Candidates running David Axelrod styled campaigns strive to avoid meaningful discussions of the issues. They repeat shopworn, vacuous phrases like a mantra and labor to avoid controversy. Barack Obama coasted through much of the 2008 campaign season promising “Hope and Change,” an empty slogan that Axelrod had employed on behalf of previous election clients in Canada and Massachusetts. When the going was good, campaign staffers nodded approvingly at their candidate who they nicknamed “No drama Obama.”

The few problems encountered on the campaign trail occurred when Obama improvised and “got off message.” Without a teleprompter, Obama occasionally revealed some of his inner thoughts about America that were less than helpful. His description of those Americans who cling to their guns and their religion provided Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign with an unanticipated boost, albeit a temporary one.

For much of the mayoral campaign, Rahm Emanuel has behaved like a model Axelrod candidate. He has been totally scripted. Apart from a handful of joint appearances such as the televised candidate debates, Emanuel has consistently avoided appearing at forums where he had to share the limelight with his opponents. By sticking to a schedule that emphasized greeting voters at bus stops, train platforms and bowling alleys, Emanuel managed to avoid to significant confrontations with his political opponents while his spin doctors went about their business of portraying him as a lifelong Chicagoan and a civic hero.

The biggest obstacle was a challenge to his eligibility to run for mayor based upon his tangled residency.

It took an almost incoherent and incomprehensible opinion from the Supreme Court of Illinois to restore Emanuel to the ballot. It was supremely ironic that Michael Kasper, one of Emanuel’s lead attorneys, had the audacity to argue that the same one year residential requirement for municipal candidates that was in controversy in the challenge to Emanuel’s mayoral candidacy ought to have barred an aldermanic candidate from the ballot in the 27th Ward. As the Irish cynic and scholar, Jonathan Swift, famously observed there are lawyers who can argue “White is Black and Black is White” according to how they are paid by their various clients.

In the closing days of the campaign, Emanuel, who has been straining at the leash, slipped away from his political handlers, and vented his temperamental thoughts and frustrations. At a campaign gathering in the 45th Ward, Emanuel castigated his opponent Gery Chico on account of his rival’s unsolicited endorsement by local Tea Party activists. Emanuel denounced the Tea Party as extremists opposed to the Obama agenda.

The fact that Obama had posed as a centrist while campaigning in 2008 and governed as a leftist once he assumed office in 2009 did not trouble Emanuel. This political charade gave impetus to the creation of Tea Party coalition opposed to higher taxes and excessive government spending.

It also seemed a trifle odd that Emanuel seemed so unfamiliar with a ward that he formerly represented in Washington. Republican candidates have fared well on the Northwest side of the city in national and statewide elections. Such GOP candidates as State Senator Walter Dudcyz, State Representatives Roger and Michael McAuliffe, Alderman Brian Doherty and former US Representative Michael Flanagan, all have carried various election precincts in the 45th Ward bungalow belt where Emanuel blasted the Tea Party movement. Nonetheless, Emanuel opted to make his vitriolic remarks in one of the most conservative areas in Chicago.

More recently, Emanuel has attempted to smear Gery Chico for accepting the endorsement of a union president, Jim Sweeney of the Operating Engineers Union, Local 150, who condemned Emanuel as a “Wall Street Judas” for his role in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement while serving in the Clinton White House. Many blue collar workers have condemned NAFTA and suggested that it accelerated the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs. Emanuel interpreted these criticisms as Anti-Semitism. Sweeney has maintained that his comments exposed Emanuel as a “traitor” to the cause of working families and organized labor. Emanuel’s operatives are hoping that lightning can strike twice as they hope to embarrass Chico on account of another person‘s comments.

The response of the Emanuel campaign to Sweeney’s remarks was highly reminiscent of Emanuel’s initial run for public office in 2002 when his campaign delivered a late broadside against his principal primary opponent, former State Representative Nancy Kazak. Emanuel and Kazak were both seeking the nomination for the open Congressional seat in the 5th district. This was the House seat formerly held by Rod Blagojevich who went on to become governor in 2002 with Emanuel‘s help.

According to Emanuel’s operatives, Kazak was guilty of Anti-Semitism by proxy because the late Ed Moskal, who was then the president of the Polish National Alliance, endorsed Kazak for the 5th district vacancy. The septuagenarian Moskal faulted Emanuel as “a millionaire carpetbagger” and questioned his alleged dual citizenship. It mattered not an iota that Rahm’s own masculine boasting of his military service in Israel gave rise to some of the specious rumors, it was an Anti-Semitic remark according to Emanuel.

As an impetuous high school aged youth, Rahm Emanuel cut a finger while working at an Arby’s fast food restaurant. Rather than seeking prompt medical attention, being the son of a suburban physician after all, Rahm chose to go out partying after hours. Emanuel later had to be hospitalized when the wound became infected and the finger had to amputated. After entering the rough and tumble world of politics, fantastic stories began to circulate about tough guy Emanuel having lost the digit after surviving a shark attack or in military combat fighting with the Israeli Army. The truth was much more benign. At most, Emanuel served briefly as a civilian volunteer in Israel in 1991.

It did not really matter as Kazak was staggered by the accusation and the precinct workers recruited from the Water Department by Donald Tomczak, who was to serve time in prison for his electioneering activities on Emanuel’s behalf, pulled off a narrow primary victory for Emanuel. Once in office, Rahm continued to grandstand on the issues with Blagojevich including their silly plan to import discounted prescription drugs to Illinois from Canada. That scheme failed when the Canadian government pointed out that it was not in the business of subsidizing prescription drug prices for the benefit of Americans rather than Canadians.

One of the strange aspects of the “Emanuel Homecoming Parade” is that it has provided the former White House Chief of Staff with valuable political cover for the Republican gains in the midterm Congressional elections. Washington insiders had been whispering that Emanuel was going to be called upon to step aside once the polling data indicated that the House of Representatives was lost. Inside the Beltway, Emanuel, who proclaimed himself to be the architect of the new Democratic majority in 2006, which is debatable, was going to be thrown under the bus by Obama for the Republican restoration in 2010.

Mayor Richard M. Daley’s retirement provided Emanuel with a welcome parachute. In so many words, Emanuel has been jubilantly boasting that he and his followers are not retreating towards Chicago from Washington — they are strategically advancing to the rear to shore up their political fortunes and to secure the base for Obama.

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Daniel J. Kelley is a contributor to “The Chicago Daily Observer.”