Archives for January 2016

Rick Perlstein’s New Yorker piece somehow gives me the impression that he would piss on Rahm if he were on fire, but only so as not to waste the opportunity…

It’s hard to remember a time when Rahm Emanuel wasn’t a Democratic Party superstar. Go back to 1991, when the thirty-two-year-old took over fund-raising for Bill Clinton. He was soon renowned for making the staff come to work on Sundays, shrieking into the phone to donors things like, “Five thousand dollars is an insult! You’re a twenty-five-thousand-dollar person!”—and, not incidentally, helping Clinton afford the blitz of TV commercials that saved him from the Gennifer Flowers scandal, clearing his course to the White House. The legend continued through this past April, when Rahm—in Chicago and D.C., he’s known by that single name—won a second term as the mayor of Chicago in a come-from-behind landslide.

Nine months later, Chicagoans—and Democrats nationally—are suffering buyer’s remorse. Last month, a Cook County judge ordered the release of a shocking dashcam video of a black seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by a policeman while he was walking away. Five days later, the officer was charged with murder. The charge came after four hundred days of public inaction, and only hours before the video’s release. Of almost four hundred police shootings of civilians investigated by the city’s Independent Police Review Authority since 2007, only one was found to be unjustified. So the suspicion was overwhelming that the officer would not have faced discipline at all had officials not feared a riot—especially after it was learned that McDonald’s family had been paid five million dollars from city coffers without ever having filed a lawsuit. Mayor Emanuel claims that he never saw the video. Given that he surely would not have been reëlected had any of this come out before the balloting, a recent poll showed that only seventeen per cent of Chicagoans believe him. And a majority of Chicagoans now think he should resign.

For twenty years now, there have been those who say that this emperor never had any clothes on in the first place. Given the speed and intensity of his fall, perhaps it’s time to reconsider their case…

…[R]eturn to Washington in the early nineteen-nineties, when a grateful Clinton awarded his young charge a prominent White House role. There, Emanuel’s prodigious energy, along with his contempt for what he called “liberal theology,” rocketed him higher and higher into the Clinton stratosphere. “He gets things done,” Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, enthused late in 1996, when Emanuel usurped George Stephanopoulos as senior advisor for policy and strategy. 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…

… Barack Obama in 2009… named Emanuel as his White House chief of staff. There, however, Emanuel’s signature strategy—committing Obama only to initiatives they knew in advance would succeed, in order to put “points on the board”—nearly waylaid the President’s most historic accomplishment: health-care reform. Emanuel wanted to scale it back almost to the vanishing point. It took a concerted effort by Speaker Pelosi to convince the President otherwise. This time, it was Emanuel who apologized: “Thank God for the country he didn’t listen to me,” he said after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, in 2012.

By then Emanuel had became the mayor of Chicago, elected with fifty-five per cent of the vote in the spring of 2011. Since then, there have been so many scandals in Emanuel’s administration which have failed to gain traction that it’s hard to single them out…

Ed Kilgore, on the other hand, argues in NYMag “Rahm Emanuel Will Probably Hang On As Mayor of Chicago“:

… Just when you’d figure Rahm Emanuel was on the ropes, the consensus of his local critics in elected office — including key African-American pols — is to keep him in office, albeit on a tight leash.

As CNN’s Manu Raju reports [Tuesday], the momentum toward an Emanuel resignation seems to have stalled at the elected official level…

… For one thing, it is simply hard to imagine Rahm Emanuel actually quitting his job. But he is by all accounts a highly transactional pol for whom power and the ability to use it is the coin of the realm. He knows he’s going to have to go hat in hand to many past and present critics to rebuild the political capital he needs to function as mayor, and they know it, too. So like Bobby Rush, they’d rather deal with the devil they know than invite the “chaos” of a resignation followed by a succession struggle in the City Council and then a special election. Perhaps under extreme duress Emanuel will do all the things he might have done earlier to restore his severely eroded credibility in many of his city’s neighborhoods. If not, then the protests may come back with a vengeance.

Interesting Read: “The Sudden But Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel”Post + Comments (57)