Rahm Emanuel, an adviser to President Bill Clinton, the White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama and a former mayor of Chicago, appears to be eyeing a 2028 White House run. Color me unexcited. Emanuel, who embodies the failed Democratic strategy of always tacking to the right and showing deference to the GOP, would likely lead the party back toward the kind of ideas that got it in this mess.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Emanuel will be the headliner at a September fish fry for Democrats in Iowa — a clear signal that he’s at least toying around with the idea of a White House bid. He told the Journal, “I’m tired of sitting in the back seat when somebody’s gunning it at 90 miles an hour for a cliff.”
On issue over issue, Emanuel has made his name pushing Democrats in the wrong direction.
Emanuel tried on populism for size in that Journal interview, saying, “The public’s not wrong. They figured it out. The system’s rigged. It’s corrupt.”
But the pitchfork is hardly a good fit for a man who stood opposed to expanding Americans’ access to health care. And his vacuous centrism comes through in his hints at a game plan. The Journal reports:
[Emanuel] is direct about what he thinks Democrats need to do to win national elections again. He calls the party’s brand ‘toxic’ and ‘weak and woke,’ a nod to culture-war issues he thinks Democrats have become too often fixated on that President Trump has successfully used against them."
Emanuel was a featured speaker this month at a retreat for the centrist New Democrat Coalition, and after he spoke, the Journal reports, a member of that coalition, Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, praised him as a “huge voice” for shaping the party and deeply in touch with voters.
Emanuel is affiliating with (and sounding a lot like) the centrists who have no answer to Trump other than to cave and triangulate, thereby pushing the party to the right at a time during the country’s slide toward autocracy. Emanuel’s phrase “weak and woke” is the exact phrase that centrist Democrat Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan has used to criticize the Democratic brand.
There’s no question that the Democratic Party has an existential brand problem and that it’s not on strong ground on issues revolving around identity politics. But the central question facing the party is what it actually stands for, especially on economic issues, at a time when the neoliberal consensus that it helped craft has fallen apart and the working class is drifting away from it. There is no reason to think Emanuel is the one for the job. He does possess the “alpha” energy that Slotkin has called for, but toward what end? On issue over issue, Emanuel has made his name pushing Democrats in the wrong direction. As the historian Rick Perlstein wrote in The New Yorker in 2015, Emanuel is known for getting things done by bucking what he views as liberal “theology” and sprinting to the right. Perlstein pointed out the folly of many of his signature accomplishments as a senior adviser under President Clinton:
Among his special projects was helping to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and the 1994 crime bill. He also tried to push Clinton to the right on immigration, advising the President, in a memo in November, 1996, to work to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” These all, in the fullness of time, turned out to be mistakes. NAFTA, in alienating the Party’s working-class base, contributed to the Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives in 1994. As for the crime bill, which included a “three strikes” provision that mandated life terms for criminals convicted of violent crimes even if their other two offenses were nonviolent, Clinton himself has apologized for it, saying that the policy “made the problem worse.” The attempt to out-Republican the Republicans on immigration never took off."
As chief of staff under Obama, Emanuel “begged” the president not to pursue the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s already far too incremental push for health care reform.
As mayor of Chicago, Emanuel reportedly shunned community leaders and focused on businessmen, including Republicans, in his voracious fundraising efforts. He also sought to cover up the police murder of Black teen Laquan McDonald, a maneuver that legal analyst Chris Geidner in an MSNBC column called “one of the more soulless moves by a Democratic politician in recent memory.” (Emanuel has denied that it was a cover up.)
Emanuel is one of the architects of the party’s crisis, not one of its saviors, and his positions have rightly attracted sharp condemnations from progressives over the years. And unlike younger Democratic moderates like former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Emanuel has a record of attacking the left rather than trying to compromise with it.
A new Emanuel would in all likelihood operate a lot like the old Emanuel. And the old Emanuel is the kind of Democrat the party needs to shun.
