White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the administration's most feared and fascinating personality, is fending off questions about just how long he will remain in his draining job — and whether his next gig will be in Washington or back in Chicago, perhaps as Mr. Mayor.

"He's not going anywhere,” a White House aide said. “He's working every day on health care, Afghanistan, the economy and implementing the president's agenda. All this talk that he would go anywhere comes from people who don't know him.”

Top administration officials said they expect Emanuel to remain in the West Wing at least through November’s midterm elections — and indicated that he might stay around even longer if President Barack Obama asks him to help on the run-up to his 2012 reelection bid.

That would give him a longer tenure than many chiefs of staff and would be in keeping with the two-year timeline he suggested to some when he accepted the position in 2008.

Friends say the only reason they can imagine Emanuel would leave what many believe to be the nation’s second-most-powerful job before then would be if Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who has held the office since 1989, decided not to seek reelection to a seventh term in February 2011. His father, Richard J. Daley, spent 21 years in office, a mark that the current mayor will pass in December 2010.

People close to Emanuel say he considers Daley a mentor and has urged Daley to run for reelection.

“Mayor Daley is a great mayor for a great city," Emanuel told POLITICO in an e-mail. "He has my full support, and it is my deep hope that he will seek reelection."

Emanuel, who had a high profile earlier in this presidency but has made fewer public appearances as health care negotiations heated up at the end of last year, will give a long-planned interview at 9 a.m. Monday on the debut of a new MSNBC show, “Daily Rundown,” anchored by NBC White House correspondents Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie.

The 50-year-old Emanuel — chief architect of President Barack Obama’s controversial “Big Bang” strategy of leveraging the economic crisis for a once-in-a-generation legislative push — initially accepted the COS job after days of deliberation, and said he couldn’t foresee staying in the post for more than 18 months or two years.

“When he went into this, he told me he wasn’t going to be there longer than 24 months,” says Brian Wolff, who was Emanuel’s executive director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where both engineered the party’s historic 2006 take back of the House.

“Rahm’s always going to have options and he’s always going to be on the move,” adds Wolff, now a senior vice president with the Edison Electric Institute, an energy industry group.