Rahm Grabbed on to NAFTA and the Crime Bill...

Here's the more relevant stuff for today, from the 1997 Elisabeth Bumiller article in the NYTimes magazine excerpted below:

Reporters say Rahm is smart, but complain that he has a bad habit of peddling shopworn goods as scoops.  'I got along with him, but like everybody else who ever covered that place, I also hung up on him,'' says David Lauter, who was in charge of the 1996 election voerage for The Los Angeles Times. 

''You just want to say to hi, 'Enough,' He'll call you up and start spinning something about how this is the greatest thing that any President has done in the history of man.'' 

Rahm did not show promise early on, and was in fact so undistinguished a student in high school that his guidance counselor suggested to Marsha Emanuel that her son might want to consider ''alternatives'' to higher education. He went on to Sara Lawrence College - ''for mother,'' he says - ostensibly because of the dance program, which he ignored once he got there. 

By the early 90's he was back in Chicago, raising money for the mayoral campaigns of Richard M. Daley. Rahm liked what he heard when an ambitious Arkansas, raising money for a Presidential campaign that had $600,000 in the bank and a tiny team of finance people who kept Little Rock bankers' hours. (sic? something missing here...)

''He got up and stood on a table and yelled at them for 45 minutes on his first night there,'' George Stephanopoulos says. In 20 days, Rahm organized 26 fund-raising events that produced $3.3 million, which kept Clinton alive through New Hampshire and the Gennifer Flowers explosion. 

He was rewarded with the job of White House political director, which lasted six months, due in no small part to his screaming matches with Susan Thomases, then First Lady Hillary Clinton's very powerful friend.

Exiled to what he describes as a White House closet with a Playskool phone, Rahm was made director of special projects.

He grabbed on to NAFTA and the crime bill and crawled his way back.

''He didn't take his ball and go home,'' says his friend William Daley, the Secretary of Commerce and the Chicago Mayor's brother.

Ambition over excellence.
Lot of that going around in Washington these days, with predictable results everyone with eyeballs can new see...  It takes a few decades sometimes, to see how the public policies policies paid off... or didn't.