Eight years ago on a brisk morning in Millennium Park, Rahm Emanuel held up his right hand, swore to honorably discharge the duties as mayor of America’s third-largest city and then declared the dawn of “a new day for Chicago.”
“Stronger schools, safer streets, an affordable and effective government, good-paying jobs. These are the fundamental challenges facing our city,” Emanuel said that day. “If we can get these things right, nothing can stop Chicago.”
Now in his final days as mayor, Emanuel will leave office Monday with a mixed record on those four key issues he vowed to fix.
Academic performance at Chicago schools improved and students can attend city community colleges for free, but Emanuel angered teachers during a heated strike and drew the ire of South and West side communities when he closed 50 schools.
Chicago homicides dropped to levels not seen since the 1960s for two years and the city hired 1,000 new cops, but the mayor also presided over two of the bloodiest years in decades and the Laquan McDonald police shooting served as a stain on his tenure, leading to a federal civil rights investigation and a consent decree forcing police reforms.
That’s a wrap. Here are Rahm Emanuel’s top controversies and accomplishments as Chicago’s mayor. “
The city is on better financial footing and some poor budget practices have ended, but to make it happen Emanuel passed a series of record tax and fee increases that fell disproportionately on poor and working-class Chicagoans while a deficit and a $1 billion pension crisis still loom.
Development in the Loop boomed, new corporate headquarters flocked to downtown and Chicago’s growing tech economy emerged, but amid the prosperity the mayor faced near-constant criticism that he left behind the city’s most struggling neighborhoods.
Through it all, Emanuel governed with a consistent chutzpah, deploying an in-your-face political persona he honed over his previous decades working at the White House and in Congress to pressure aldermen into backing his agenda, cajole business and union leaders into cutting deals and solicit tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions that served as the bedrock of his political power.
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Amid the accomplishments and controversies of Emanuel’s City Hall, the mayor tediously kept score. Allies got rewarded and enemies were remembered. No ranking or statistic was too small to cite if it conveyed victory, and there was no shortage of public relations spin to explain away defeats.
Whether it was school closings, a teachers strike or raising taxes, Emanuel rarely wavered from his most contentious decisions, a show-no-weakness style that grated on some Chicagoans. In an interview during his final week in office, Emanuel said he stuck to his convictions for the long-term betterment of Chicago, contending he is leaving behind a city far better prepared for the future than the one he inherited.
“The goal of these decisions wasn’t whether they created controversy, it was about whether we made decisions that got through to a better place,” Emanuel said, sitting in his now-spartan fifth-floor office with hooks on the wall where paintings once hung. “My goal wasn’t about being liked.”
So perhaps it’s not surprising that as the mayor prepared a bid for a third term he found 12 candidates ready to run against him. Last September, Emanuel abandoned that campaign to spend more time with his family while simultaneously insisting he could have won had he chose to run. His soon-to-be-successor, Lori Lightfoot, put it another way: “He got out because he couldn’t win.”
The mayor departs City Hall on Monday as a polarizing figure, viewed by some as making meaningful reforms to set the city on a better path and by others as the “Mayor 1 Percent” who put the interests of the city’s wealthy elites ahead of everyday people.
Chicago Teachers Union President Jesse Sharkey said Emanuel’s public demeanor led to much of his unpopularity, especially when compared with his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, the city’s longest-serving mayor.
“Chicago is a working-class city. I think a lot of Daley’s policies weren’t that different from Rahm’s policies, but Daley was a relatable person. Rahm was like a kind of mean guy who had too much coffee, the kind of person who made you anxious and uncomfortable just being around him,” Sharkey said. “I think the combination of him really pushing a vision that was all about a global city that was friendly to business, but didn’t have much to offer working-class people — combined with a couple of big disastrous headline decisions like closing schools and Laquan McDonald — this was cemented in people’s minds, the idea that this was not a mayor for us.”
Michael Sacks, Emanuel’s closest confidant and top campaign contributor, said his friend walks away from the job misunderstood by many. The mayor’s my-way-or-the-highway, foulmouthed, tough guy reputation belies Emanuel’s thoughtfulness and deep desire to create policies to better the city, Sacks stressed.
“So much of the narrative around Rahm is frankly ridiculous. Granted, he enables — if not fosters — some of it, but it just misses the point,” Sacks, the CEO of investment firm GCM Grosvenor, said in a rare interview. “In the end, it really was the part of Rahm that most people can’t see through the caricature, a desire to succeed, to improve and make things better for people — the part of the job he loved — that enabled him to do what he did.”
‘Our children and their schools must come first’
In his 2011 inaugural address, Emanuel identified improving Chicago’s schools as the top challenge facing the city. He took over a district with substantial financial troubles, a graduation rate hovering around 50 percent and students lagging far behind their peers around the country.
The new mayor quickly embraced more international baccalaureate and other types of specialized high schools to provide students and parents with more choices. Emanuel also oversaw a substantial expansion in the number of charter schools, which he argued provided better academic results and critics insisted only weakened traditional neighborhood schools.
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A little more than a year into office, Emanuel’s education reform efforts ran head-on into the teachers union and a seven-day strike — the first in nearly 25 years, in which thousands of red-clad educators flooded the city’s streets in protest. The mayor’s decision to unilaterally yank a 4 percent pay raise promised to teachers helped fan the flames, a move the mayor now calls a “mistake” because it created an environment where everything he tried to do on education “was a battle, and it need not have been.”
In the end, the teachers got pay raises and Emanuel lengthened the school day, but the political fallout lingered. Sharkey, the current union president, called Emanuel “an effective archvillain.”
“Nothing united our members like Rahm,” he said. “I’ll miss that.”
Emanuel’s 2013 decision to pursue the most extensive public school closings in U.S. history — 49 elementary schools and one high school, mostly on the South and West sides — proved to be even more controversial.
The mayor argued that the district’s financial problems along with low enrollment and poor academic performance at many of the schools necessitated the closings. Teachers, education activists and parents contended the closings destabilized neighborhoods and disrupted student learning.
Far South Side Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, said Emanuel’s decision to close the schools was the right one, but the mayor “botched the rollout.” Instead of shuttering 50 schools at once, Beale said Emanuel should have closed around 12 per year for four years and spent more time listening to affected communities.
“The style in which he did it was the biggest mistake,” Beale said. Emanuel, though, said stretching out the closings would have “kept the city in constant turmoil.”
“It’s hard to tell a family, ‘Your children are going to a school not only with shrinking enrollment … but it is not producing academically,'” the mayor said. “We made a decision to get it over with.”
Exacerbating the CPS turmoil was frequent turnover at the top of the district, with Emanuel hiring four CEOs in eight years. The mayor’s second, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, pleaded guilty in October 2015 to steering a $23 million no-bid contract in exchange for kickbacks and is still serving a federal prison sentence. Her successor, Forrest Claypool, resigned after the district’s inspector general accused him of repeatedly lying in a “full-blown cover-up” over a clouted legal contract.
Emanuel also had to deal with the fallout of a Tribune investigation that found CPS failed to address sexual abuse suffered by students. A review commissioned after the investigation identified repeated “systemic deficiencies” in district training, incident reporting and data collection. Dozens of school workers are now barred from classrooms, face criminal charges or have been fired.
Despite the controversies, Emanuel managed to implement one of his prized accomplishments, the Chicago Star scholarship that provides free tuition at the city’s community colleges for CPS students who graduate with a B average or better. Emanuel also has started the first year of a four-year rollout for universal prekindergarten across the city, although it’s unclear whether Lightfoot will continue the program or scale it back.
And in his final year, with the help of legislative leaders in Springfield, Emanuel managed to wrangle a change in the state education funding formula that now delivers an additional $450 million per year to CPS.
As Emanuel departs, the district’s five-year graduation rate has increased from around 50 percent to 78 percent, according to the district’s figures. Test scores have improved and more kids are moving on to college, but race-based gaps persist and CPS enrollment has shrunk by more than 10 percent on Emanuel’s watch, from 404,151 students in 2011 to 361,314 today.
Sharkey doesn’t dispute there has been academic improvement. He credits the teachers while noting that higher graduation rates and increased college admissions also reflect post-recession national trends and more students realizing they need to attend some college to get a job.
“I do think the Chicago public schools have produced a bunch of success, and those of us who work in the schools are proud of that work,” Sharkey said. “I think a lot of that happened in spite of the mayor, not because of the mayor.”
Emanuel paints a more transformative picture.
“How long had we talked about the need for school consolidation? Decades. It just sat there. How long did we talk about a full school day and a full school year? Decades. How long did we talk about equitable funding of education in the state of Illinois? Close to a century,” Emanuel said. “I make no bones about the fact that we pushed and made fundamental changes, and now people can build on those.”
‘Together, we can make all our streets in every neighborhood safer’
When Emanuel took the oath of office eight years ago, Chicago had struggled with violent crime and gangs for decades. At his inaugural, he vowed safer streets and had some success early in his tenure.
In 2013 and 2014, Chicago saw homicides drop to a level not seen since the 1960s, with roughly 400 killings in each of those two years. Emanuel frequently touted the progress alongside then-police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.
By 2015, however, Emanuel had a full-blown policing crisis on his hands.
For the better part of a year, Emanuel had fought against releasing a police dashcam video of the October 2014 Laquan McDonald shooting, arguing that the matter was under investigation. In November 2015, a Cook County judge ordered the mayor to release the graphic footage, which showed then-Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times in the middle of a Southwest Side street as the black teen walked away holding a small folding knife.
On the same day Emanuel made the video public, then-State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez charged Van Dyke with murder, and it soon was revealed that several officers’ accounts of the shooting in police reports varied dramatically from the video. Those reports and the delay in the murder charge, combined with the fact that Emanuel’s administration and aldermen paid a $5 million settlement to the McDonald family before a lawsuit was even filed, led to accusations of a City Hall cover-up, calls for Emanuel’s resignation and weeks of street protests. Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder last year and is serving a nearly seven-year prison sentence.
“The fact that as a mayor that you’re not bold enough to understand that a 17-year-old being killed and shot 16 times isn’t big enough for you to say something or to call for reform, that shows your character,” said Ja’Mal Green, a South Side community advocate who became a visible activist after the McDonald shooting. “That’s basically saying, ‘That’s just another kid who was shot. Go ahead and pay the family and just keep moving.’ It was business as usual.”
Torrey Barrett, an Emanuel supporter and founder of the Washington Park community nonprofit KLEO, said the mayor’s silence proved to be damaging.
“That was a moment where he could have immediately fired that officer, stood up and told the public what was out there and this was 100 percent not tolerated in the city of Chicago,” Barrett said. “If he would have done that, I think the people who demonstrated against him would have stood with him.”
Emanuel repeatedly has insisted that neither he nor his administration covered up the video or the shooting. He said the city simply followed the protocol that was in place to not release evidence connected to an ongoing investigation.
“A lot of folks felt there was a cover-up, and whether that was factually correct or not, that’s how it looked and that had a major impact about the public perception of the mayor,” said downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd. “It begged the question, ‘If they’re not being open and transparent on an issue like this, what else is there?'”
Sacks, the mayor’s top confidant, said Emanuel’s handling of the McDonald case ranks as a top misstep of his time as mayor, along with canceling the raises for teachers. For his part, Emanuel says his administration’s handling of the McDonald controversy was symptomatic of how Chicago wrongfully had become numb to police shootings.
“I’m the mayor, so I bear responsibility, but we collectively as a city, this became a norm,” Emanuel said. “It became an accepted norm of just another weekend, when it never should have been that.”
As the McDonald shooting roiled the city, Emanuel badly misread the fallout. He initially stood by his top cop McCarthy, resisted calls for a federal Justice Department investigation and painted the shooting as an isolated incident involving one bad cop. The mayor soon reversed course on all three, firing McCarthy, welcoming the probe and giving an apologetic speech acknowledging a code of silence in the Police Department.
Amid the aftermath, crime spiked in 2016 to levels not seen since the mid-1990s as Emanuel voiced concerns about low police morale and the need to restore trust between officers and the community. With annual homicide numbers topping 750 in 2016 and 670 in 2017, Chicago garnered national attention for the violence.
The number of killings dropped below 600 in 2018 and is down again so far this year following an Emanuel initiative to hire 1,000 new officers. As the mayor leaves office, he says he has pursued reforms with police as partners, not enemies, as the city embraces its consent decree. It’s a narrative the mayor offered in a recent New York Times op-ed when comparing Chicago’s police reform efforts with those in Baltimore, an essay that was lampooned by the Obama Justice Department official who was in charge of the federal civil rights investigation here.
“It is so off,” Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, tweeted about Emanuel’s op-ed, in which the mayor glossed over his attempts to avoid a consent decree. “It is embarrassing.”
After Emanuel signed an agreement with the Obama administration to pursue a consent decree, the mayor sought to strike a weaker out-of-court deal with the Trump administration instead. Then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan called it “ludicrous” to negotiate a deal with a Trump administration that “fundamentally does not agree with the need for constitutional policing.” She sued Emanuel’s office to force a consent decree, to which the mayor ultimately agreed.
In the wake of the McDonald controversy, Emanuel initiated several reforms that included requiring officers to wear body cameras and carry Tasers while bolstering training and providing better mental health treatment for cops.
“The real question when you stumble is do you learn from it and make changes,” Emanuel said of the McDonald shooting. “I’m not the first mayor to have a police shooting on their watch, but I do think the changes we have made are going to stand the test of time.”
‘We must put the city of Chicago’s financial house in order’
When Emanuel took office in May 2011, Chicago’s financial books were a mess and filled with red ink.
Over the past eight years, Emanuel has made good on larger, state-mandated payments to the city’s four public employee pension funds, placing them on firmer footing. But Lightfoot will have to come up with an extra $376 million in pension payments next year and an additional $1 billion annually by 2023.
At the beginning of Emanuel’s tenure, City Hall also faced a $635 million deficit (more than one-tenth of the city budget), a number the mayor managed to shrink to $98 million by last year. He did not, however, get rid of the deficit entirely, and early projections have it growing to as much as $380 million for next year as some revenues are expected to come in short of earlier projections.
Part of the added deficit also is attributed to Emanuel finally finishing a phaseout of Daley’s so-called “scoop and toss,” a practice that puts off debt onto future generations at a higher cost. The mayor also ended his predecessor’s practice of selling off city assets, such as the parking meters, to fund day-to-day operations.
“He came in with significant challenges in terms of city revenue, future revenue problems. He tried to rectify it,” said Ald. Patrick O’Connor, 40th, the mayor’s City Council floor leader. “On the structural deficit, he made big strides. On the pensions, he made a significant dent. It will be up to others to follow through.”
Emanuel made progress on both fronts by passing a series of record property tax increases, a new water and sewer tax, new garbage fee and increases in 911 telephone fees, cable taxes, city vehicle sticker fees and parking garage taxes. Plus, he doubled water and sewer fees to pay for new lines. The tab for the average Chicago family: $1,813 a year, the Tribune has reported.
Many of the taxes were regressive, disproportionately harming poor and working-class Chicagoans. Critics argue that Emanuel should have been more willing to tax the wealthy.
“The list of policy decisions he made that kept the people in the neighborhoods at the margins is endless, including the effect of enormous taxes, fees and fines on working people in the city,” said Amisha Patel, executive director of Grassroots Collaborative, a community organization that advocates for working families. “He put the pressure and the weight on the workers in the neighborhood to fix the problems that were caused more by the crowd of CEOs and corporate elite folks he spent time with.”
Corporate executives and wealthy business interests from Chicago and beyond made up the core of Emanuel’s campaign donors, enabling him to build a campaign cash machine unlike any mayor before him. All told, donors contributed more than $57 million to Emanuel’s campaign funds from the time he first ran for office in 2010 to when he abandoned his bid for a third term last September.
When a pair of open records lawsuits, including one from the Tribune, forced Emanuel to disclose thousands of personal emails in which he conducted city business, the messages showed his email account had become an avenue of influence for the city’s rich and powerful. Some of those who emailed Emanuel were cited with city lobbying violations.
“All of the revelations in his emails, where people who have clout and have wealth got to curry favor and get things they asked for, that shows the people who had access to this mayor were the wealthiest folks in business, social circles and the arts,” Patel said. “That is who bankrolled his campaigns, that is who had his ear, that is who was at the center of his financial policies and that is who he delivered for.”
Emanuel dismisses the contention that he looked out only for the city’s wealthiest interests, noting efforts that included raising the city’s minimum wage to $13 an hour by this summer.
“How many people in the Chicago Star scholarship are in the 1 percent? How many kids that go to free kindergarten and free full-day pre-K are in the 1 percent? How many who get the minimum wage are in the 1 percent?” an irked Emanuel asked. “I get the politics. It’s easy. We can attack. But I make no bones about making sure we have a growing, thriving business economy.”
‘The best way to keep people from leaving is to attract the jobs that give them a reason to stay’
As Emanuel gave his speech eight years ago, Chicago was just starting its recovery from the Great Recession and continued to grapple with a steady population loss.
“No great city can thrive by shrinking,” he said back then. Over the past four years alone, the Chicago area has lost more than 50,000 residents and the city’s black neighborhoods have continued to lose population as they struggle with violent crime and a lack of jobs.
Still, the mayor has enjoyed his successes. Unemployment is down and job creation is up. While that follows national trends, Emanuel has demonstrated particular success in boosting economic growth in the Loop, including championing the emergence of the city’s tech sector.
“The fastest-growing economy in Chicago is technology,” Emanuel said, noting the success of tech incubator 1871 and the emergence of scores of successful startups. “We weren’t anywhere on the world scene, national scene in the digital economy. We are now a presence.”
An Emanuel hallmark became securing an interest-free federal loan to expand the Chicago Riverwalk for several blocks west of State Street. The city now is in the midst of revamping the older eastern stretch between State and Lake Michigan, and developers have flocked to build riverside projects. The mayor counts that work as his contribution to legendary Chicago planner Daniel Burnham’s vision to make the river an important public space.
“I had no idea the Riverwalk would spark these investments. You didn’t really see the river 10 years ago. You drove over it, took a train over it, but didn’t see it,” Emanuel said. “The Riverwalk has brought the river back into focus and took us, in a significant way, closer to Burnham’s vision from 100 years ago of being a two-waterfront city.”
Emanuel also leveraged the expiration of decadeslong airline leases to pay for an $8.5 billion expansion of O’Hare International Airport, which will break ground in 2023 and feature more gates, concessions, lounges and the nation’s first global terminal where passengers can connect from a domestic flight to an international one in the same terminal.
The mayor had great success in scoring state and federal transportation funding, including a $425 million track reconstruction of the Red Line’s south branch, a $280 million new 95th Street Red Line station, a $203 million Wilson Avenue Red Line station in Uptown, a $75 million new Washington/Wabash Loop station, a $492 million overhaul of the Blue Line O’Hare branch and a future modernization of the Red Line to improve travel times on the North Side.
Emanuel also aggressively pursued corporate headquarters, personally courting CEOs. And while the city struck out on landing Amazon’s prized HQ2, Emanuel counts 59 new corporate headquarters moving to Chicago on his watch, including McDonald’s, Motorola and ConAgra.
“The mayor did an excellent job as a salesman for Chicago,” said Reilly, the downtown alderman. “His success in winning corporate headquarters relocations is indisputable.”
But for all the successes in the Loop, the mayor faced near-constant criticism that he left behind the city’s most struggling neighborhoods and failed to preserve affordable housing as some blue-collar neighborhoods gentrified.
“The North Side, downtown, Lincoln Park, they’ll thank the mayor for what he’s done, because they have a booming community with thriving businesses that has gotten even better,” said Green, the South Side community advocate. “But if you look at the rest of the city, it’s actually probably worsened under Mayor Emanuel, because he neglected to do anything in the communities that have been ignored, and he let the problems continue to boil over.”
While Emanuel jump-started some shopping and businesses in neglected neighborhoods like Pullman and Englewood, the criticism that he hadn’t done enough for the city’s struggling areas became a theme in the mayor’s 2015 surprise runoff against Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Emanuel responded in his second term by creating the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund, which earmarks fees developers pay to build high-rises downtown for projects on the South and West sides. So far, $47 million in grants have been awarded and another $125 million is expected from already-approved developments.
“He only had eight years. Some of the areas have been neglected for decades. Could he have done more? Of course, you can always do more,” said Barrett, the nonprofit director. “But if you look at the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund alone, that is an unprecedented investment taking money from downtown. People are always going to complain, but I think if he had more time, we’d have seen more significant investments.”
Patel, the director of Grassroots Collaborative, doubts it.
“The continual push-out of families from the city shows that we were failing these communities,” she said. “The mayor can point to a handful of things he did in a few places, but in the end overall, he failed those neighborhoods.”
‘For the next generation of Chicagoans, let us roll up our sleeves and take on the hard work of securing Chicago’s future’
Shifting in a leather chair in his City Hall office, Emanuel says he’s satisfied with what he’s accomplished on the mission he started eight years ago.
“If you look at the scale of the problems we had faced based on a set of decisions, or lack thereof, that Chicago collectively, because of the weight of the problems, had lost its swagger. And now, I think it has its swagger back,” Emanuel said. “There are things that are not totally where I want them, but I feel like with the time spent, we have had an impact and made a difference.”
At the beginning of each mayoral term, Emanuel made a list of top goals on a long notecard with an “Office of the Mayor, City of Chicago” blue letterhead at the top. He retrieved his second-term list from the top right drawer of his City Hall desk and ticked through the tasks. Many he tackled (O’Hare, “L” improvements and CPS funding) and some he did not (eliminating the budget deficit and getting express rail to O’Hare).
What will be on Emanuel’s post-mayoral checklist? He isn’t saying, but a part-time gig as television talking head is considered likely. He declined to say whether he would pursue a return to investment banking, a brief career he held after his time in the Clinton White House.
“I’ll be able to make all the college payments I’ll need for the kids, and I’ll have a good life,” he said. “I’ve been honored to have this job.”
Emanuel’s performance in that job will be a matter of debate for years to come and will be shaped in part by how his decisions and projects play out over the next several years. Distinguishing between Emanuel’s policies and his personality poses a challenge for some, Reilly said.
“Mayor Emanuel certainly had a vision for the city and an impatience to deliver, and sometimes his approach wasn’t diplomatic,” the downtown alderman said. “Some people bristled at his style, but at the end of the day, the goals he was seeking to accomplish were the right ones, even if some people took issue with how he went about it.”
Barrett, the Washington Park nonprofit director, said he never had a problem with Emanuel’s direct approach but knows many who did.
“I think a lot of people want the warm and fuzzy feeling, and he’s just not that guy. You have access to him, but it’s transactional,” Barrett said. “Some people were turned off by that, but I’m not because I’m trying to get what I can for my community. I didn’t need to have a social, cocktail relationship with him.”
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While the school closings, teacher strike, policing issues and more made his friend the mayor a divisive leader, Sacks said Emanuel should be appreciated for governing without political popularity in mind.
“He was the rare politician who was willing to take hits for progress,” Sacks said. “We’re not used to politicians who do the right thing regardless of the political cost to themselves. We say we want that all the time, and we had someone who did that to great effect and great result. I suspect when we look back, many will miss that.”
Green won’t miss Emanuel.
“I think Rahm is somebody who didn’t listen, and really was about his agenda and what he wanted and about what his friends wanted,” the South Side activist said. “He was loyal to the rich and the campaign donors and the aldermen who helped him move his agenda, but he was not a listener to city residents and everyday people.”
Patel agreed.
“Rahm Emanuel’s lasting legacy is the failure of young black people in the city, the murder of Laquan McDonald and his trickle-down approach from focusing almost single-handedly on downtown to the neglect of neighborhoods,” the grassroots organizer said. “That’s what really defines his eight years in office.”
Beale, the Far South Side alderman, said people don’t appreciate how much the job weighed on Emanuel.
“When you’re under the pressure of being the mayor of Chicago and you’re dealing with the budgets, the murders, the foreclosures and all the things that go with it, you’ve got the weight of the world on you,” Beale said. “Once he decided he was no longer running, you could tell it all lifted off him and he was a different person. I wish he was that guy the whole time.”
Even in his final days in office, Emanuel doesn’t give much credence to the critics.
In one of his recent podcast episodes in which he hosted U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Emanuel noted how he keeps President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” quote under the glass on his desk. The quotation is neatly printed on a piece of paper, and the mayor said he intends to leave it there for Lightfoot along with the customary note in the top desk drawer.
Roosevelt’s quote lauds “the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” who “spends himself in a worthy cause” and whose “place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” It’s a sentiment that has resonated with Emanuel, who as mayor found himself in the chief executive’s chair for the first time in a long political career that spanned two White Houses and three terms in Congress.
“I think that quote is something worth reading and reminding yourself why you’re here. Even when they’re throwing arrows at you, even when those who have never tried from the cheap seats are throwing rocks, you at least know the value of having exerted yourself and trying to make something happen,” Emanuel said. “And that is why public life is worth it.”
Chicago Tribune’s Juan Perez Jr. and John Byrne contributed.
Twitter @BillRuthhart
