An Enforcer Named Emanuel

As chief of staff, Emanuel will have to act as a traffic cop, referee and gatekeeper, deciding which decisions go to the President and which don't and guarding against end runs to the Oval Office. That's not exactly a formula for making or keeping friends. "You say no most of the time and let the President say yes," says Erskine Bowles, who held the chief of staff job and worked alongside Emanuel in the Clinton White House. "Rahm will always have the backbone to say no." But just as crucial is making sure that once he does, the bickering stops.

Adding to the management challenges ahead is the fact that Obama and Emanuel have brought into the White House an unusually high-octane team. It includes such muscular operatives as Summers and National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a retired Marine general. In addition, the Administration will have new power centers exerting their own gravitational pull. Obama has established a White House office for health reform, to be overseen by incoming Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle, and one for energy and climate-change policy, headed by former Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner. It's still a bit unclear whether all these West Wing czars will be making policy or managing it, or both, but the Cabinet will want its say as well. "They have a lot of big brains and big personalities with what appears to be overlapping portfolios," says Josh Bolten, who was George W. Bush's chief of staff for nearly three years. "I believe that will be one of Rahm's biggest challenges."

Emanuel's sea trials have not been entirely smooth. One less than magnanimous gesture that seemed to have Emanuel's fingerprints all over it: former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean--who waged an epic battle with Emanuel over political strategy during the 2006 election cycle--was not invited to the public announcement in early January of his successor, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine. "I thought it was appalling," a Dean ally says of the snub.

Emanuel was also blamed for the Obama team's failure to notify incoming Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein before leaking the choice of former Congressman Leon Panetta for Central Intelligence Agency director--a gesture that might have averted Feinstein's huffy declaration that she would have preferred an "intelligence professional" in the job.

Emanuel is a relatively recent addition to Obama's formal brain trust. Torn between his loyalty to the Clintons and the fact that his home-state Senator was running, he stayed on the sidelines during the long and contentious Democratic primary race between Obama and Hillary Clinton, though many observers suspected his sympathies lay with the Chicagoan. Once that battle was over, Emanuel quickly established himself as one of Obama's closest advisers. "He was very helpful," Axelrod recalls. "They have a really candid but respectful relationship. [Obama] knows he can count on Rahm for unvarnished advice." By midsummer, Axelrod says, the President-to-be was privately telling advisers that Emanuel would make an excellent White House chief of staff "if we win this thing."

Looking back on his first stint in the White House, Emanuel says, "If I knew in the first year of the first term what we knew by the first year of the second term, history would have been different." Yet no one knows better than Emanuel that he will have to retool himself in some ways. And he is the first to acknowledge that every one of the qualifications he brings to the job can be a liability if not managed correctly. "I know the place, and I have some knowledge," he says of the White House. "The disadvantage is, I know it around one President. Every President brings a different style of management, a different philosophy, and you've got to get yourself rewired to that."

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