Rahm Gets the GQ Treatment

Obama. Aaron Schock. And now, Rahm Emanuel. When you’ve made it into the pages of GQ, you’ve made it in politics. Emanuel is the subject of a profile in the June issue, by Oak Park journalist David Mendell, the former Tribune reporter who wrote Obama: From Promise to Power, the first biography of the man who would become our 44th president.

The article starts with a profane excerpt from @MayorEmanuel, then goes on to quote Rep. Jan Schakowsky as saying Emanuel will have to clean up his act now that he’s mayor. He can no longer behave like the enfant terrible of Congress or the White House.

“He has never been the number one,” says U.S. representative Jan Schakowsky. “He’s always served the principal.”

Emanuel also gives us a sense of how important he considers himself now. More important than anyone in Illinois!

“There are five major chief-executive jobs in the United States,” he says. “The president, the governor of California, the governor of New York, the mayor of New York, and the mayor of Chicago. I hope I am not insulting anybody else, and if I am insulting a governor somewhere, I apologize.”

(Did you hear that, Pat Quinn, Rahm apologizes. Now spend the next three-and-a-half years doing exactly what he says.) 

GQ extrapolates that Rahm's next step will be up.  

It's official, Rahm Emanuel runs Chicago. Now, if he can just remake his dead-fish image and save the city from budgetary disaster, then maybe, just maybe, he'll return to Washington for an even bigger leading role. 

And about that dead-fish image, Emanuel says that's all in the past. 

"Come on," he says. "That was literally half a life ago. And I mean, do I really swear that way? You guys overembellish the colors to make them brighter and stronger."

Sure, we (bleeping) believe you, Rahm.

For the latest updates and to keep track of the conversation, follow @NBCChicago and #RahmChicago on Twitter. 

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!

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