Legal Commentary

: BeldarBlog

Rahm Emanuel, "former investment (cough*scoundrel*cough) banker"

By Beldar (index)

Hugh Hewitt points to a Chicago Tribune article which points out that Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel "made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint [as a board member] at Freddie Mac that required little effort," and probably many tens of thousands more from stock sales. But it was another bit of that article which happened to catch my attention (emphasis mine):

Though just 49, Emanuel is a veteran Democratic strategist and fundraiser who served three terms in the U.S. House after helping elect Mayor Richard Daley and former President Bill Clinton. The Freddie Mac money was a small piece of the $16 million he made in a three-year interlude as an investment banker a decade ago.

Not an hour earlier, while catching up with the March 3 issue of The New Yorker, I'd read this Ryan Lizza puff piece on Emanuel, which reported (emphasis mine):

When Emanuel left the Clinton Administration, in 1998, he moved back to Chicago, took a job as an investment banker, and in less than three years earned nearly twenty million dollars.

So which numbers about Emanuel's income are correct?

The New York Times wrote last November that "[i]n his two-and-a-half-year stint as a[n investment] banker [at Wasserstein Perella (now Dresdner Kleinwort)], Mr. Emanuel ... made $16.2 million, according to Congressional disclosures." But Nina Easton, writing in Fortune back in September 2006, said that Emanuel's stint at Wasserstein Perella "netted him more than $18 million in just over two years."

Whether it was $16.2 million, "more than" $18 million, or "nearly" $20 million, and whether it was in three years or less, and whether the reports of his earnings do or don't include his salary, fees, stock options, and other compensation as a member of the board of Freddie Mac, I have a more fundamental question about Emanuel:

How does a former Arby's meat-cutter, who went to Sarah Lawrence College for its ballet dancing program and whose master's degree is in communications and fine arts ? someone without a degree in business, much less an MBA or a track record in the business world, someone whose entire adult life had been spent as a famously sharp-knived political operative ? suddenly transform himself into an "investment banker" who's capable of earning several millions of dollars each year? Since when did raising funds for a congressional election or trading pork-barrel votes to push a legislative proposal become any sort of qualification for structuring a convertible debenture indenture or running a hostile tender offer?

If you believe Emanuel earned that money based solely, or even mostly, on work accomplished through honest business talent, then you must also believe in unicorns ? and we all understand why you're an Obama supporter.

One of Lizza's quotations of Emanuel is particularly chilling, then, precisely because I think it is accurate:

[Emanuel] explained his decision [to finally give in to Obama's requests that Emanuel become Obama's White House chief of staff] in pragmatic terms: ?If you got into public life to affect policy, and to affect the direction of the country, where could you do that on the most immediate basis? Everybody knows: chief of staff.?

Just keep that in mind as you hear the torrents of anti-business demagoguery continue to pour from the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership over the next weeks and months. And then ponder the invisible strings that must have been (and may still be) attached to an entry-level job which netted its recipient somewhere between $16 and $20 million in somewhere between two and three years.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on March 27, 2009 (boomark / email).