Rahm’s Kind of Town

In a one-party town like this one, all great conflicts are intramural. Republicans pose no threat to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as he enters the third year of his four-year term, gunning for re-election. It’s his fellow Democrats who are scheming to destroy him. Consider Cain and Abel, the Yorks and Lancasters, Michael and Fredo Corleone: family conflict is often the deadliest.

Skirmishing among Chicago Democrats escalated to all-out war after the mayor’s handpicked school board voted on May 22 to shutter 50 city public schools. Facing a billion-dollar deficit in the schools budget, Emanuel had good reason to tackle the problem of half-full buildings and underperforming kids. But this giant step–no American city has closed as many schools at one time–was guaranteed to provoke.

Sure enough, the Chicago Teachers Union, a power unto itself, loosed its heavy artillery, with its president, Karen Lewis, calling Emanuel “the murder mayor” when the closings were announced. “He’s murdering schools. He’s murdering jobs,” she said. Neighborhood leaders charged that the closures targeted majority-black schools with majority-black faculties. “Does [Rahm’s] new Chicago mean no black folks?” asked Valerie Leonard of North Lawndale on the city’s West Side. At a rally against the school closings, people roared as 9-year-old Asean Johnson proclaimed, “This is racism!” “Children will die,” a protester cried at another gathering, presumably because they will have to walk farther to school through gang-troubled streets; the accusation was soon echoed on placards waved for the evening news.

Strong stuff. And it follows a tumultuous 2012 for the mayor, who weathered a seven-day strike by the teachers and struggled to get a handle on a spike in gun violence. According to a recent poll, Emanuel has lost support among black Chicagoans–who were vital to his easy victory in 2011–while his overall approval rating hovers at 50%. The mayor’s efforts at school reform, urban redevelopment, infrastructure repair and job training all seem to irritate the status quo in favor of other, often corporate, interests. Changes he has made in the police department have put a dent in crime, but that hasn’t won him the confidence of residents who experience the worst of it. Watching him court corporations and plot strategy with hedge-fund plutocrats, some of whom cut his campaign six-figure checks, Emanuel’s enemies have dubbed him “Mayor 1%.”

This factious city’s gift for turning disagreement into Armageddon is a proud part of its identity. “Stormy, husky, brawling,” Carl Sandburg famously wrote of Chicago. For more than half a century, the culture has favored the get-along, go-along machine politics of the Richard Daleys, the legendary Boss and his shrewd, stumble-tongued son. They reigned over Chicago by husbanding power and spreading favors, not always tending to the long term. No Daley was crazy enough to cross the teachers’ union or tangle with the unionized janitors at O’Hare airport.

That approach won elections but did not solve big structural problems. Elected in 2011 after 22 years of Richard M. Daley, Emanuel inherited a cash-strapped city in a flat-broke state. Chicago has budget problems and crime problems, problems of inequality and racial division, problems of mutual suspicion and failing schools, of high unemployment and aging infrastructure. And behind it all, special interests so deeply entrenched you need spelunking gear to go after them.

But Emanuel has picked the fights his predecessors avoided. His confrontational approach, he says, is the city’s best chance to retain its perch as the country’s third largest city, a Midwestern metropolis with global ambition–and to avoid a grim Rust Belt future. “The decisions we make in the next two to three years will determine the face of Chicago for the next 20 to 30 years,” he says. And given his bona fides at the highest levels of the Democratic Party–former White House chief of staff for President Obama, go-to Congressman during the rise of Nancy Pelosi, senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton–his clash with the left may prove to be a proxy for a broader fight nationwide over the identity of the Democratic Party. Some of the same constituencies attacking Emanuel have beefs with Obama over such issues as drone strikes, Guantánamo and, yes, education reform. But they have been reluctant to take on a trailblazing President in his second and last term in office.

The mayor of Chicago is a different matter.

With millions banked for his next campaign, a firm grip on the city council and the teachers at a loss so far to recruit a suitable opponent, Emanuel still packs plenty of punch. He is, after all, Rahm–the rare Washington insider with enough zing to be on a first-name basis with people he has never met. Legendary for his F bombs and swagger, he has star power in Washington, Hollywood and certain parts of Manhattan sufficient to attract the gaze of Robert Redford, who recently announced plans for an eight-part reality series, Chicagoland, featuring the “tough, visionary mayor” (Redford’s words) front and center.

But his approach to running Chicago makes it easy to believe his insistent denials that he would flee the city’s problems for a return engagement in Washington. When I ask him during an interview whether he is dreaming of the presidency one day, he replies, “No. I’m not. Never. It is not happening. I don’t know how else to say it. No.” The mayor has deep-set eyes that gather shadows in their sockets, and this can make him look ominous when he stares, which he was doing intensely. I braced for an F grenade, but nothing detonated. As mayor, he has cleaned up his language–a little.

“I’m done with that,” he said of Washington’s gridlock and posturing. “I worked eight years in the White House for two great Presidents. They talk about things they want to do–I’m doing it. This is the happiest I’ve ever been in public life. I’ve always wanted to be mayor.”

He leveled the death stare again. “You don’t believe me?” But I do believe him, because Emanuel is not stupid. Arrogant, chesty, prickly, yes, but never stupid. He knew what he was getting into as mayor of Chicago and why the office is a poor stepping-stone to any other job in politics. Chicago mayors are sometimes feared, sometimes scorned, sometimes investigated–but almost never promoted.

The Impossible Politics of Crime

Nothing has been more difficult than the surge of street violence during the mayor’s first full year in office. The number of murders in Chicago climbed past 500 in 2012 for only the second time since 2004–and turned a near coronation of the celebrity mayor into a baptism of fire.

Emanuel had taken over a city where crime rates fell gradually and steadily over more than a decade, mirroring a national trend–but they had not fallen as much as in some other major cities. While Chicago cut its murder rate in half from a peak in the 1990s, New York City managed to cut its murder rate by three-quarters and Los Angeles by two-thirds. The difference is more than 100 lives per year.

The problem is rooted, troublingly, in a relative few South Side and West Side neighborhoods where the legacy of segregation, police corruption, failed schools and misguided public-housing policy can be seen in concentrated pockets of family dysfunction and violence among young black men. Three percent of the city’s real estate is the source of 20% of its homicides; at the same time, 40% of Chicago, mostly on the North Side, experienced no murders at all last year, according to city officials.

During the younger Daley’s long reign, the city demolished such notorious high-rise poverty traps as the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green, but these overdue steps had the perverse effect of scattering crime and gang activity into previously stable middle-class neighborhoods. At the same time, Chicago police were slow to embrace the revolution in anticrime tactics that helped tame the mayhem of other cities.

On taking office, Emanuel moved quickly to hire a new superintendent of police. He picked Newark, N.J., police commissioner Garry McCarthy, a Bronx-born veteran of the New York City police and a disciple of the law-enforcement guru William Bratton. As the officer in charge of New York’s CompStat system of data-driven policing for seven years, McCarthy was revolutionary to the core, but with the streetwise demeanor of a beat cop.

McCarthy told me in a recent interview that he and the mayor shared a vision of a “proactive” force, which meant more officers on the street to gather more information about bad actors and simmering conflicts. It did little good to respond after a crime was committed when a more aggressive approach might prevent crime before it happens. To accomplish this, the department would have to be reorganized around new district commanders loyal to the vision. “He promised that I could run the department and he would take care of the politics, because if you want performance from a police department, you have to take the politics out of it,” McCarthy says.

The changes did not produce immediate results. While overall crime dropped, the number of homicides, which had averaged fewer than 460 per year from 2004 through 2011, soared. Emanuel blamed such influences as the warm winter–which supposedly brought gangbangers into the streets–and the enduring problem of absent fathers. Barraged by reporters eager to talk about murder when he wanted to bask after hosting a successful NATO summit, Emanuel seethed.

“You’re like birds all jumping from the telephone wire,” he scolds when I ask him about gun violence in February, shortly after a 15-year-old named Hadiya Pendleton was killed while standing with friends in a park about a mile from Obama’s South Side home. She was one of at least 39 killed in Chicago in January, and her death, which came days after she took part in the Obamas’ Inauguration ceremonies, reawakened the world to the city’s epidemic of gun violence. Scrambling to stop the killings amid the media glare, the mayor and his police superintendent raided overtime budgets to saturate hot spots with cops.

Now McCarthy’s reforms appear to be kicking in. Through May 6, the city experienced 102 murders, compared with 167 in the same period of 2012. “These are the best numbers Chicago has seen since 1959,” McCarthy said. Crime overall is down 11% compared with last year and close to 20% since Emanuel took office. McCarthy believes he can do better still. “A regression analysis based on algorithms–sounds funny coming from a cop” has identified the 420 most troublesome men in Chicago, he says, and police are looking into their networks.

That improvement will depend partly on manpower–the police department has already used about two-thirds of its entire 2013 overtime budget to tamp down violent crime. Summer’s warm weather, which historically brings a rise in gun violence, won’t make it any easier. Shootings over the Memorial Day weekend killed six people and wounded 11, a high toll, but a drop from the more than 50 killed or injured during the 2012 holiday.

These statistics are of little consolation to many residents of South and West Side neighborhoods. When McCarthy reorganized the department to attack “one of the worst, if not the worst, gang problems in the country” and reassigned what he calls the “warm and fuzzy” community-relations officers to street patrols, some residents regarded it as a hostile gesture.

This was clear in an interview with Pamela Wright and Greg Young, the mother and stepfather of Tyrone Lawson. An honors student at Morgan Park High, Lawson, 17, was shot to death outside a basketball game in January. Two grown men have been charged; their motive remains unclear. It may have been simply a case of mistaken identity.

“He never, that I am aware of, had a fight or an argument,” his mother says. “He was a big kid,” adds his dad, “6-feet-3 and over 300 pounds, so I suppose people could think he was intimidating,” but his aunt described him as “the gentle giant.” Lawson spent part of each Saturday in an honors class in physics and was deciding between going to college and joining the Navy.

After the murder, Wright was touched when Emanuel phoned her and told her to “consider this call a hug.” But she and Young have very different feelings about the police. “Where’s the Officer Friendly?” asks Wright, a longtime government employee. “We have young people who are afraid of the police when they need to be able to trust the police.”

Of McCarthy’s early talk about more police on the streets and a more aggressive approach to crime, Wright says, “The message I got was that they would shoot first and ask questions later. Every group of young black men is a gang to him–what would be a ‘group’ of white kids is a ‘gang’ if they’re black. I told Tyrone, ‘If you see police, you sit down and do what they say, because they aren’t coming to talk to you. They’re coming to shoot you.'”

McCarthy says he eliminated the special warm-and-fuzzy detail because “every cop should be doing community relations. We should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.” What’s more, the Lawson family are exactly the sort of solid citizens caught in failing circumstances that the mayor says he is trying to help. Yet they don’t trust his programs, and they’re not sure he is on their side. “The main focus seems to be the downtown area,” Wright tells me, which in Chicago means the business interests.

A Wonk in a Hack’s Body

In a city of ethnic neighborhoods and tribal politics, Emanuel is a bit of an outsider. For most of modern history, South Siders have occupied the mayor’s office; five mayors, including the Daleys, have hailed from the historically Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport. Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, came from the nearby African-American neighborhood of Bronzeville. Emanuel, the city’s first Jewish mayor, was born in Chicago but spent much of his childhood in a prosperous North Shore suburb, Wilmette. He’s now on the North Side, living with his wife and three children in the leafy Ravenswood neighborhood.

At age 53, with a nimbus of gray hair and a fluffy pile of millions in the bank (made during a brief but incredibly lucrative private-sector sojourn among friendly investment bankers), Emanuel is mayor purely for the sake of being mayor. He’s living his dream, and that dream turns out to involve potholes and snowplows, garbage collection and sewer pipes, streamlining the permit process at the department of buildings and renegotiating the city parking-meter contract, not to mention wooing businesspeople to move to the Loop from places like St. Louis and Cleveland. A mayor has to sweat the small stuff.

But at the same time, he has taken on some very large issues, the kind Presidents give speeches about: education reform, job creation, unsafe streets. Revealing the stripes of a pragmatic, pro-business New Democrat, the mayor lengthened the school day for Chicago’s elementary and high school students, reorganized the city’s enormous system of community colleges to emphasize job-skills training and established an infrastructure trust to allow private investment in public-works projects. All of these are popular ideas among some Democratic policy mavens, but no other mayor has taken them so far, so fast. In addition to his showdowns with the teachers and the janitors, Emanuel has clashed with constituencies ranging from professors at the community colleges to Cubs fans perched on the rooftops outside Wrigley Field.

“It’s not a strategy the old Rahm would have advised a candidate to follow,” he acknowledges. So why?

One clue might be found in a book that Emanuel co-wrote with the influential New Democrat Bruce Reed, now Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff. The authors divided political life into two warring camps–not conservatives and liberals, but hacks and wonks. Emanuel represented the hacks: pols who play hardball to win elections but yawn at policy. On the fifth floor of city hall, however, the mayor has gotten in touch with his inner wonk.

“I am a wonk desperate to get out of a hack’s body” is how he puts it during a recent interview in his large, wood-paneled office. Tastefully decorated with pieces borrowed from the Art Institute of Chicago, the space is a reminder that this particular hack was educated at artsy Sarah Lawrence College and won a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet.

The lessons learned from two very different Presidents are also on display. The mayor seems to have picked up some of Obama’s cool composure, and he still keeps a close eye on the White House he used to run. He gives the Administration high marks for its reaction to the rat-a-tat of recent crises. “Congress has a job to do with oversight,” he says of the hearings on Benghazi, the IRS scandal and possible overreaching by a leak-chasing Justice Department. “But if your oversight becomes overly political, the public gets turned off. Not that this White House needs saving, but that’s where the Republicans are saving the White House.”

Emanuel also evokes Clinton in the way he rattles off statistics and peppers conversations with arcane details. And, like Clinton, he knows how to schmooze to get what he wants. “He’s a more open mayor than I’m used to,” Alderman Walter Burnett Jr. tells me. “He’ll call up and say, ‘Hey, Alderman, this is Rahm.’ Rahm?!” After the Daley years, it’s hard to imagine a first-name mayor.

At his best, his wonk and hack tendencies blend into a 21st century version of the classic urban boss. (Emanuel did once work for the younger Daley.) One example: determined to steer Chicago’s leading universities into partnerships with local high schools, he summoned their presidents to his office one by one. “Each of those college presidents has construction projects they want to complete,” he explains. “I just told them if they would help me, I’d have someone walk their plans through the permit process.” They all assented, though he didn’t have to say what might happen to those permits should they refuse.

The mayor has a press release for every company he has lured to town–more than two dozen–and will never miss a photo op at a renovated branch library. He brags about the tech incubator he supported in the Merchandise Mart, where an estimated 225 start-ups created some 800 jobs during the first year of operation.

After reading in the Wall Street Journal about IBM’s plans to create a six-year high school curriculum heavy in STEM subjects–science, technology, engineering and math–Emanuel decided to adopt the idea, but at five schools, not one. “Typical competitive middle child,” he shrugs. Microsoft, Cisco and other high-tech giants have joined IBM at the mayor’s request. In a similar vein, he has steamrolled past the complaints of traditionally minded liberal-arts professors to focus Chicago’s community colleges on real-world job training for hotel and hospital workers as well as truck drivers.

Changes like these, added to the longer school day he rammed through and the promise of full-day kindergarten for all students, will finally give kids long trapped in poverty a realistic path to success, Emanuel insists. He has risked political backlash, he says, because he “will not shortchange our students.”

Business leaders are buying it. “I personally think Mayor Emanuel is just what the doctor ordered,” said Jeff Smisek, chairman and CEO of United Airlines, which has its headquarters in Chicago’s landmark Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower). “He is willing to take on some tough issues and vested interests. He’s not daunted by them.”

Daunted he should be. Chicago’s problems are stubborn. The city’s unemployment rate was 10.3% in April, a notch below Los Angeles, but far above Houston and New York. The city’s population is inching back up after a decade of losses, but at the slowest rate of any major city in the country. And his pet projects at the state capital in Springfield–pension reform and a Chicago casino–are languishing.

The Chicago Tribune recently scolded Chicagoans for turning on Emanuel simply for following through on campaign promises. “By essentially doing what he had said he would do–by pushing for better schools and imposing tough economies–Emanuel stoked grievances old and new,” the paper noted.

The Chicago way of resolving grievances is not to forget them but to fight them out. That’s what Rahm Emanuel will be busy doing for the next couple of years. And to borrow a classic Chicago line from the 1987 film The Untouchables, “you wait until the fight is over. One guy is left standing. And that’s how you know who won.”