Most politicians hate to say no; Emanuel can’t say it enough. He is a one-man pecking order. “All right, what’s going, whaddya got?” he impatiently asks a reporter who stops by. Perched behind a clean desk in his campaign office, he talks while thumbing his BlackBerry as though it contained the secrets of the universe. Aides appear in the doorway with bulletins from the front; he glances up now and again at news on a flat-panel TV; someone hands him a personal cell phone (it’s a call from his wife); he tries to put on a Norah Jones CD–loud–until the reporter objects. “For us to win we have to focus,” he says. “It’s all about picking, making good judgments about priorities.” The Red to Blue Program is a Good Housekeeping Seal, he says. “It means a lot of things: campaign well run, campaign well financed, good candidate. It means a good opportunity to pick up a seat.” Donors know whom they should give to–and Emanuel easily can check later to see if they do. “Candidates want to be on [the list] and donors want the clarity,” he says.
If the man, the scene and the rope-line mentality remind you of something you have seen on television–say, “Entourage” on HBO or “The West Wing” on NBC–it is no accident. In a “life imitates art imitates life” moment, the Democrats’ hopes for winning control of the House rest on whether real people can be as effective as they have been portrayed as being on TV. Consider: the hard-charging character of Josh Lyman on “The West Wing” was modeled on Emanuel. How did that happen? Because the part was created and written by Aaron Sorkin (who created the whole show) and played by Bradley Whitford. Both men are clients of Emanuel’s younger brother, Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel. The maniacally in-your-face character of agent Ari Gold on “Entourage” is modeled on Ari Emanuel, who represents Steve Tompkins and Mark Wahlberg, executive producers of the show. In real life, Ari Emanuel is fast becoming a political networking force in Los Angeles, issuing his clients and partners invitations to fund-raising events, including one for Rahm himself and for his House campaign committee. “Ari’s a definite player and very strategic,” says Robin Bronk, who heads the nonpartisan Creative Coalition, an arts lobbying group.
It will take all the hard-charging that Democrats can muster if they are going to assemble an entourage that can take back the House of Representatives. A switch of just 15 seats would give them their first foothold in Washington since George W. Bush became president. But at a time when political divisions are so entrenched and opinions are so fixed–on the war in Iraq, on terrorism, on economic security, on pretty much everything–the outcome could well depend (again) on money and get-out-the-vote machinery.
As has been the case since Bill Clinton left town, the Republicans have the organizational and financial advantage. How-ever beleaguered and angry the president is–and however at odds he is with GOP senators over issues such as the treatment of terrorism suspects–the campaign apparatus Karl Rove built is intact and internally disciplined. It’s a “cohesive unit,” says Ken Mehlman, Republican Party chairman. “Every decision, we’ve all talked about it,” he says.
Among Democrats, by contrast, national, Senate and House campaign units maintain their independence–and often behave like rival homies in an “Entourage” bar scene. Emanuel has clashed repeatedly with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, whose “50-state” approach to organizing strikes Emanuel as disastrously unfocused. Only in the Democratic Party would campaign officials need to sign a written peace treaty, which Dean and Emanuel did last week. The national committee agreed to funnel $12 million of its cash into congressional get-out-the-vote efforts; Emanuel basically agreed (though not in writing) to shut up. He did so in an interview. “They want me to take my beta blockers,” he says with a somewhat defiant shrug. “So I’m going to take my beta blockers, OK?” The disputes, he says, “have not hampered us .”
Meaning his own clubhouse. A native of Chicago, Emanuel learned his politics from the legendary Daley family, with whom he remains close. The family lesson: take care of your own. While Republicans as a whole have $30 million more in the bank than Democrats do now, Emanuel’s own Democratic Congressional Campaign Commit-tee is now roughly even with its GOP counterpart–a position it hasn’t enjoyed for a decade. And there is evidence that the Red to Blue Program is working: Democrat-ic candidates are even or ahead in fund-raising in most of the races that neutral observers regard as competitive.
As a member of the Ways and Means Committee, Emanuel teamed with Senate campaign chair Chuck Schumer to tap uncharted donor fields in the financial industry. “We’re working outside of traditional banks,” he says proudly, “into the private-equity world, the hedge-fund world, the distressed-debt world.” These “worlds” know they are talking to a guy who not only runs the campaign committee, but who could be in the majority of the key financial committee–and maybe even majority leader.
The entertainment industry remains a major source of cash for the Democrats, who get two out of every three dollars given to federal candidates. It has been a tough sell. Donors felt tapped out and depressed after what they regarded as Sen. John Kerry’s badly run 2004 campaign. The mood changed after the Democrats’ congressional prospects improved, and some fund-raisers developed a novel, typically self-doubting pitch for selling into a down market. It goes this way, explains a screenwriter who declined to speak on the record for fear of angering big machers such as Ari Emanuel: “Hillary Clinton is going to be nominated in 2008, John McCain is going to be president, so the House is our only chance to get in the game.”
Whatever the pitch, it’s working. The industry has given about $10 million to Democrats so far. And while Ari Emanuel is hardly the key moneyman, he is emerging as a leader of a newer generation of Hollywood fund-raisers, who rely less on their own wallets than their networks’ and who are willing to become public political figures, not just backroom types. Famously abrasive (Jerry Seinfeld reportedly once had a bumper sticker printed that read: I hate Ari Emanuel, too), he can also be charmingly insistent. He phoned one client who left his fold on friendly terms to ask, “Why are you ruining your career?” Ari called him the following week, and the next–for a year.
Persistence pays. Ari cosponsored a $220,000 fund-raiser for his brother’s personal PAC in June; in the days before and after the event, the PAC received $30,000 in checks from employees of the Endeavor Agency, the firm Ari founded. Other contributors included Ari’s celebrity clients, among them Sorkin and Michael Douglas. (Rahm’s PAC, in turn, has donated some of that cash to members of the Red to Blue Program.) Endeavor employees have given more than $50,000 to the House campaign committee; clients such as Sorkin have given generously, too. “He can pick up the phone and get anyone–anyone–on the line,” says a friend who deals with Ari on a daily basis but who is still afraid to talk about him on the record.
In Washington, meanwhile, brother Rahm is turning his attention to turnout operations. Focused like a laser beam, not so much in a hurry as in a controlled frenzy, he is almost literally driven crazy by professional ineptitude and sloth. In one legendary incident from the 1988 cycle (he was a top staffer then of the committee he now runs), he sent a dead fish to a pollster whose work he disliked. He has carefully studied the GOP’s expensive, cutting-edge voter “outreach” program. Using huge databases, it connects like-minded people by using market research to develop profiles of their interests and concerns. The aim is to re-create an over-the-back-fence digital/personal endorsement.
The Democrats’ system isn’t nearly as robust, but perhaps one of their best GOTV masterminds–Harold Ickes–last week announced an independent effort (they hope to raise $25 million) to target key voters. “People are really beginning to understand that the House is really competitive and Democrats have a real chance to win,” says Ickes. Maybe so, but Emanuel isn’t making grand predictions. Privately, he’s telling friends that the current number is a pickup of 15 to 19 seats–too close to call, in other words, for the Red to Blue crew to start breaking out the champagne.
Emanuel is releasing what probably is his final Red to Blue list this week. He and his team considered Yarmuth’s case. The district is a tough one to win, even though Kerry carried it in 2004. Yarmuth owned a local magazine in which he published articles that might cause controversy. (“Rahm had read all of those articles before last December, when I first met him,” Yarmuth says.) Perhaps most important, Yarmuth is independently wealthy. Scorn does not begin to describe Emanuel’s response to the idea, as he put it, “of giving money to a multimillionaire.” Yarmuth was not invited to join the entourage.
