Fighting for The Spoils

"Blair looked pretty shocked before he started laughing," says Begala, who was there. "They are a little more formal in Britain than they are in Chicago."

Back in the Game

Toward the end of Clinton's second term, Emanuel and his wife, Amy Rule, a Wharton MBA, and the first of their three children moved back to Chicago with the express purpose of making some serious money. In 1999, without any previous experience, Emanuel joined the investment bank of Democratic donor Bruce Wasserstein. Within two years, thanks in part to the bank's being sold, Emanuel had made about $18 million, enough to get back into the game without worrying about his family's finances.

"Rahm was always going to go back into politics," says Ezekiel. "That was the whole point of going into investment banking, to earn a nest egg."

It was Da Mayor himself who first suggested that Emanuel run for the open North Side congressional seat in 2002.

"I told him he was crazy," Emanuel says. "But then I did a poll, and it actually looked like I had a shot."

With the Daley cogs turning on his behalf, Emanuel edged out a Polish American state legislator in the primary and went on to win the general election. It's a safe seat now -- he's not even running ads this year -- but he speaks with pride of the street-level fight he waged the first time.

"I walked a hundred precincts during that campaign," he says. "I stood in front of every grocery in my district seven times."

Emanuel keeps in regular contact with his City Hall patron. And some say he has brought LaSalle Street sensibilities to his House job, particularly those who have been on the wrong side of his DCCC machine. He hasn't hesitated to muscle aside liberal candidates in favor of ones he thought could go toe-to-toe with Republicans on security and social issues. He recruited several Iraq war veterans and found sheriffs to run in both Washington state and Indiana. He persuaded Heath Shuler, a former Redskins quarterback and an antiabortion Democrat, to run in North Carolina. (Shuler has said Emanuel's five-calls-a-day pushiness was worse than any college recruiter's.)

In one move that Rose calls a "classic Chicago power play," Emanuel pushed Tammy Duckworth, a political newcomer who lost both legs as an Army helicopter pilot in Iraq, to run in the congressional district of retiring Illinois Republican Henry Hyde. That didn't sit well with supporters of Christine Cegelis, a technology consultant who had scored a surprise 44 percent against Hyde in 2002. Her supporters say the DCCC effectively starved the antiwar Cegelis of money and support in favor of Duckworth, who calls the war "a mistake" but calls for more aggressive training of Iraqi forces before pulling out U.S. troops.

"There was a lot of frustration on the ground, trying to figure why the national Democratic Party was trying to squash a strong local movement like this," says Kevin Spidel, a founder of Progressive Democrats of America who managed the Cegelis campaign. "It generated a lot of volunteers for us. We were outspent 4 to 1 and came close to beating Rahm Emanuel and his Washington machine."

Out of the Wilderness

Asked if he ever has regrets about his hardball habits, Emanuel stares into his glass of tea for a long moment.

"Look, you're never as tough as they say you are," he says finally.

But the self-reflection lasts only as long as it takes for him to remember the tactics of the other side.

"They call Tammy Duckworth a cut-and-runner when she left two legs in Iraq?" he shouts, jabbing a finger in the air, drawing stares from around the deli. "How dare they! I'm going to give them the medicine that they've been giving out. That's what shocks them."

If Duckworth wins, along with enough of Emanuel's other candidates to deliver the House into Democratic hands, it's easy to predict that all the hard feelings within the party will be quickly swept away by the shouts of hallelujah. And Rahm Emanuel, with a month to go before his 48th birthday and less than five years of seniority on the Hill, will be basking in acclaim for helping to lead his long-suffering party from the backbencher wilderness to the Promised Land of majority.

Just what is the proper reward for an electoral Moses? Plum committee assignments? (He already has a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee.) A leadership post? Leapfrogging to a chairmanship?

"How about the great honor of serving as the chairman of the DCCC?" says Pelosi. "Honestly, we've never even had a conversation about that."

Emanuel refuses to muse, publicly at least, on how a good Nov. 7 could boost his career. Or whether that career is likely to be on Capitol Hill, in Springfield or up at City Hall. For now, he's consumed only with the race.

"I don't even want to talk about that," he says, tapping his BlackBerry on Manny's Formica. "Call me on November 8th. We'll talk about it then."