Chicago Tribune

Mayor Emanuel?

White House chief of staff says he’d like the post if Daley doesn’t run for re-election

Andrew L. Wang and Katherine Skiba

Tribune reporters

9:17 PM CDT, April 19, 2010

He has been equivocal on the subject in the past, but on Monday night White House chief of staff and native Chicagoan Rahm Emanuel made no bones about it: He wants to be the mayor of Chicago.

"I hope Mayor [Richard] Daley seeks re-election. I will work and support him if he seeks re-election," Emanuel told Charlie Rose on the host's PBS talk show, in an interview broadcast Monday night. "But if Mayor Daley doesn't, one day I would like to run for mayor of the city of Chicago. That's always been an aspiration of mine, even when I was in the House of Representatives."

In January, after The Washington Post reported that Emanuel, a one-time Daley aide and longtime supporter of the mayor, was mulling a mayoral run, Emanuel did not deny the report. He instead said in statement that he was "100 percent focused on the job at hand: serving President Obama as his chief of staff."

At the time, Daley himself dismissed the report as gossip.

But on Monday night, Emanuel said he missed the regular contact he had with constituents as a representative of Illinois 5^th District. "You learned a lot," he told Rose, according to a transcript of the interview.

Emanuel has long been rumored to covet the job of speaker of the House, but he said in the interview that aspiration was "over."

Emanuel was a chief fundraiser for Daley in the mayor's first election campaign in 1989 and later served as an aide to Daley. He was a White House staffer during the Clinton administration and, after a brief career in investment banking, was elected to Congress in 2002

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