Rule. The devoted father of three who can choke up when talking about his family—he said he speaks daily with each of his kids—and who regularly asks about others’. The fervent believer in the promise of America, who prizes loyalty, and inspires it, and sometimes ends phone calls—even tirades—with “I love you.” “Distinguish the caricature from the character,” Emanuel had told me. When I asked people who had worked for Emanuel if they’d join his presidential campaign, several were open to the idea. And when I asked people for their best Rahm stories, much of what I heard went beyond dead-fish antics and fuck-yous. Sarah Feinberg, who worked for Emanuel at the DCCC and as a senior adviser in the Obama White House, was once mugged at gunpoint. “Rahm literally checked on me constantly,” Feinberg told me. “He had me call him every night when I got home—not to have a conversation, but so he knew I was home.” Emanuel is a boss who’ll call on weekends and at all hours, but he’s also a boss who encourages work-life balance. Michael Negron, Emanuel’s policy director when he was mayor, told me that if Rahm called and heard his kids in the background, “he’d say, ‘Call me when you’re free.’” Shortly after Chicago was named host of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, a local hospitality union reached a contract impasse with a major hotel operator. Karen Kent, the president of the union, called Emanuel, who happened to be at Camp David. He was ambassador to Japan at the time but told her, simply, “I got it.” “Two days later,” Kent told me, “those hotel guys called and settled.” Emanuel said he’d urged the hotel operator to consider the long term: The convention would bring a ton of business to the city, and the hotel shouldn’t be left on the outside because of short-term worries. “Figuring out what people needed and getting it for them, I think, was always one of his talents,” Zeke Emanuel told me, explaining how Rahm had honed certain skills as the middle child of three competitive brothers. A former aide had described Emanuel to me as “very Tony Soprano–esque” in the way that his animus is often laced with affection, and vice versa. The week after Rosh Hashanah, I received this text from Emanuel: “First I start the new year with being nice to you. Will try. Harder.” Emanuel asked whether I’d reached out to a couple of people he thought I should speak with for this profile. Through an aide, he’d previously sent me a list of a dozen people to call, from his mayoral days. “Speaker in Virginia said never heard from ashley,” he texted. “True?” When I replied that the people he was now asking about were not on his original list, he responded, “Don’t attack the messenger,” and then sent me their contact info. So I called Don Scott, the first Black speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, who told me that Emanuel “helped me navigate the political scene” in the state. Scott sees in Emanuel a thorny sincerity that can’t be faked. “All these people are being coached on how to be themselves and be real,” Scott said, “and Rahm came out of the womb using a motherfucker here and a motherfucker there.” At the end of our call, Scott and I wondered if Emanuel would finally stop pestering us, now that we had connected. But Emanuel was also querying people I’d already interviewed, and then asking me if I was going to use what they’d said. Emanuel’s desire for control manifested even in the photo shoot for this article. Our photographer said in an email that Emanuel had been generous with his time but “refused most of my location choices,” “called me a ‘little prick’ when I suggested some posing directions (multiple times) and told me he ‘knew where I lived in case he didn’t like what was printed.’” Emanuel had done this in his avuncular, shit-giving tone, which had made the photographer laugh but also complicated his assignment. Waiting with Emanuel in the CNN greenroom before his TV hit, we ran into a reporter we both know, who—amused to have stumbled upon a profile-in-process—began snapping photos of us on his phone. I joked with Emanuel that we could keep the pictures for posterity, to remember the good times in the event that this profile comes out, he hates it, and I’m forever dead to him. He responded by switching to caricature. “You won’t fuck this up,” Emanuel said, faux-menacing, jabbing four-and-a-half fingers at me, “because if you do, your kids won’t have a mother anymore.” “Just who is the Rahm voter?” I repeatedly asked people, and the answers were varied: moderates and centrists. Progressives who care about winning the general election. Biden-Trump voters. Washington insiders, yes, but also the working class. Or maybe there’s no constituency that could make him a front-runner. Emanuel, meanwhile, complained to me that I was trying to pigeonhole him. “You’re trying to figure out what box I fit,” he said, “and I don’t fit a box.” Case in point: Emanuel chats with a range of people who would make certain heads explode. The billionaire Republican Ken Griffin, a Chicagoan, supported Emanuel when he ran for Congress and mayor, and the two collaborated to revitalize the Chicago Lakefront Trail. Last month, Emanuel met with the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has provoked centrist Democrats, to talk about how to staff a city administration and turn goals into results. And over the summer, Emanuel met with a few billionaire tech titans: Peter Thiel, whose fortune helped J. D. Vance win his Senate race, and the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whom Emanuel has known for years. Emanuel said that he’d asked Andreessen and Horowitz about improving research funding at universities and in the defense industry. A few weeks ago, I traveled with Emanuel to the proving ground of Iowa, where his trip’s stated purpose—to campaign and fundraise for Democrats—collided with its subtext: to test his own prospects. Rose Green, a Des Moines resident, immediately recognized Emanuel at the September 26 homecoming game at Roosevelt High School. “I heard him on a podcast a few months ago,” Green told me, “and I said, ‘He’s sounding very presidential. He’s willing to say what he thinks, and I like that right now.’” She asked Emanuel if he was going to run for president, and he gave a version of his standard response: He’s still thinking about it. But he’s clearly acting the part. In his 33 hours in Des Moines, Emanuel had coffee with a group of teachers, ate Italian food with fellow politicians, and worked the homecoming crowd at Roosevelt High, where one dad told me, “I’m a big fan of Obama, so if Obama trusts him, that just gives me good vibes.” Emanuel also toured a business incubator in a low-income neighborhood, ate two tacos ahogados at a tiny Mexican restaurant, soapboxed at a fish fry hosted by State Representative Sean Bagniewski, and befuddled at least one police officer who, after shaking hands with Emanuel, turned to a colleague and asked, “Who’d he say he was?” Before Emanuel’s day of Iowa campaigning on Saturday, he and I met for breakfast in the lobby of his hotel (again, black coffee and yogurt with berries). Emanuel believes that Kamala Harris lost mainly because she presented herself as a continuation of the Biden administration rather than as a candidate of change, and that she erred by focusing too much on threats to democracy. Yet since Emanuel and I had last spoken, Charlie Kirk had been assassinated in front of thousands of college students, and the Justice Department had begun prosecuting Trump’s perceived enemies, such as former FBI Director James Comey. I asked: Did he now find the issue more salient? Emanuel deflected. “I think, by 2027, the country is going to be: We’ve got to get past Trump. We’re exhausted,” he told me. If voters want revenge via a Democratic version of Trump, Emanuel added, then he’s not their guy. And over the past several months, Emanuel has repeatedly argued that the 2028 election will not be a referendum on Trump, and that Democrats will need to affirmatively stand for something. Emanuel, in nearly all of his remarks, stands for education and affordability. He talks about making homeownership more achievable by giving first-time buyers a $24,000 tax credit or favorable interest rates. He wants to rethink our nation’s education system, in part by nationalizing what he did in Chicago, such as free community college for public-high-school graduates with at least a B average. Before entering politics, Emanuel wanted to be a teacher; when he was mayor, his staff would sometimes treat a bad mood with an impromptu visit to a school, which always made him sunnier. During Emanuel’s coffee with Iowa educators, a teacher said that he would love to bring Chicago innovations—such as requiring high-school seniors to have an official “day after” graduation plan in order to get their diploma—to Des Moines. Emanuel fist-bumped the teacher while addressing a theoretical student: “You want to be a plumber? Great! You want to be in the Air Force? Great! You want to go to Iowa Technical? Great! But,” he said, “we’re not letting you go until we know what you’re doing.” At the Iowa fish fry, Emanuel began his remarks in a folksy style that struck me as slightly Clintonian, his voice lapsing into a light twang for the first few minutes. At 65, Emanuel still presents as impish: a bit fidgety, a bit smart-ass. His hair has been going gray since the Clinton era, but his skin retains a glow. (The former aide told me that Emanuel is a devotee of Kiehl’s face lotion: “He was very militant about that.”) Most Iowans I chatted with after they met Emanuel seemed open to the idea of him as a candidate. They liked his candor; one woman told me that she liked how he “cussed.” They liked his diagnosis of—and prescriptions for—the Democratic Party: that it must focus on delivering results instead of culture squabbles. Emanuel has a whole riff about three 21st-century moments that shattered trust in government—the Iraq War, the Great Recession, and the response to COVID—but one line that got heads nodding in Iowa was far simpler: “The American dream is unaffordable, it’s inaccessible, and we as Democrats—that’s unacceptable to us.” Earlier this year, Emanuel returned to an investment-banking firm as a senior adviser. Although not yet a candidate, Emanuel has six people working with him on his nascent campaign, and he plans to announce more early next year. In a hypothetical field for a primary season that’s two years away, it’s impossible to forecast Emanuel’s chances. He could bend his party’s trajectory once again, or maneuver his way into a Cabinet position or even the vice presidency. Or he could flame out before a single primary vote is cast. All his life, failure has been unimaginable, almost physically unbearable. But Emanuel says that he’s different now. As he sees it, this would be his last political race, he’s already had a full career, and nearly everyone thinks he’s a very long shot. So he says he’s liberated himself to not care if he loses, and to have fun even if he does. That seems unrealistic, but Emanuel has long practiced the art of spin, and it’s possible that he’s successfully spun himself. For now, he’s focused on influencing his own party. Democrats, after all, are in their “Why the hell not?” era, and part of Emanuel’s pitch is: Why the hell not me?
