Rep. Luis Gutierrez is on all-out media tear against his former congressional colleague, Rahm Emanuel.
First, Gutierrez gave an interview to Chicago magazine in which he called Emanuel the "chief architect of NAFTA" and said he’s only running for mayor "because he can’t be speaker of the House."
According to Gutierrez, Emanuel is the anointed heir of the Daley dynasty.
"I don’t believe for one second that when Rahm Emanuel was on the talk show circuit and said he’d like to be mayor of Chicago one day that that wasn’t done with the blessing [of the Mayor]," he told reporter Carol Felsenthal.
Today, Gutierrez recorded a robo-call for the Gery Chico campaign. The call will be targeted to union households, spokeswoman Brooke Anderson said. Here it is, followed by the transcript:
This is Congressman Luis Gutierrez calling to ask you to support Gery Chico for Mayor of Chicago.
Gery Chico will be a jobs Mayor who fights for working families. Gery has a record of putting people to work. As Mayor, he’ll be on your side – a leader from our neighborhoods with a jobs plan for our neighborhoods.
His opponent, Rahm Emanuel, led the fight for NAFTA and against labor unions.
Emanuel’s support for big business led to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs. Emanuel’s fight for NAFTA hurt workers and we can’t trust him to stand up for us as Mayor.
For Mayor, the choice is clear. Rahm Emanuel let us down. Gery Chico will fight for us.
The bad blood between Gutierrez and Emanuel goes back to last year’s failed campaign for immigration reform. Gutierrez and other Latino lawmakers blamed Emanuel, then President Obama’s chief of staff, for not making immigration a White House priority.
Politics
"I don’t think Rahm Emanuel is a positive influence on the immigration debate," Gutierrez told Fox Chicago in May. "I don’t think he sees it as a core value of the Democratic Party, or a necessity that the American people need to be acted upon."
So now, he’s getting revenge.
