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The Enforcer— The Clinton Years

Benjamin Emanuel thought his son was crazy.

It was November 1991, and Rahm was planning to leave Chicago for Arkansas, where he would work on the presidential campaign of William Jefferson Clinton, a Southern governor whom the elder Emanuel had never even heard of. “He thought maybe somebody needed to check the medication cabinet,” Rahm later said in an interview.1

Since working on Daley’s campaign, Emanuel had continued to do political advising and strategy out of Chicago.2 He co-founded a company called the Research Group, which specialized in opposition research—essentially digging up information on political opponents or unearthing comments they’d made in the past that would be controversial or damaging in the current context.3 These nuggets would be aired in the media and political ads or featured in direct-mail campaigns targeted to voters who would be particularly incensed by the news.4

Emanuel was recruited to join the Clinton campaign by David Wilhelm, with whom he’d worked on David Robinson’s congressional campaign.5 Emanuel had seen Clinton speak at events related to Chicago public housing in early 1991, and he had been highly impressed with the Arkansas governor’s “New Democratic centrism.”6 The affection was mutual. Two decades later in Chicago, Clinton said he was taken with Emanuel right from the start and could tell he was “an executive by nature.”7

“First of all, I liked him because our campaign was broke and he was a genius at raising money—even as a young person without any money himself,” Clinton was quoted saying in the Chicago Sun-Times. “I liked him because people said I was too young to run for president and I was too ambitious and Rahm made me look laid-back and passive.”8

Emanuel reportedly descended on Little Rock like a tornado, berating local advisers and fundraisers for their small-town ways. He once jumped on a table to lecture the staff for forty-five minutes about their practice of not working on Sundays and other failings.9 When Emanuel arrived, the Clinton campaign had raised $600,000. Emanuel set up a whirlwind of twenty-six fundraising events in twenty days, and by the end of the primary season the take, not counting federal matching funds, was $17 million.10 The final tally was a record $70 million.11Esquire magazine described Emanuel during that campaign as a “heat-seeking missile of a principal fundraiser, a brash wunderkind who collected millions for the candidate.”12

As a senior adviser to Clinton at the age of thirty-two, Emanuel persuaded Clinton to prioritize fundraising, even to the extent of delaying campaigning in New Hampshire. The strategy proved sound, as Clinton’s primary rival, Paul Tsongas, ultimately backed out of the race citing lack of funds.13 Strong financial reserves helped Clinton ride out scandals over his relationship with Gennifer Flowers and his dodging the draft for the Vietnam War, because he was able to flood the airwaves with ads to mitigate the accusations.

A now-famous Emanuel moment came during the final stretch of Clinton’s 1992 race, at a Little Rock restaurant and campaign hangout called Doe’s. Emanuel performed a diatribe against prominent Democrats he thought had betrayed Clinton during the campaign. He called out each name one by one, in between stabbing a steak knife into the table and yelling, “Dead!”14

Once in the White House, Clinton appointed Emanuel to be his political director. Colleagues referred to him simply as “The Enforcer.”15 But Emanuel was forced out of the job after just six months because of conflicts with various staff and, perhaps most important, with First Lady Hillary Clinton.16 As author Naftali Bendavid described it, on the day Emanuel’s then-fiancée, Amy Rule, moved to Washington to join him, Clinton’s chief of staff, Mack McLarty, told Emanuel he was fired. Emanuel simply refused to leave unless Clinton told him personally, and “the president, unable to fire the man who arguably had saved his candidacy, relented. Instead, Emanuel was knocked down to ‘director of special projects.’”17

NAFTA

After his demotion, Emanuel had a chance to get back into Clinton’s good graces with a formidable challenge: joining special counsel Bill Daley, brother of Richard M. Daley, in pushing Congress to approve the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement. Daley was dubbed the “NAFTA czar,” and Emanuel would be his right-hand man in what Businessweek described as a “bloody fight” that “pitted friend against friend and allied the Administration with Republicans and Big Business.”18

NAFTA had been signed by President George H. W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney in 1992, but each country’s legislative branch still had to ratify the agreement. Many Democrats opposed the trade agreement, as did an international movement of trade unionists, human rights advocates, and progressive economists. NAFTA was also unpopular among the general public, who worried about the impact on US jobs. So legislators in both parties feared consequences if they voted for it.

NAFTA backers said it would stimulate trade and bolster the Mexican and US economies by reducing and eliminating tariffs and breaking down other trade barriers. Among other things, the agreement was supposed to create massive demand in Mexico for US exports, which proponents promised would result in thousands of new manufacturing jobs in the United States.

Opponents were convinced that NAFTA would just mean profit for corporations while sending countless US jobs south of the border and undercutting labor and environmental protections in all three countries. Billionaire businessman Ross Perot, who had gotten a whopping 19 percent of the popular vote as an independent candidate in the 1992 presidential election, warned of a “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Mexico.19

But Clinton was a strong supporter of free trade, and he was determined to implement the trade agreement, dubbed the “Lazarus Project” because it was so politically difficult.

“Nobody wanted to touch NAFTA,” Emanuel told Chicago political writer Carol Felsenthal.20 So he and Bill Daley threw all their political and rhetorical weight at the challenge. Side agreements were negotiated that were supposed to address concerns about labor and environmental issues, though these agreements proceeded in chaotic fits and starts and—critics argued—lacked strong enforcement measures. Republicans extracted from Clinton a promise that in the next election cycle, he would “personally repudiate” any NAFTA-related attacks on legislators of either party who had voted for the agreement.21

AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland attacked Clinton for that promise, and warned that Democrats who voted for NAFTA would risk losing the support of state labor federations in future elections.22 In turn, Clinton denounced organized labor for using “roughshod, muscle-bound tactics” to fight NAFTA—a notable attack by a Democratic president on a traditional Democratic power base.23

After thirteen hours of debate, the House of Representatives passed NAFTA on November 18, 1993, with a surprisingly wide margin of 234 to 200.24 The Senate then passed it sixty-one to thirty-eight, and Clinton signed the bill on December 8. Tellingly, a majority of Democrats voted against the bill in both houses. (In the House, 156 Democrats voted against the bill versus 102 for it; and in the Senate, twenty-eight Democrats voted against it versus twenty-seven for it.)25

Years later, in 1997, Emanuel told a Chicago Tribune reporter that passing NAFTA was one of his proudest political moments, and his prized possessions included a photo taken with Clinton after the legislation passed.26

The White House seriously alienated organized labor by supporting the initiative. The AFL-CIO announced it would cut off funding Democratic campaign committees for at least three months in retaliation.27 The respected progressive magazine The Nation blamed Clinton’s “demoral[izing] his base with NAFTA” in part for the Republican Revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 midterm elections.28

The worst fears of NAFTA opponents were essentially realized over the next decade, as documented in numerous studies and as experienced in the lives of thousands of regular people in the United States and Mexico. Rather than increasing manufacturing jobs as promised, NAFTA led to the disappearance of good union jobs in the United States, as companies moved production to Mexico, where workers earned about one-tenth of US wages.29Often companies relocated just across the border in a booming maquiladora (factory) zone. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported that about half a million jobs were created in Mexican maquiladoras in the five years following NAFTA. But Mexico’s net job creation was “disappointing,” as the agricultural sector lost many jobs in the wake of NAFTA. And a decade later, about 30 percent of those maquila jobs had moved to countries with even cheaper labor, like China.30

Nineteen months after NAFTA was instituted, a report by the watchdog group Public Citizen found that 90 percent of the promises made by its proponents had not come true. Companies that had pledged to create jobs if NAFTA passed—including General Electric, Mattel, Procter & Gamble, Scott Paper, and Zenith—had actually cut US jobs. The Department of Labor reported that thirty-eight thousand workers had lost their jobs because of NAFTA in just its first year and a half, and almost seventy thousand US workers had filed claims with the Labor Department to receive unemployment aid specifically related to NAFTA.31

The agreement would not redeem itself over time, either. By 2010 the trade deficit with Mexico had soared to $97 billion. US exports to Mexico had risen as expected, but imports from Mexico, which displaced US jobs, had risen even more. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, the ten hardest-hit states included Emanuel’s native Illinois along with other already-struggling Rust Belt states like Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.32

The Handshake

Emanuel played a role in choreographing one of the iconic images of the twentieth century. That would be the famous handshake between Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin at the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993.33 The accords called for Israeli troop withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank and affirmed a Palestinian right to self-determination. CNN remarked upon the “uneasy, yet unforgettable handshake.”34 Emanuel, Clinton, and staffer John Podesta staged and meticulously rehearsed the handshake ahead of time. Emanuel studied footage of the 1978 Camp David Accords handshake where President Jimmy Carter oversaw an agreement between Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.35 Emanuel put a new stamp on the moment by having Clinton spread his arms around the two Middle East leaders, bringing them together.36

Arafat and Rabin’s clasp was a major international event signifying what many hoped would be a shift in Middle Eastern affairs. Meanwhile, for Emanuel, it was a relatively minor but interesting example of his ability to shift positions and allegiances as the political situation dictated, always with a keen eye to managing the image.

Photo by Kari Lydersen.

Mexicans protest the killings of women in the border city Jua´rez, widely seen as an outcome of the sweeping economic changes wrought by NAFTA—one of Emanuel’s Clinton-era projects.

Crime and Immigration Bills

Along with his work on NAFTA, Emanuel would frequently invoke with pride his role in the Clinton administration’s law enforcement and crime-fighting efforts for decades to come. He helped Clinton pass bills cracking down on sex offenders, assault weapon ownership, street crime, and “terrorism”; and he staged photo opportunities with the president surrounded by police officers in uniform. Emanuel played a key role in Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was signed into law in August 1994.37 The act put one hundred thousand more officers on the street and allocated $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs. The bill also banned the manufacture of nineteen types of assault weapons, increased the reach of the death penalty, and created harsher penalties for immigration-related and gang-related offenses.38

Author Noam Scheiber described Emanuel as a driving force behind the crime bill: “Middle America thought Clinton was soft. And so Emanuel, from his perch as second-string White House counselor without portfolio, excluded from the action on health care, concocted an anti-crime campaign almost out of thin air.”39

Clinton, Emanuel, and Democratic supporters often stressed aspects of the bill that were supported by many Americans across the political spectrum: gun control, domestic violence prevention, and officers on the ground. The assault weapons ban naturally infuriated the National Rifle Association and many powerful Republicans but was lauded by gun control and public safety advocates. The bill also increased penalties on repeat sex offenders, mandated financial restitution for rape and other sex crimes, increased funding for women’s shelters and domestic violence prevention programs, and mandated that restraining orders be honored across state lines.40

These were logical, humane, and important reforms that aided the vulnerable and abused. But other aspects of the legislation were widely seen as draconian tough-on-crime measures that would have disproportionate impacts on people of color and low-income people. The Justice Policy Institute cited the bill in calling Clinton “the incarceration president” because spending on incarceration and the number of inmates behind bars—disproportionately African Americans—skyrocketed on his watch. The institute noted that the incarceration rate at the end of the Clinton administration was 476 per 100,000 citizens, compared to 332 per 100,000 at the end of President George H. W. Bush’s term and 247 per 100,000 at the end of the Reagan administration.41

The 1994 act, the country’s largest crime bill ever, expanded the scope of the death penalty to make more than sixty offenses punishable by execution.42 In the Chicago Sun-Times, pundit Carl T. Rowan wrote, “Can Clinton be blind to the obvious truth that the death penalty is imposed mostly upon the poor, the black, brown and other minorities of America? Any law that adds to the unfairness of our judicial system will provoke more crime. And doesn’t the president know that there is no credible evidence that electrocuting, gassing, shooting or hanging felons is a deterrent to criminal behavior?”43

The law aimed to crack down on gangs, including allowing up to ten years of additional prison time if a crime involved gang issues.44 And it increased reliance on “boot camps” for juvenile offenders.45 While arguably preferable to other types of incarceration, such boot camps would become the subject of many horror stories, including reports of abuse and youth suffering serious injuries and death after being forced to do hard physical exercise in extreme conditions.46

The crime bill also eliminated Pell grant funding for inmates pursuing higher education in federal and state prisons. Since the 1965 Higher Education Act, Pell grants had provided a way for many incarcerated men and women—often from poor communities with little education—to make productive use of their time behind bars. Building more prisons while eliminating an important resource for those inside them was cruel and smashed the already-weak argument that US prisons were rehabilitative as much as punitive, prison reformers said.47

The crime bill also instituted a federal “three strikes” provision of the type later passed by various states. As a result, a third conviction for serious violent felonies or drug trafficking offenses would mean life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Analysts said the provision was more posturing than substance, since relatively few violent crimes are federal offenses.48 But perhaps the posturing worked. In early 1994, even before the final version of the crime bill was signed, a Washington Post/ABC poll found that 39 percent of Americans thought Democrats were doing a better job on crime than Republicans, compared to 32 percent with the inverse view.49

“The impact on the political climate I think was significant,” Marc Mauer, executive director of the nonprofit justice reform group the Sentencing Project, told longtime Chicago journalist Curtis Black. “Here you have a Democratic administration saying we can be as tough as anybody on crime. You have a Democratic president supporting ‘three strikes you’re out.’”50

In 1995 Clinton outraged criminal justice reformers and civil rights leaders when he upheld the sentencing disparity between offenses involving crack and powder cocaine, wherein crimes involving one gram of crack received prison terms roughly equal to crimes involving one hundred grams of powder cocaine. Since African Americans were much more likely to be arrested on charges related to crack cocaine, the disparity had a blatantly racist effect. In spring 1995 the US Sentencing Commission decided the penalties should be equalized. This would have happened with no action from Clinton or Congress, but Congress soon passed a law (which Clinton signed in October 1995) perpetuating the sentencing disparity—arguing that crack was decimating inner cities and that a heavy hand was needed.51 Furious members of the Congressional Black Caucus sent Clinton a letter saying the continued policy made “a mockery of justice.”52

In 1996 Clinton signed another sweeping crime bill, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), in which Emanuel likely also played a significant role.53 Introduced after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the AEDPA significantly curbed habeas corpus rights by severely limiting appeals. Defense attorneys said this created a greater chance that an innocent person would be executed. A prime example was the high-profile case of Troy Davis, who was executed in September 2011 for the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer working security at a Burger King in Savannah, Georgia. An international movement supporting Davis’s claims of innocence, including Amnesty International, former president Jimmy Carter, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, argued that no physical evidence linked Davis to the crime, and noted that seven of the nine witnesses whose testimony had led to his conviction later recanted. Nonetheless, Davis was killed by lethal injection after the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole refused to grant clemency and a last-minute appeal to the US Supreme Court was denied. Legal experts said that the AEDPA curbed Davis’s legal recourse. The Nation described the bill as “greas[ing] the wheels of this death machinery by curtailing prisoners’ rights to appeal their sentences.”54

The AEDPA dovetailed with the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), also signed by Clinton and likely orchestrated at least in part by Emanuel. Immigrants’ rights advocates decried the bill as inhumane and ineffective, saying it did little to solve larger problems with the country’s immigration system. The combined effects of the two acts nearly doubled the number of immigrants in detention in just two years. The American Civil Liberties Union noted that the laws essentially created indefinite detention for immigrants who could not be deported to their home countries. And the laws’ focus on deporting permanent residents with criminal convictions meant that many generally law-abiding people who had been in the country for years were placed in deportation proceedings because of relatively minor convictions like drug possession and statutory rape.55

Welfare Reform

Emanuel was also at Clinton’s side as senior policy adviser for the sweeping welfare reform legislation that revamped an admittedly dysfunctional system but also eviscerated the whole concept of a guaranteed safety net.

In his 2006 book The Plan, cowritten with Clinton aide Bruce Reed, Emanuel described welfare reform as “an excruciating dilemma” for his boss. During his campaign Clinton had vowed to “end welfare as we know it.”56 But how to do it became a bitter battle both between Republicans and Democrats and among Democrats in the Clinton White House.

Republicans—who had taken over the House with their 1994 “Republican Revolution”—proposed bills that gutted numerous protections for the most vulnerable, including young women, children, and immigrants. Clinton vetoed two Republican bills that would have drastically cut food stamps and nutritional programs, benefits for documented immigrants, aid for disabled children, and other supports, while also imposing lifetime limits on benefits.57

In 1994 Clinton had proposed a bill that would have required welfare recipients to go to work but provided significant funding for job training and job creation and maintained safeguards if they couldn’t find work. That bill was expensive; the cost, among other political considerations, killed the measure.58

As the 1996 presidential election approached, Clinton was under increasing pressure to keep his promise and pass some kind of welfare reform. In typical fashion Emanuel was central to making this happen, brokering compromises and pressuring not only Republicans but, perhaps more important, Democrats who objected to deep cuts.

By summer 1996 Clinton was considering a bill from Republicans that didn’t include as many cuts as their previous proposals but still transformed the very nature of welfare by creating five-year lifetime limits on benefits.

Internal discussions over the bill pitted White House liberals against New Democrat conservatives. Cabinet opponents of the bill included health and human services secretary Donna Shalala, treasury secretary Robert Rubin, labor secretary Robert Reich, and housing secretary Henry Cisneros, as described in a book by Clinton’s assistant secretary of health and human services, Peter B. Edelman.59

Another ardent critic of the proposed reform was New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist by training who predicted the bill would lead to desperately poor children “sleeping on grates.”60 Fortune magazine noted that Emanuel “had a very public run-in” with Moynihan, who suspected Emanuel was behind an anonymous quote that “we’ll roll all over [Moynihan] if we have to.”61

Emanuel’s side ultimately won out. The reform bill Clinton signed in August 1996 fundamentally changed welfare into a temporary assistance program administered primarily through states, focused on moving people off public aid.62

For sixty years poor people had been guaranteed cash aid from the federal government. Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act changed that, incorporating several of the major tenets of the Republican bills Clinton had vetoed.63 It created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which gave block grants to states for services meant to move people to work. The bill placed a five-year lifetime limit on benefits while allowing states to set even shorter limits. TANF recipients also had to meet work requirements, and many ended up in low-paying jobs that left them in poverty or, down the line, again unemployed.64

Liberals were outraged at the reform law. Edelman and Mary Jo Bane, Clinton’s assistant secretary for children and families, quit the administration in protest.65 Edelman would spend the next few years studying the impact of welfare reform on the poor. He wrote that the bill “broke faith with America’s children” and created a new class of “disappeared” people abandoned by the government and turning to desperate measures to survive.66

On the tenth anniversary of welfare reform’s passage, Emanuel remarked in Congress that “I am proud to have played an active role in the passage of this legislation during my time in the White House.” He recited numbers of people moving off public aid in Illinois and praised the legislation for “connecting a generation of children with a culture of work.”67

During Clinton’s presidency millions of families did indeed rise out of poverty and find work. “While Bill Clinton ended welfare as we had known it, America responded in heroic ways,” Emanuel and Reed wrote in The Plan. “Businesses stepped forward to hire and train people. States overhauled their bureaucracies to help recipients find jobs. Most of all, people who had been trapped on welfare flocked to work in record numbers.”68

But that was in the midst of a strong economy. In a 2012 report the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that when poverty increased following the financial crash of 2008 the safety net that previously would have caught needy people and helped them get back on their feet was torn or nonexistent.69

“Because relatively few families receive TANF and benefits are very low, TANF plays a much more limited role in helping families escape poverty or deep poverty (i.e., income below half the poverty line) today,” compared to the previous welfare program, the report explained. It noted that 2012 poverty levels exceeded 1996 levels, and “over the last 16 years, the national TANF caseload has declined by 60 percent, even as poverty and deep poverty have worsened. . . . These opposing trends—TANF caseloads going down while poverty is going up—mean that a much smaller share of poor families receive cash assistance from TANF than they did prior to welfare reform.”

The center added that “many families left the welfare rolls without gaining employment, leading to a substantial increase in the number of families disconnected from both welfare and work.”

In other words, Clinton’s welfare reform may have looked good in the short term, but it contributed to the desperate poverty and instability that many families would later face nationwide—including in Chicago when Emanuel would take the helm.

Political Significance

Welfare reform, NAFTA, and aspects of the 1994 and 1996 crime and immigration bills would for years to come be blamed for negative impacts on regular Americans—especially African Americans, who disproportionately were caught up in the criminal justice system, and poor people, who struggled to survive with reduced public aid options. Clinton’s presidency would also be remembered as one of the most prosperous eras of the twentieth century, with low unemployment, a budget surplus, rising incomes and homeownership rates, national debt reduction, improvements in health indicators, and an overall expanding economy.70 Emanuel surely deserves credit for his role in some of these achievements. But it is hard to know exactly how much his efforts or values were reflected in the policies and priorities of the Clinton White House—as it would be during his time as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff.

Emanuel’s advice and actions in the Clinton White House were likely based in large part on his own ambition and drive to succeed at the tasks assigned him, and also his arguably keen judgment about what stances were most expedient for his boss. Emanuel was well known for abandoning past positions and principles if they became politically inconvenient, so it is difficult to say how much his work on NAFTA, welfare reform, and draconian aspects of the crime bill reflected deep-seated ideologies. However, all three measures do fit with the known and consistent aspects of Emanuel’s approach: his dedication to business interests and the free market; an emphasis on personal responsibility and choice; and his willingness to forge ahead with policies even in the face of intense opposition from labor unions, civil rights groups, and other interests that traditionally made up an important base of the Democratic Party.