The Chief's Chief

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Rahm Emanuel Chosen as Chief of Staff

The llinois Congressman has accepted the job as President-elect Barack Obama's chief of staff.

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But his accomplishment came at the cost of bitter feuds with party Chairman Howard Dean, Congressional Black Caucus members and several candidates he pushed off the ballot in favor of his favorite centrists.

"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," Kevin Spidel said in 2006 when he was campaign manager for Christine Cegelis, a liberal candidate he said was starved of funds by Emanuel in favor of Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq veteran.

Many of the candidates Emanuel recruited are now members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog caucus, a group of Democrats Obama will badly need for any of his pricier initiatives.

"These are folks that know that Rahm looked out for them both in the campaign and in their first term in Congress," said Amy Walter of the Hotline political report.

The ease with which Emanuel slides down the halls of Congress would suggest he has never left. But he used Washington's revolving door to great personal profit, using his White House contacts to become a multimillionaire before returning as a member.

He was a guy of relatively average means when he left the Clinton administration in 1998 to become a partner at Wasserstein Perella & Co., a global investment and merchant banking firm. Four years later, as he began his first campaign, financial disclosure forms revealed him to be rich.

At the firm founded by Bruce Wasserstein, one of Clinton's Wall Street buddies, a top Democratic fundraiser and brother of the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein, Emanuel turned his blunt charm to the business of financial dealmaking. And by all accounts, he was good at it.

"He could go from the politics of the deal to the economics of the deal to the corporate strategy of the deal, and he just goes back and forth like quicksilver," said Rowe of Exelon, a company that Emanuel helped form out of the merger of two smaller utility companies.

The money rolled in quickly -- more quickly than is usual for a new member of Congress. On his 2003 disclosure, he listed $9,678,775 from the firm, enough to force a footnote that specified he had earned the money before his election.

His stock listings on the same form are filled with the all-too-familiar companies from the economic collapse: Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac, J.P. Morgan.

Emanuel's political and financial connections, built during his time on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, have made him a darling of Wall Street when the New York financial hub has lost its luster.

One of Clinton's going-away presents to Emanuel was an appointment to the Freddie Mac board of directors, a year-long service for which he was reportedly compensated to the tune of $292,774.