Former President Bill Clinton endorsed Rahm Emanuel's mayoral campaign this morning, showcasing the candidate's intimate connections with the national Democratic Party and his ability to call in favors from some of the country's most powerful elected officials.

"He will be fearlessly honest with you," Clinton told a crowd of supporters at the Chicago Cultural Center in the city Loop, echoing one of the Emanuel campaign's own themes. The ex-president recounted how Emanuel helped his 1992 presidential campaign get off the ground, saying that working with the mayoral front-runner was one of two or three "pivotal facts" that made him a winner of the country's most powerful job nearly two decades ago.

Clinton pitched Emanuel as someone who would be a "big mayor" for Chicago, able to guide the city during difficult economic times. "If you want to reinvent yourself one more time and come out better than ever ... Rahm Emanuel is your man," he said.

As Clinton and Emanuel talked about what they consider some of their top policy accomplishments of the 1990s -- an assault weapons ban, health insurance for children, the massive overhaul of the country's welfare system were three cited -- Emanuel opponents Gery Chico and Miguel del Valle used the occasion to highlight a few choices the two men made that went unmentioned during today's downtown rally.

Standing in the living room of a foreclosed and vacant home at 4924 W. Gladys, del Valle demanded a full accounting from Emanuel about his time on the board of Freddie Mac, citing a Chicago Tribune investigation from 2009.

The Gladys home, one of 11 abandoned structures owned by banks on the block according to the South Austin Coalition's Elce Redmond, served as a grim tableau to discuss the foreclosure-related wreckage fueled in part by Wall Street deregulation. Bank of America, Redmond said, owns the building.

The house was wide open, with no boards on its shattered windows. Inside, much of the carpet was ripped up. The kitchen was destroyed and the wiring was apparently reclaimed by vandals. Empty liquor bottles were scattered around, and a few tiny plastic baggies presumably used for drugs could be seen on the floor.

"There are neighbors living on both sides of this house," del Valle said. "If this house goes up in flames they are in jeopardy, in danger."

Here is a clip of del Valle criticizing Emanuel for his role on Freddie Mac's board of directors today:

The Tribune's '09 investigation found that after President Clinton appointed Emanuel and other directors to Freddie Mac's board in 2000, all were immediately granted stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee. Emanuel earned at least $320,000 from the company, a number that doesn't include an additional sale of Freddie stock, the Tribune found.

The Tribune describes Freddie's board during Emanuel's tenure as more than willing to ratify questionable practices by the company's top managers. Emanuel was never accused of any wrongdoing during the time he spent on Freddie's board. But Armando Falcon, the director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, concluded "that the board of directors on which Emanuel sat was so pliant that Freddie Mac's managers easily were able to massage company ledgers. They manipulated bookkeeping to smooth out volatility, perpetuating Freddie Mac's industry reputation as 'Steady Freddie,' a reliable producer of earnings growth. Wall Street liked what it saw, Freddie Mac's stock value soared and top executives collected their bonuses," the newspaper wrote.

Del Valle also pointed out that it was during the Clinton administration that the deregulation of the banking system first got under way.

Gery Chico's campaign for mayor, meanwhile, has released a YouTube video that also cited the '09 Tribune investigation.

The Emanuel campaign says this line of critique isn't credible. "Rahm was appointed to the Freddie Mac board by President Clinton because of his work on the Plan for Transformation as Vice Chair of the CHA, and Mr. Chico knows that it's not credible to suggest that Rahm is responsible for the housing crisis which began years after he served on the Board," spokesman Ben LaBolt wrote in an email.

Emanuel's staffers are also passing around another Tribune investigation -- this one about Altheimer & Gray, the failed law firm that Chico once headed, and the business it received from the Board of Education. Chico is a former president of that body.

"Companies represented by Altheimer & Gray have seen their fortunes soar. Altheimer & Gray clients made $505,000 in school board business in 1995, before Chico joined the firm; in 1999, the firm's clients and companies related to them were paid $259 million," the story from March 2000 reads.

The relative politeness seen among the four top mayoral candidates during their most recent debate appears to have quickly come to a close.

The Gladys house that del Valle showcased this morning, meanwhile, is still blighting the block on which it stands.