Robert Reich, citing a New York Times profile of Rahm Emanuel’s 2026 midterm role and a possible 2028 run, plus Chris Lehmann in The Nation, argues Emanuel stands for donor-first “New Democrat” politics Democrats should not treat as a model.

The piece lists NAFTA, the 1994 crime bill, welfare repeal, a $16 million banking stint, Chicago school closures and the Laquan McDonald video scandal, and Emanuel’s 2006 DCCC fight against Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.

Sanders is quoted rejecting Emanuel’s attacks on the left; Reich frames the dispute as establishment vs. working-class priorities, not an endorsement of any 2028 candidate.

I’m spending all my time and efforts on the upcoming midterms (as many of you are) urging Dems to speak out for average working people, for lower prices and higher wages, and against the big-money corruption that’s the core of today’s Republican Party.

But I’ve also got to speak out about one Democrat who’s not running for midterm office but is using the midterms to build his base among future Democratic office-holders for his 2028 presidential run.

The New York Times carried a Page 1 puff piece about him titled “Rahm Emanuel Makes His 2026 Play” with the subhead “The longtime Democratic insider has emerged as a behind-the-scenes force in his party’s push to win back Congress. After that, he’ll think about 2028.”

I know Emanuel. I worked with him for years in the Clinton administration, and then when he was Obama’s chief of staff.

Rahm Emanuel represents everything that’s been wrong about the Democratic Party for the last 34 years — its dependence on money from big corporations and the wealthy, its reluctance to embrace bold ideas to reverse widening inequalities, and its indifference to the needs of average working people — and Democratic candidates should be warned off him.

Chris Lehmann’s piece from The Nation magazine confirms my own experience with Emanuel:

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 Benjamin 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’s 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........

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