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Rahm Emanuel’s Losing Record

The Democratic establishment’s golden boy has shifted the party to the right and lost ground in crucial elections.

Rahm Emanuel at Chicago’s City Hall in October 2011.

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 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 Democratic 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 hard-line 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........

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