Hints on how Emanuel will build team - Chicago Sun-Times

Hints on how Emanuel will build team

CAROL MARIN cmarin@suntimes.com

' + first_letter + ' Feb 27, 2011 02:12AM

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Rahm Emanuel will need to recruit the best and brightest to govern a city on the financial brink. And he needs to have his team up and running the moment he’s sworn in on May 16.

The mayor-elect is well-practiced at this. Two years ago, as Barack Obama’s chief of staff, he was relentless in his outreach to talented people who could help formulate and forge the president’s agenda.

It’s instructive to see how he did it.

And equally instructive to see how the best and the brightest, often busy making millions in the private sector, don’t always jump at the chance.

Nancy-Ann DeParle is a case in point.

At 54, she has been a star all of her life. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, a Rhodes Scholar, and a graduate of Harvard Law, she has done tours of duty in high-ranking state and federal government positions. That includes a stint in the Clinton White House on behalf of health-care reform before leaving for the business world.

“Rahm is tough and we had our moments in the Clinton administration, and I wasn’t eager to work with him again,” she said Thursday night by phone from North Carolina where she was giving a speech.

But Emanuel, she acknowledged, was “dogged” in his pursuit.

He used an intermediary, Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes, to make the first call.

“She was charming and gracious and said ‘Rahm wants to meet with you,’ ” DeParle recalled. “I basically said . . . ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’ ”

DeParle told her husband, New York Times correspondent Jason DeParle, “I’m not going to a White House and work for Rahm Emanuel.”

But the calls kept coming.

DeParle finally agreed to a meeting.

“I go in,” she said, “and he’s like a different person. Very charming. Respectful. I’m thinking, ‘Wow . . . Rahm seems more mature, a different guy.’ ”

He asked her advice on health-care legislation and how she would do it. And then he told her the president was just down the way and wanted to see her.

DeParle, a veteran of Washington’s high-powered pitches, told Emanuel not to pull that stunt, not to enlist Obama in wooing her.

“And then,” she said, “he switched off the charm. And we’re pretty much eyeball to eyeball. And he’s poking me in the shoulder saying, ‘You have to do this, you have to do this.’”

“No, I don’t,” she told him.

She said Emanuel insisted, “You care about this president, you care about health care, you know we can get this done.”

It was, she recalled, “the old Rahm . . . pretty much in my face. I got out of there, not meeting the president.”

But he had pushed all the right buttons.

“He knew exactly what to say to me, that I had to do this, had to help the president. . . . I [also] knew Rahm wouldn’t let it fail,” she said.

And so DeParle left a lucrative gig in the corporate world to return to the White House to help make the Obama health-care bill a reality.

Today, she remains an assistant to the president and has become deputy chief of staff for policy under another Chicagoan, Bill Daley, who replaces Emanuel as Emanuel replaces Daley’s brother.

The mayor-elect, DeParle contends, has grown more patient and more compassionate over the years.

But the relentlessness? That likely hasn’t changed at all.

“I already know of people,” she said, “who are getting those calls.”

via suntimes.com

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