Just nine months out from the next election, Emanuel is unexpectedly vulnerable. Emanuel: D.C. hero, Chicago goat

CHICAGO — In Washington, he is “Rahmbo,” the ruthless, profane operative who survived the Clinton White House despite being vanquished by the first lady. In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel has been dubbed the “murder mayor” by one critic, a snipe at the city’s high homicide rate.


In Washington, he’s the campaign mastermind who reportedly mused about a 2016 presidential run if Hillary Clinton takes a pass. In Chicago, he’s the ham-fisted gentrifer who’s been tripped up by the city’s entrenched racial politics.

In Washington, he’s the star of the CNN series “Chicagoland” — a careful keeper of his image whose office helped coordinate the show. In the real Chicago, a city known for its mobster history, his tough-guy veneer just isn’t as intimidating.

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When Emanuel exited the Beltway in late 2010 to run for Chicago mayor, he had the tacit backing of a current president and the overt support of a former one. He won the race to succeed Richard M. Daley, and expectations ran high that Washington’s supreme enforcer was just the person to tame the Wild Midwest.

Now, just nine months out from the next election, Emanuel is unexpectedly vulnerable, with an approval rating that is perilously low. The comedown for the Illinois native, who terrified staffers and donors over more than a decade in Washington, has been striking. So has been the contrast between how he’s regarded in D.C., New York and Los Angeles — as opposed to some wards of Chicago.

A Chicago Sun-Times poll released last month showed that Emanuel would draw just 29 percent of the vote if the election were held then. His 8 percent showing in the survey among black voters, a crucial voting bloc for him last time, creates a truck-size hole for another candidate to drive through.

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Emanuel still has the upper hand in his battle to retain his job. He has $7 million in the bank and the power of incumbency behind him. The one challenger who gives his supporters agita, Cook County Supervisor Toni Preckwinkle – an African-American woman with name recognition who could fare well in Chicago’s identity politics – has said she’s not running. She also hasn’t closed the door on the prospect, but her campaign account holds a tenth of the cash of Emanuel’s.

As his fundraising gears up for his campaign, Emanuel is hosting a high-dollar event on June 20 with Bill Clinton and indie band The Head and the Heart, according to an email invitation obtained by POLITICO.

Emanuel’s allies say that a Sun-Times poll is an outlier, although they concede he’s not in a comfortable position politically.

“He’s had his challenges,” said James Carville, who’s known Emanuel since the two worked for Bill Clinton. “I think he’ll win reelection but he’s got to run a good campaign. Nothing’s easy in politics.” Ultimately, Carville added, people “have a lot of faith in Rahm.”

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Another Emanuel ally was blunt that his problem is as much his style as it is the substance of his message.

“There’s a straight-ahead quality to Rahm’s personality that allows him to get things done, but also can be off-putting,” the ally said.

Emanuel declined to be interviewed for this story. A spokeswoman provided this statement: “Leading a great city is a difficult job and there is much work left to do. But under Mayor Emanuel, Chicago is making steady progress in addressing the huge challenges that have built up over decades.”

Ben LaBolt, who was an aide to Emanuel in his first race, said the mayor has tackled “big, burning challenges at a turning point for the city. … The school day is longer and the graduation rate is higher, the murder rate is down after he reintroduced community policing, and he sliced the deficit in half while balancing the budget.”

Still, his adversaries smell blood and plan to make the most of the next year.

“I hope he loses, and I will work very hard to have somebody else [replace him],” said Karen Lewis, the African-American head of the Chicago Teachers Union. Emanuel was widely reported to have said “F—- you, Lewis” during a private meeting with her in 2012 about a new contract. (He did not deny it.)

“If you’ve seen any of the polling, he’s in serious trouble. No one seems to think that he’s doing a very good job. I think he is not suited to this kind of work,” said Lewis, who dubbed him “the murder mayor” last year after a big uptick in crime soon after he took office.

Some of the city’s problems are out of Emanuel’s control, and he’s tried hard to ease crime, with some success. He extended the school day for kindergartners, an achievement he frequently touts. But he’s had difficulty mastering the stagecraft needed to appease different constituencies in big-city politics.

Instead, Emanuel has approached the job like a latter-day Michael Bloomberg, a business-minded centrist without much interest in bending to opposition. Except unlike Bloomberg, he has no personal fortune with which to appease critics and enhance political friendships.

It’s a particularly difficult task at a time when income inequality has driven voters in Democratic-leaning cities further to the left. In Chicago, class politics fall along starkly racial lines.

Lewis recalled telling reporters that Emanuel had used the F-word with her, a move that fanned much of the initial anger among black voters against him. She noted that he demurred when asked by reporters whether he’d said it.

“And that’s where, if there were any stretch of the imagination of having any fear of Rahm Emanuel, it vanished at that moment,” she said. “Because I knew then he wasn’t the bad-ass he claimed to be.”

Succeeding Daley — a beloved figure whose family is etched into the fabric of the city — would be challenging even for a politician without Emanuel’s blunt edges. Daley, whose father was mayor before him, was skilled at the type of interest-group politicking that has bedeviled Emanuel.

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But the problems Emanuel is facing in Chicago haven’t, for the most part, hurt his standing beyond city limits. The mayor has been heralded on the cover of Time magazine and has visited the late-night television couches of Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien. Last year, Democrats in Washington whispered among themselves that Emanuel, on one of his frequent trips to the capital, had raised the idea of him running for president in 2016 if Hillary Clinton did not. Emanuel later denied he had an interest in running for president.

One Washington Democrat who’s worked with Emanuel in D.C. marveled at the degree to which his current political woes haven’t penetrated the Beltway.

“People can’t believe” he’s having a problem, said the Democrat. “They just expect Rahm’s kicking ass.”

To his allies and supporters, Emanuel remains the same fire-plug-size barrel of energy who, for all his foibles, is in politics to do good.

“I think Rahm’s been a good mayor and in a very difficult time,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s former senior adviser who recently wrote an op-ed rebutting a Chicago Tribune editorial writer who dubbed him “an elitist whose swagger doesn’t match his triumphs.”

Not everyone agrees.

“Rahm Emanuel comes in with a swagger. … that is ‘my way or the highway,’” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “And some people like that initially because they think you’re taking on all of the multiple interests in a city. But if you look at the most effective mayors, the most effective governors, the most effective executives, people find ways to bridge differences and work together to move an agenda.”

She added, “He’s very connected with the power elite in Washington and Chicago, which is why the power elite doesn’t see [his current struggles].”

Emanuel’s allies have also rankled supporters of Daley, who believe the current mayor’s team has foisted blame for his own problems on the past administration.

Yet it’s also hard to argue with facts — Emanuel faced a budget crisis and pension bubble three years after a major recession in a state that is struggling to stay afloat financially. He’s discovering the limits of his own power, acknowledging at an Institute of Politics seminar at the University of Chicago last week that his city’s fate is tied to goings-on in Springfield, the state capital.

A pension reform bill that he pushed through is still awaiting sign-off that may not come from Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat who has his own difficult reelection fight this year. Quinn is running against Bruce Rauner, a Republican businessman who is friends with Emanuel and counseled the mayor on what type of investment banking he should go into when he was in the private sector.

There are other problems. The conflagration with Lewis was ultimately resolved after a teachers’ strike in 2012, but the negative residue from that fight has lingered. His decision to close roughly 50 under-enrolled schools primarily in African-American neighborhoods drew fury. And that anger only grew when he named a school after Obama in the more affluent North Side of the city.

And Emanuel’s focus on economic development hasn’t gone over well in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

“He has a top-down philosophy of not listening to what the communities say,” said Alderman Bob Fioretti, a frequent and vocal Emanuel critic who is also sometimes mentioned as a potential challenger.

In response to the high murder rate, which has drawn attention nationally, Emanuel has pushed for vastly stricter gun laws.

In an interview with Crain’s Chicago Business last month, Emanuel acknowledged that his bare-knuckle approach can be excessive.

“There are times I need to pull back and listen. I understand that,” he said. But “I was not nostalgic that this [job] was going to be a walk. I didn’t say change would be easy. I said the change would be worth the struggle.”

“There is slow but steady progress,” he argued. “But we’ve got to make sure we don’t go back.”

Emanuel insiders believe if he can present a credible narrative — of a mayor willing to offend for the sake of getting things done — it will be enough to win reelection.

“He has a story to tell,” said one Emanuel insider who asked not to be identified. Another Emanuel ally pointed out that there were many moments during the 2011 campaign when he faced problems — including when he was temporarily tossed off the ballot because he hadn’t lived in the city for a year — and overcame them.

It’s Emanuel’s signature tenacity that his allies and Chicago politicos expect to carry him in the February election. Preckwinkle, whose county has its own underfunded pension problems — in a state plagued with financial issues, will have to come prepared if she changes her mind and runs. She declined a request to be interviewed.

The good news for Emanuel, one ally said, is that “you can’t beat someone with no one.”

If Preckwinkle gets in, “she will have to want it because, just like the mayor’s personality probably gets him in more trouble than his policies, he’s not going to give that office away,” said Paul Green, director of the Institute for Politics at Roosevelt University in Chicago. “She’s got to really go after it. And the question is, does she want to?”

Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.