Rahm Emanuel's wife - As Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel waved to an excited crowd at his election night victory party, another future Chicago leader stood with him. Amy Merritt Rule, Chicago's first lady in waiting, joined her husband on the stage, the first time she had been with him at a campaign event since he announced his candidacy last fall.She is, in Emanuel's words, the rock of the family, but in personality and public persona the two are strikingly different. In more than two decades together, as Emanuel's reputation for political bravado grew, Rule remained the steady hand behind him, caring for their three children and eschewing the spotlight.

"She is a very grounded person and I think they do complement each other very well," said Susan Sher, former chief of staff for Michelle Obama, who has known Rule for years. "She is a really lovely, smart, thoughtful, private person. She's got three kids and I think her plan really is to move back and get them situated in terms of school, not unlike the way Michelle Obama did it."
During the past several months, the Emanuel campaign has taken great steps to shield Rule from the glare of her husband's run for office. Emanuel's lawyers fought tooth and nail during the hearing on his Chicago residency, for example, to keep Rule from appearing in Chicago to answer questions about whether her wedding dress was being stored in their rented-out North Side home.

While her husband served in Congress and later as chief of staff to President Barack Obama, Rule managed to avoid the political-gossip whirlwind of Washington. But now she takes on a role that Mayor Richard Daley's wife, Maggie, has shaped for the past two decades, one that inherently brings with it a more public role.

A year older than her husband at 52, Rule earned an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and holds a master's degree in art history from the University of Chicago.

She worked in the development department at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was employed when she met Emanuel in the early 1990s. Her focus since then has been on her family, and by any description given by her husband, she is the glue that holds them all together.

During his victory speech Tuesday, Emanuel choked up as he spoke about Rule, giving a "special thank you to my best friend, my wife Amy, who has kept our family together and been a rock throughout all of this."

The couple met in 1990 on a blind date in Chicago set up by a mutual friend, Antonia Contro.
"I had some intuition about how Rahm and Amy might connect and relate," Contro said. "They were both, first of all, really intelligent people. They are both humanist at their core. They have a great, wry sense of humor. They had a very dynamic connection."

Emanuel said that connection took a couple of tries. The first date was at an Italian restaurant the night before he went on a scuba diving trip. The two didn't hit it off.

But when he returned from his trip, Emanuel had two tickets to a play in Pilsen and no date.

"I call her up, during a snowstorm," he recalled recently. "I called her up and I said, 'Do you want to go to a play?' … We went to this play in Pilsen and we hit it off and started dating."

By 1991, Emanuel was involved in Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. He and Rule continued dating, though she didn't want to come with him to Clinton's home base in Arkansas.

He told her Clinton was a long shot and he'd likely be back in Chicago soon: "I said, 'Don't worry, no challenger has ever knocked off an incumbent president. I'll be back in November.'"

Clinton, of course, won. Rule and Emanuel married in 1994, after she converted to Judaism, Emanuel's faith. She has been by his side ever since.

"Amy and I have a regular date night and we go by ourselves to a movie and dinner," Emanuel said. "So she can tell me what I've done wrong for the week."

Contro, the friend who set them up, said the couple's Ravenswood home is "open and warm," often filled with friends and children. (Of course, lately the home has been occupied by another couple that refused to leave when Emanuel returned to run for mayor, helping to touch off the residency controversy.)

"I always think of eating good food," Contro said. "Cold winter mornings, with good strong coffee. They have a great sense of welcoming people into their home."

Mary Jane Keitel, who hired Rule into the development office at the Art Institute in the late 1980s, said her new employee was a bit shy at first, but that, once she got to know people, she quickly warmed and revealed a "highly intelligent and fun" personality.

Time will tell how much Rule is in the public eye as first lady, but her arts background could be a natural fit to carry on the work Maggie Daley has emphasized. Those who know the current mayor's wife describe her as incredibly influential in shaping Richard Daley's efforts to boost Chicago's arts and cultural scene.