Rahm Emanuel wants back in the game. The former three-term congressman, top advisor to Barack Obama, and Mayor of Chicago is itching to get into the ring and slug it out with Republicans as well as woke Democrats.
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“Weak and woke” is how he describes much of his party today.
“We can’t get distracted by the cultural issues and lose sight of what Americans care about and what impacts them, which is a shot at the American dream,” Emanuel said. “We have to be able to stand up to the interest groups. We can’t look weak and woke. We need to be grounded and centered.”
At a time when running against the establishment has been the dominant political messaging of the early 20th century, Emanuel is the most establishment Democrat anyone can think of.
“I’m not done with public service,” Emanuel said. “I’m hoping it’s not done with me.”
But are the voters done with him and the Democratic Party?
“The system is fundamentally rigged and corrupt against the American people,” said this man who expertly played the system his entire political career. “It was true in 2016, true in 2020, true in 2024.”
He traces the rise of Trump to Americans’ resentment against Washington for leaving them behind.
“There are things that are unique to 2016, but the undercurrent in ’08, ’12, ’16, ’20, ’24, the one constant is the resentment against the establishment, because we have self-dealt us in, our kids in, and dealt everybody else out. And the system is broken and rigged.”
Emanuel said: “I’m a product of Bill Clinton.” Clinton, with Goldman Sachs’s Robert Rubin as his treasury secretary, was surely the most neoliberal president the country had ever had—meaning he embodied the emerging consensus around free trade and the deregulation of markets. Was it at all odd, I asked Emanuel, that here he was, Mr. Neoliberal Elite, now demonizing the elite? Wasn’t his career intimately intertwined with the rise of our Democratic-technocratic-Silicon Valley-Hollywood overlords?
“I don’t buy those labels,” he said, meaning “neoliberal.” “I think they’re cheap. I think they’re nonrepresentative.” In the course of his career, he told me, he had battled the NRA, Netanyahu, the big pharmaceutical companies, the Chicago “education establishment.” And Emanuel spearheaded free community college and free universal nursery school for 3- and 4-year-olds in Chicago. “If free universal pre-K, if that’s neoliberal, okay,” he said. “If that’s progressive, okay. I think it’s moving people forward.”
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“I don’t buy moderate versus left. I buy moving forward versus looking backward,” he said.
Better politicians than he have tried that gambit with little success. You can’t rebrand reality, and if Emanuel tries it, he will be buried, if not in the Democratic primary, then certainly in a general election contest against any Republican.
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Emanuel also has a problem with the fact that he can’t escape his role in some of the most disastrous policies ever promulgated by an American president. Both Clinton and Obama enacted damaging policies on trade and immigration that we may never recover from.
It’s important not to forget: Donald Trump rose to power by convincing millions of Americans that they’d been screwed by the suits. It was a caricature of the past three decades, blaming all our many woes on free trade and China. But really, Trump was saying, it was the super-connected in D.C. and New York (and maybe Chicago) who had betrayed their fellow citizens on their way to the zenith of the great American power structure. People exactly like Rahm Emanuel.
Emanuel’s hindsight is better than 20-20. It was Obama’s Justice Department that refused to prosecute any financial executives for the 2008 financial meltdown.
He agrees, telling The Free Press’s Peter Savodnik, “The system needed Old Testament justice.”
Huh?
“A banker should have been brought into the public square,” Emanuel said. A pithy reply, but would putting Jamie Dimon in the stocks have done any good besides giving voters emotional satisfaction?
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This is what Democrats have been reduced to. While Emanuel may eschew wokeness and equate it with weakness (as most Americans do), he and his fellow progressives can’t get past the idea that appealing to emotions is the path to victory. The American people want their lives to improve, not to be presented with smoke and mirrors as a solution to our problems.
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