Rahm Beats Himself.

By always going for the short-term gain and undercutting any ties of loyalty, he has essentially gamed himself...

Here's Rick Perlstein in The New Yorker:

“He gets things done,” Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, enthused late in 1996, when Emanuel usurped George Stephanopoulos as senior adviser for policy and strategy.

Among his special projects was helping to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and the 1994 crime bill. He also tried to push Clinton to the right on immigration, advising the President, in a memo in November, 1996, to work to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” These all, in the fullness of time, turned out to be mistakes.

NAFTA, in alienating the Party’s working-class base, contributed to the Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives in 1994. As for the crime bill, which included a “three strikes” provision that mandated life terms for criminals convicted of violent crimes even if their other two offenses were nonviolent, Clinton himself has apologized for it, saying that the policy “made the problem worse.” 

Rahm's fast rise to success owed to his monied ways -- he grew up in wealthy Wilmette, attending New Trier; it would be interesting to see who is more a Chicago city boy:  he or Barack -- and dates back to the Clinton years:

Start with the 1992 Presidential campaign. Emanuel persuaded Clinton to prioritize raising money. This, to put it lightly, caught up with him. 

And while Emanuel was never tied to the fund-raising chicanery involving forgotten names like James Riady, Yah Lin Trie, and John Huang, it was that zeal for cash that provided Clinton’s Presidency its original taint of scandal. 

Obsessive fund-raising is also the foundation of Emanuel’s political operation in Chicago. When two reporters for the Chicago Reader filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the mayor’s private schedule in 2011 (unlike previous mayors, his public schedule was pretty much blank), they discovered that he almost never met with community leaders. He did, however, spend enormous blocks of time with the rich businessmen, including Republicans, who had showered him with cash.

There are moral complaints to be made about this, to be sure. But the behavior has also failed Emanuel on political grounds: when he found himself in trouble, he was left without a broad base of political support, unlike the previous mayor, Richard M. Daley, who in similar straits fell back on his close relationships in all fifty city wards. 

When one of those rich Republicans donors—Bruce Rauner, with whom Rahm has vacationed—became Illinois’s governor, last year, at least the scolds could comfort themselves that their mayor would enjoy privileged access to lobby for the city’s needs. But that hasn’t worked, either: instead, Rauner has given Rahm the cold shoulder.

...

(After his time in Clinton-era Washington, Emanuel made $18 million dollars in two and a half years as an investment banker. His buddy Rauner helped get him his job.)

When the Obama administration shuffled jobs, and a Daley brother was in as Commerce Secretary and the other one announced he would not run for another term as Chicago mayor, Emanuel scooted "home" and, after a few residency issues were worked out, assumed the mantle.

The results are in, though:  Rahm's not effective in the job, but a pretender.  A gruff, type-A, nasty don't-cross-me pretender, according to the reputation he's cultivated over the years:

Emanuel had became the mayor of Chicago, elected with fifty-five per cent of the vote in the spring of 2011. Since then, there have been so many scandals in Emanuel’s administration that have failed to gain traction that it’s hard to single them out.

One signature idea was lengthening Chicago’s school day by thirty per cent—controversial because he proposed compensating teachers only two per cent more for the extra work. The Chicago public-schools inspector general was soon investigating allegations that a local pastor linked to Emanuel was arranging buses to pack public hearings with supporters of the idea, paying at least two “protesters” twenty-five to fifty dollars each.

The city also rolled out a new “smart card” system for customers to pay transit fares, a product of the San Diego-based defense contractor Cubic. The system, known as Ventra, worked about as well as Lucille Ball on a factory production line: some people would get on the bus for free, while others would be charged several times.

The cards were supposed to double as debit cards for Chicago’s “unbanked” poor. But buried deep within the thousand-page contract with Cubic were nice little Easter eggs, like the seven-dollar fee for customers who didn’t use the card for eighteen months, and another five dollars tacked on for each dormant month after that.

The manager of Cubic’s Chicago division while the project was under negotiation had previously been the Chicago Transit Authority’s vice-president for technology; then, when it came time for implementation, he spun back through the revolving door to his former city job. ...

Well, that’s Chicago; after critics blamed Emanuel for the debacle, it was pointed out that the project was, after all, a holdover from the previous administration. Didn’t the blame really belong to Daley’s C.T.A. chief, Forrest Claypool, who had nothing to do with Rahm Emanuel?

A reasonable argument -- though it did not prevent Emanuel from making Claypool his chief of staff. Then he appointed him as the Chicago public schools’ C.E.O., following the resignation of his previous pick, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, ahead of an indictment for a kickback scheme, to which she later pleaded guilty.

Byrd-Bennett ... was then tasked with another of Emanuel’s sketchy initiatives: closing 54 schools, many of which were in the city’s black neighborhoods. Why were these pillars of community stability shuttered?

Suspicions of venal motives abounded, but nobody could really be sure. A fact-check by Chicago’s public-radio station, WBEZ, discovered that many of the facts that the city gave about the decision were not accurate.

But don’t confuse that inquiry with a joint investigation by WBEZ and the schools magazine Catalyst Chicago which discovered that Emanuel’s claim about high-school-graduation rates -- that they would increase by 15 percentage points -- was also a mirage.

(Dropouts are reassigned to for-profit online education programs that demand very little work, and then are awarded diplomas from the school they last attended or one near where they live.)

Or with the multi-part series by Chicago magazine that blew the mayor’s claims about Chicago’s supposedly declining homicide rates out of the water, too. (One method: categorizing homicide victims as “noncriminal deaths.”

The little man, who only knew success in the political realm, is now learning that with no real-world checks on his work, he has advanced himself in an artificial way:  it doesn't work when the manipulating of the numbers stops, and reality is looking you squat in the eyes.

Working-class people understand the checks built into their work.  You can't fudge for long.  Either it works as a result of your tinkering, or it does not, and it is back to the drawing board.

Rahm and so many formerly younger politicians won, because they essentially forged a new path, undercutting others playing by established rules. But look around.  If it's not working, and there are no real results to be had, how do you keep playing the people to advance yourself?
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* Rahm's greatest defeat, however, might be in the time he served chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in charge of recruiting House candidates.  He was tasked with building the Democratic party's national base, stocking the farm-teams, so to speak, with fresh talent.

Back in 2006, Rahm was lauded for bringing in new Democrats who were really, republicans lite.  It was thought to be good for the party numbers:

But that achievement disintegrates the more closely it’s examined. At the D-Trip, as the D.C.C.C. known, Emanuel aggressively recruited right-leaning candidates, frequently military veterans, including former Republicans. But many of his hand-picked choices fared poorly, losing in general elections. 

Some even lost in their primaries, to candidates backed by liberals -- many of whom won congressional seats resoundingly, even after the D.C.C.C. abandoned them.

Victory, like defeat, can have a hundred fathers, and we can’t know what was ultimately responsible for the Democrats’ success that November (when Obama was elected to office). Anger at Republicans for the Iraq War (which Emanuel supported) certainly drove many voters’ decisions.

What is indisputable is that the 2006 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the party over time.

The secret of my success, by Rahm Emanuel:

" I flit, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly..."