Suppose you’re a mother living in Wilmette, with a beautiful daughter. You just spent $250,000 putting her through Wellesley and University of Chicago Law School. Now, you want her to make a good match. The pediatrician next door has three sons. Which one do you want your daughter to marry?
The oldest boy is a bioethicist with degrees from Amherst, Oxford and Harvard. He taught at Harvard Law School before joining the National Institutes of Health, and serving as a health policy adviser to President Obama.
The middle boy is mayor of Chicago. Your parents worked 16 hours a day to get the family out of Lawndale. The kids would never get to New Trier.
The youngest boy is a shady Hollywood agent.
Obviously, the correct answer is “the oldest boy.” Since you don’t have a son, you want to be able to say, “My son-in-law the doctor.”
You can understand now the hell Ezekiel Emanuel has been living in all these years. The oldest of the pathologically competitive Emanuel brothers is at once the most successful but least wealthy and least famous of his siblings. While Rahm and Ari have inspired TV characters, Zeke has been the colorless older brother, following Dad into medicine.
Now, though, Zeke is getting his ticket punched. The New York Times is expanding its roster of on online Opinionator columnists. Zeke is on the list. According to a press release, “Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania…will comment on health care policy.”
Zeke has two daughters. One is a Rhodes Scholar. The other is at Yale. He is also divorced.
This post is now being e-mailed all over the North Shore.
Buy this book! Ward Room blogger Edward McClelland's book, Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President , is available Amazon. Young Mr. Obama includes reporting on President Obama's earliest days in the Windy City, covering how a presumptuous young man transformed himself into presidential material. Buy it now!
