Fake Rahm feed becomes Twitter hit - POLITICO.com Print View

When an Illinois appellate court ruled this week that he was not eligible to run for mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel was not pleased. “What the f—-ing f—- motherf—-ing happened?!” he exploded. He threw a chair through a window and immediately regretted it: “Now we’re f—-ed AND it’s cold.” He began lighting things on fire at random, “just to feel f—-ing something.” He teamed up with adviser David Axelrod and an intern to trash his rented apartment. This was not the reaction of the real Rahm Emanuel, at least as far as anyone knows. It came from @MayorEmanuel, a parody Twitter account that has rapidly gained a following by purporting to be the voice of the former Obama chief of staff. As the drama surrounding the real Emanuel has mounted this week, the fake Emanuel has exploded in popularity. On Monday, the day of the court’s decision, @MayorEmanuel gained more than 4,000 Twitter followers, according to TwitterCounter.com. As of midday Wednesday, the account had nearly 16,000 followers. The official Twitter feed of the real Rahm Emanuel, @RahmEmanuel, had less than 5,000 followers. @MayorEmanuel’s Twitter bio describes him as “Your next motherf—-ing mayor. Get used to it, a—holes.” Nobody knows who is behind it, but whoever it is clearly has a detailed grasp of Chicago politics, a lot of free time and a flair for the surreal. On Monday, after the supposed apartment-trashing, the story continued. @MayorEmanuel took a solitary walk in the cold to clear his head, then sat down under a bridge by the Chicago River. Taking a liking to a duck with a mustache-like marking, he named him Quaxelrod. Man and duck floated down the river together on a sheet of ice, eventually encountering Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. “You’re a hard man to find, you know,” Daley remarked, giving the duck some bread. The mayor offered this piece of advice: “Pull yourself the f—- together. You’re running for mayor. Of Chicago. People are going to f—- with you all the time.” The @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed is hilarious, but it’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny, and it never tells jokes. Its appeal lies in its over-the-top persona — and the contrast that provides with Emanuel as a candidate. The real Emanuel has long been known in Washington (or as the real Emanuel has called it, “F—-nutsville”) as a foul-mouthed taskmaster who does not suffer fools. But as a candidate, he has played the polite supplicant, diligently wooing Chicagoans with positively themed campaign events across the city — and never straying off message. The @MayorEmanuel account’s profanity-laced tirades, one imagines, are what the real Emanuel would be saying if he could. It’s Emanuel’s imaginary internal monologue. While the official Emanuel was tweeting a boring photo of a conference table from “a great discussion with veterans” Wednesday morning, @MayorEmanuel was complaining, “I’ve been shaking hands outside of PetSmart all morning. Last day I let Hambone and Quaxelrod set my f—-ing schedule.” Quaxelrod is the aforementioned duck; Hambone, supposedly, is Axelrod’s puppy, temporarily adopted by our hero. The @MayorEmanuel tweets are notable for their creativity. A whole cast of characters has been invented: In addition to the animals, there’s frequent sidekick Carl the Intern. (The Emanuel campaign confirmed it does not actually have an intern named Carl.) While Twitter often serves as a medium for one-line zingers, @MayorEmanuel is a storyteller, apt to spin whimsical narratives that can go on for days of successive tweets. The tweets are relentlessly topical, responding instantly to events such as testimony in Emanuel’s residency hearings. This week, @MayorEmanuel has riffed on the Bears’ loss in the playoffs (“I am going to get so f—-ing drunk I’ll be hungover until Wednesday”) and Obama’s State of the Union address (“I’m not saying that I flipped away for a bit, but I will tell you there is a motherf—-ing ‘I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant’ marathon on”). What’s perhaps oddest about @MayorEmanuel is that whoever’s behind it has no apparent ax to grind. He (or she) doesn’t seem to love Emanuel, but doesn’t seem to hate the candidate either. The point, if there is one, appears to be the sheer joy of the satire. Speculating about who is behind @MayorEmanuel is a popular parlor game among Chicago political types. Most believe it is a local, possibly a member of Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe. The real Emanuel is aware of the account, which his staff follows and tells him about. “I think it’s hilarious,” Emanuel told Crain’s Chicago Business earlier this month. Crain’s tried to no avail to smoke out the anonymous satirist’s identity, interviewing “numerous possible contenders, all of whom denied being the writer.” To POLITICO’s polite request for an interview, via Twitter, @MayorEmanuel replied that the chances were “somewhere right between f—-ing slim and f—-ing none.” A similar request from a Chicago television reporter got this response: “just call the office: (312) F—-OFF.” It was an answer worthy of Rahmbo himself. © 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC

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