Rahm's Kind of Town

Rahm Emanuel left the white house to run a broke, violence-plagued city, and he's having the time of his life

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Photograph by Mark Seliger for TIME

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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.

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