Corporate Chicago Lining Up Behind Rahm
During Rahm Emanuel's "listening tour," the ex-White House Chief of Staff heard from people at Chicago Public School institutions and neighborhood stops across the city. But another important constituency is starting to offer up support to the soon-to-announce mayoral candidate: executives leading the region's largest firms.
Crain's reported yesterday that the top brass at much of Chicago's corporate mainstays -- including Boeing, Abbott Laboratories, Northern Trust, United Continental, and more -- are closing rank around Rahm and throwing fundraisers for him. They see him as the candidate who offers the most continuity with outgoing Mayor Richard Daley and someone who will "stand up" to unionized city employees, as one Rahm supporter put it to Crain's. From the report:
Simply put, members of the business community are lining up behind Mr. Emanuel because they think he most shares Mr. Daley's strongest traits. They see the one-time investment banker as an economic centrist who will play hardball with municipal unions, someone who knows the labyrinth of Washington and can exploit his worldwide reputation to further Chicago's global ambitions.
Sources told the newspaper that Emanuel wants an eye-popping $6 million to $8 million in his campaign account for his run, which the $1.2 million he's got left over in his congressional fund will help him reach. The upper band of that amount would surpass the $7 million outgoing Mayor Richard Daley raised over three years for his last election in 2007.
While other mayoral candidates are finding lesser amounts of support from executives, Rahm has clearly emerged as the choice for corporate Chicago. It's a group that Emanuel, as we noted earlier this fall, grew to know intimately after he followed "a well-trodden gilded path out of politics and into the lucrative world of business" in 1999, returning to Chicago to work as an investment banker here. It's also a constituency that's disproportionately benefited from the Daley administration's policies.