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The mayor has a press release for every company he has lured to town--more than two dozen--and will never miss a photo op at a renovated branch library. He brags about the tech incubator he supported in the Merchandise Mart, where an estimated 225 start-ups created some 800 jobs during the first year of operation.
After reading in the Wall Street Journal about IBM's plans to create a six-year high school curriculum heavy in STEM subjects--science, technology, engineering and math--Emanuel decided to adopt the idea, but at five schools, not one. "Typical competitive middle child," he shrugs. Microsoft, Cisco and other high-tech giants have joined IBM at the mayor's request. In a similar vein, he has steamrolled past the complaints of traditionally minded liberal-arts professors to focus Chicago's community colleges on real-world job training for hotel and hospital workers as well as truck drivers.
Changes like these, added to the longer school day he rammed through and the promise of full-day kindergarten for all students, will finally give kids long trapped in poverty a realistic path to success, Emanuel insists. He has risked political backlash, he says, because he "will not shortchange our students."
Business leaders are buying it. "I personally think Mayor Emanuel is just what the doctor ordered," said Jeff Smisek, chairman and CEO of United Airlines, which has its headquarters in Chicago's landmark Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower). "He is willing to take on some tough issues and vested interests. He's not daunted by them."
Daunted he should be. Chicago's problems are stubborn. The city's unemployment rate was 10.3% in April, a notch below Los Angeles, but far above Houston and New York. The city's population is inching back up after a decade of losses, but at the slowest rate of any major city in the country. And his pet projects at the state capital in Springfield--pension reform and a Chicago casino--are languishing.
The Chicago Tribune recently scolded Chicagoans for turning on Emanuel simply for following through on campaign promises. "By essentially doing what he had said he would do--by pushing for better schools and imposing tough economies--Emanuel stoked grievances old and new," the paper noted.
The Chicago way of resolving grievances is not to forget them but to fight them out. That's what Rahm Emanuel will be busy doing for the next couple of years. And to borrow a classic Chicago line from the 1987 film The Untouchables, "you wait until the fight is over. One guy is left standing. And that's how you know who won."