Rahm Emanuel, Press TamerWhat to expect as Clinton's enforcer becomes Obama's chief of staff. By Jack Shafer

Working for Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, the hyperaggressive Emanuel—who knows his way around lewd speech as well as any David Mamet character—raised money by the tanker-load, helping to make the Clinton victory happen. Inside the White House, he prodded, schemed, bullied, and screeched in service of his boss as a political director and senior aide.

After leaving the White House in 1998, he went to work for financier and vanity-press mogul Bruce Wasserstein and outdid the Baldwin character, who bragged about making almost $1 million a year, by taking down at least $16.2 million dollars in just two and a half years, according to a 2003 Chicago Tribune story. (A later Fortune article puts his haul at $18 million.)

"It's a striking sum even in the richly paid world of corporate deal-making, let alone for someone without an MBA or any prior business experience other than running a small political consultancy," the Tribune reports. After closing that deal, Emanuel returned to politics, winning a House seat and going on to raise even larger mountains of campaign cash for the Democratic Party....

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Howard Kurtz's 1998 book, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine, portrays Emanuel as a tireless, conniving salesman of Clinton hoo-ha. Once, when Emanuel fed an assortment of Clinton mini-initiatives to several newspapers, USA Today put "Clinton Lays Plans for Millennium Activities" on Page One. "Next, reporters joked, they would be leaking presidential Post-it notes," Kurtz writes.