Rahm Emanuel, Weighing White House Bid, Beckons Democrats Back to the Center To Gain in Midterms, 2028

Rahm Emanuel’s stint as ambassador to Japan followed his two terms as Chicago’s mayor, which followed his 20 months as President Obama’s first White House chief of staff. Yet before he formally begins his likely campaign for the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nomination, he has become a social scientist.As an avid bicyclist, Mr. Emanuel, when he retired from the mayor’s office, took a two-week, 900-mile ride around Lake Michigan with a friend. During the ride, he made a sociological discovery: “The worse the cellphone coverage is, the nicer people are.”Niceness is sometimes secondary for Mr. Emanuel, whose salty vocabulary expresses the serrated edge of his personality. Yet his discovery of the inverse relationship between smartphones and congeniality indicates his interest in today’s culture, and his party’s contribution to its strangeness. Although politics is the Democratic Party’s business, it currently has scant aptitude for it.Politics is mostly talk. In an interview, Mr. Emanuel says, more in anger than in sorrow, that too many Democrats speak as though their words have been “focus-grouped in a faculty lounge.” He has a point.If the progressives who coined the term “Latinx” had known a few Hispanics, they would have known there was no interest in a “nonbinary” (more progressive-speak) name for members of an ethnic group who have said they prefer to be called “Americans.” Between 2020 and 2024, President Trump increased his portion of the Latino vote to 48 percent from 36 percent. When progressives refer to people in jail as “justice-involved populations,” voters are apt to be mystified, then bemused, and ultimately unlikely to fill public offices with peculiar people who speak a private language.Mr. Emanuel wishes some Democrats would worry less about “a child’s right to pick his pronouns” and more about “children who do not know what a pronoun is.” He is proud of an education reform he instituted as mayor: Before handing a diploma to a high school senior, the student had to hand over a letter of acceptance from a four-year college, a community college, an armed service or a vocational school.Mr. Emanuel mused about all this a few days before the 65 percent of New York City’s registered Democrats who voted in the mayoral primary nominated (by a plurality) a 33-year-old who resembles an adjunct professor of applied Trotskyism (free stuff for everyone!) who wandered out of a satirical campus novel.In 1992, Mr. Emanuel says, President Clinton won while promising not to “defund” the police but to hire 100,000 more of them. In 1996, Mr. Emanuel says, Mr. Clinton became the first Democratic president reelected since Franklin D. Roosevelt by running 40 percent of his ads promising to “end welfare as we know it.” In 2008, candidate Obama campaigned by stressing that it is easy to father a child but hard to be a father.Mr. Emanuel sees signs of incipient sanity in the fact that in this year’s gubernatorial contest, the two most important contests, Democrats have nominated two centrists with national security backgrounds: In New Jersey, Representative Mikie Sherrill, a United States Naval Academy graduate and former helicopter pilot; in Virginia, a former CIA officer and congresswoman, Abigail Spanberger. The uber-progressive president of New Jersey’s teachers union finished fifth in a primary field of six.Mr. Emanuel is wagering that “candor and authenticity have currency,” and that “strength, confidence and optimism” can be projected by ignoring “the culture police” on his party’s left. He tickles optimism from a fact about Chicago’s summer country-music festival: It features a number of Black singers of a genre associated with rural America. That is thin evidence for national reconciliation, but Mr. Emanuel thinks the 2026 midterm elections will give his party momentum for 2028.He says that in midterms when the same party controls the presidency and both houses of Congress, turnout is usually higher for the out-of-power party, independents break 2-1 for that party, and turnout drops for the in-power party. This drop might be particularly pronounced next year because many supposed supporters of the incumbent party are actually just fans of its entertaining leader, whose absence from the ballot will make politics unappetizing.As mayor, Mr. Emanuel did not halt Chicago’s slide toward bankruptcy, and as a national candidate he must shed the stigma resulting from Democratic control of sagging cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. And there will be the drama of watching progressives of the “globalize the intifada” stripe (see their choice for New York mayor) ponder a candidate whose middle name is “Israel.”The Washington Post

Rahm Emanuel, Weighing White House Bid, Beckons Democrats Back to the Center To Gain in Midterms, 2028

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