Bluesky

A specter is haunting the 2028 Democratic presidential field: the specter of reactionary centrism, which sports the political brand name of Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel, the former Clinton White House policy enforcer who went on to become chief of staff in the Obama administration and mayor of Chicago, is going through all the motions of an early presidential hopeful. He’s completed a “spin-free” bike tour through New Hampshire, he’s staged a photo-op on an Omaha “beer picket line,” and he’s delivered a high-profile speech arguing that America needs to adopt a more aggressive posture toward Binyamin Netanyahu’s irredentist warfare regime in Israel (without, of course, affirming anything close to the legitimate political agency of Palestinians). He’s making the rounds on the very serious interview and conference circuits to tout his broader foreign policy sagesse. 

Through it all, Emanuel has burnished his credentials as a wised-up disciplinarian figure in a Democratic Party that’s poised to succumb to a wild-eyed left-wing agenda that will poison its standing among independent-minded Real Americans during a pivotal election cycle. There’s a singular irony in Emanuel peddling this prescription in 2026, ahead of an all-but-confirmed 2028 presidential run: It’s the same hoary consultant-brewed panacea that he introduced as one of the initial class of New Democrats in the early 1990s. For this same structural critique to hold more than three decades later, you have to bracket the history of three centrist Democratic administrations, together with the disastrous legacies on trade, labor, financial regulation, and brain-dead austerity they left the MAGA movement to exploit at will. You have to somehow accept the idea that a Democrat establishment dominated by big-money donors, tech lobbyists, and their leased consultant mouthpieces has fallen victim to a sans-culotte insurgency led by left-wing congressional staffers and “the groups” of the nonprofit sector, while the forgotten middle America scours the political landscape in vain for a voice to represent it. 

You also, not incidentally, have to disregard most of the actual political career of one Rahm Emanuel. It’s no exaggeration to say, with apologies to Hegel’s characterization of Napoleon at the Battle of Jena, that Emanuel has embodied the neoliberal world-spirit on horseback.  Back then, Emanuel’s policy portfolio was largely taken up with the push to win congressional approval for NAFTA and the 1994 crime bill—a measure that symbolized the savvy New Democratic repudiation of the old liberal interest-group model of lawmaking. After weathering right-wing assaults on liberal governance as a prolonged study in crime coddling and kowtowing to union bosses, the Clintonian Capitol Hill strategists led by Emanuel were declaring their independence from the ancien régime, by embracing traditional right-wing policy initiatives and placing a modest it-takes-a-village rhetorical spin on them. By the squalid and inert later phase of the Clinton policy agenda—when the administration signaled total moral capitulation to the Gingrich right by signing its welfare-eradication legislation into law—it was no surprise to see Emanuel leading the charge in the White House. Emanuel also sought, unsuccessfully, to turn Clinton into a hardline immigration hawk, urging the president to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” 

You could say that Emanuel was simply playing to his base: He became a key player in the Clinton White House after leading the big-donor fundraising initiative of the 1992 Clinton campaign. Emanuel’s long-mythologized DC reputation as a blunt, loud, and profane interlocutor stems from this time, when he could be heard berating big-ticket prospects with come-ons like “Five thousand dollars is an insult! You’re a twenty-five-thousand-dollar person!” 

This marks the other sprawling paradox of Emanuel’s career: In posturing as the advocate of common-sense pragmatic governing, he is always representing a boardroom-first vision of politics. Prior to his election to Congress in 2022, Emanuel spent a lucrative tour as an investment banker, bringing in a cool $16 million payday over three years. (He was, in fact, one of three former investment bankers to serve as chief of staff in Obama’s hope-and-change administration.) What he has rhetorically packaged as a savvy, problem-solving approach to lawmaking based on bipartisan outreach has always been the drearily consistent wish list of capital, from his effort as mayor to kneecap the Chicago Teachers’ Union to an accompanying wave of school closures and privatization to a bloated private-equity plan to take over the city’s parking operations to a disastrous accord with Elon Musk’s Boring Company to create a transit tunnel. When a pair of reporters from the Chicago Reader filed a FOIA request to access the mayor’s meeting schedule—which had been mostly shielded from public view—they found that he met almost exclusively with donors, and almost never with actual community leaders. In other words, if you want an advance vision of a Democratic politics shorn of the influence of “the groups” and other irksome activists, look no further than Emanuel’s plutocratic governing record in Chicago. 

Alternately, you can divine the waning influence of groups-style activism in the very fact that Rahm Emanuel is now bruited as a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination at all. The scandal that paralyzed, and effectively ended, his mayoralty in Chicago was his administration’s obscene coverup of the police murder of 17-year-old Lacquan McDonald, a Black man shot 16 times in the back by the police as he was walking away. When the video of McDonald’s killing was released, 64 percent of Chicagoans disputed Emanuel’s claim that he had never seen it before; more than half agreed that he should resign office immediately. It says everything about the priorities of establishment Democrats that Emanuel should be an early 2028 contender, just eight years after Sen. Amy Klobuchar was effectively forced to scuttle her own presidential run in the wake of George Floyd’s police murder, since she had previously served as a federal prosecutor in Minneapolis. 

Grim as Emanuel’s litany of policy calls is, it may not represent his most woeful legacy in Democratic politics. That distinction likely falls to his 2006 tour as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. During that pivotal midterm cycle, Emanuel largely prevailed in a feud over the “50-state strategy” advocated by Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. Dean argued that for the Democrats to secure a long-term governing coalition they had to mount viable candidates—and devote resources to—states and districts that presented as redoubts of deeper-red Republicanism. The idea was akin to bolstering a flailing major-league team’s farm system with prospects that would yield significant dividends over the long-haul, in lieu of a more myopic “win now” strategy focused on immediate returns. In his accustomed role as gatekeeper to the large-donor caste, Emanuel carried the day, using his campaign coffers to effectively cut loose Democratic candidates in districts that would be a stretch to win that cycle, and lavishing money on his preferred brand of donor-friendly campaign hopeful: right-leaning difference trimmers who often had a military resume, some of them former Republicans. Even in that historic Democratic wave election, Emanuel’s handpicked standard-bearers fared poorly—but far more consequently, Democrats relinquished viable candidacies in formerly contested states and districts for the political generation ahead. 

A 2013 study from Governing magazine found that Dean’s project—which wasn’t officially mothballed until the end of his DNC tenure in 2009—yielded striking results. In 20 deep-red states, Democrats gained three house seats, and 39 state legislative ones, while clocking an increase in presidential vote share between 2004 and 2008 in 15 of the 20 states. “Overall, Democrats either improved their results in the reddest states between 2005 and 2009 or, at worst, suffered only minor setbacks, which, given the obstacles the party faced in these solidly Republican states, was almost a victory in its own right,” Governing’s managing editor Elizabeth Daigneau wrote. In the initial post-50-States dispensation, from 2009 to 2013 , the showing of Democratic candidates was nothing short of “catastrophic,” she notes: 

In these 20 solidly red states, the Democrats controlled 13 legislative chambers in 2005, a number that fell to just three in 2013. Of the 40 chambers in these states, only two experienced a net gain of Democratic seats between 2005 and 2013; in the other 38, the Democrats lost ground.

And because state legislative seats and lower statewide offices provide the “bench” for future runs for governor and Congress, these developments could prompt a self-perpetuating death spiral for the party in these states.

One could go further still, and note that as Democrats retreated to safer, donor-anointed battlegrounds to leave greater stretches of the political map in play for the right, ruthless GOP electioneers pounced. The follow-on midterm cycle witnessed the devastating assault that the right termed Operation REDMAP—a bald effort to gerrymander as many congressional seats for Republican candidates as possible coming out of the 2010 census. In other words, as Democrats, high on their own donor-driven presidential-cycle savvy, believed they were cleverly targeting winnable districts in lieu of expanding the electoral map, Republicans seized control of the map, and every individual vote they could get their hand on. As election analyst David Daley writes, the REDMAP initiative birthed the Tea Party insurgency of 2010, and years of Republican one-party rule beyond: 

REDMAP flipped state legislative majorities to Republicans in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Alabama, among others, and also handed complete control over both legislative houses in Florida, Georgia and Texas. With the help of sophisticated new mapping software and terabytes of granular voter data, GOP strategists  devised state legislative maps so immune to the popular will that Democrats have not recaptured a single chamber in any of those states since—even when they win hundreds of thousands more votes. Those same legislatures then drew their state’s congressional maps and the results were immediate. In 2012, Barack Obama carried Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—but Republicans won 64 of the 94 congressional districts they crafted in those states.

Emanuel’s latest ploy for elite Beltway attention is an interview with Politico correspondent Jonathan Martin. It bears all the hallmarks of braindead access journalism, from a hackneyed introduction by Martin flogging all the cliches of Emanuel’s foulmouthed rise to power to Emanuel’s own farcical efforts to depict himself as a lone misunderstood apostle of financial regulation in the Obama White House and a heroic advocate of improved educational performance. (Tell it to the Chicago Teachers Union, pal.) But its chief selling point—yet again—is Emanuel’s wised-up counsel to Democrats who dare to believe in a world where they might be allowed nice things. “I’m not very excited by people that took an election that was focused on Donald Trump’s corruption and now focused on a party that has candidates that want to defund the police, decriminalize the criminal justice system, and want to run an open border policy,” he maunders, before circling for good measure into some performative bigotry: “I’m tired of discussions about bathroom access, and I want to start having discussions about classroom excellence.”