So, maybe there are those who don't like Rahm Emanuel, but I think we need to carefully consider his words.

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/12/rahm-emanuel-outlines-road-back-to.html

Yeah, So What's the Point?

Well, the point is that, 1.) He's right, and 2.)There are plenty of Democrats who see this and take this seriously who are saying almost exactly the same thing.

I think the theme of "abandon failed orthodoxies" can be applied to every single point that has been made here. We've lost the free press, it no longer exists in the world of corporate billionaire controlled media for profit. We don't need "out own outlet, like Fox News is for the GOP," as is the solution that is often proposed, what we needed to do, when we had majorities in both houses and the White House, was to pass legislation that would have protected the free press, and broken up the gigantic billionaire corporations that own media networks. That means getting rid of the damned filibuster in the Senate, packing the damned Supreme Court and passing legislation defining and defending constitutional free press, ruled on by a court that understands how essential it is to the preservation of Democracy.

And I'll add this to the rest of it. We cannot affort to be irresolute in the face of direct threats to American Constitutional Democracy, like Donald Trump's insurrection. If that danger materializes into the dissolution of the American Republic, as many of our political scientists, experts, and many Americans, think that it very well could, then the failure of Merrick Garland to take hold of a Congressional investigation and turn it into guilty verdicts then history will blame President Biden for allowing it to happen, along with Trump being blamed for carrying it out.

Rahm Emanuel has to be regarded, not only as one of the more successful Democrats in electoral politics in recent history, but also as an expert in the behind-the-scenes kind of organization, political knowledge and skill required to chair congressional party campaigns, and serve as one of the chief advisors to two of the more successful Democrats to serve as President of the United States. And it's not possible to serve in those kind of positions, along with municipal government and Congress, without making a few enemies along the way.

As I said up front, I'm a lifelong Democrat. During a relatively short part of this election cycle, we experienced panic, and then confusion and disorder, following the first Presidential debate, the aftermath of which was having the President, and the party's nominee, step down just three months before an election. The loss of the White House, and control of the Senate, while razor thin, as the polls predicted, has left the party in a bad spot, still trying to cope with the loss while at the same time preparing for an existential threat to democracy to materialize. So what Rahm Emanuel has to say is important to consider, if we ever want to think about the possibility of a recovery.

[Mike 03]

1. I'm not so quick to close the door on Rahm Emanuel. NT

[SnoopDog]

2. Out with the old, in with the new...

If we want the USA to survive, we need the younger progressive (who simply want what most Americans want) Democrats to lead the Democratic Party. Otherwise we all lose.

[lees1975]

17. And who would these "younger progressives" be, that have the kind of experience and discernment to do it?

I'm on board with AOC, she's great, so is Jasmine Crockett. Pete Buttigieg. But none of them have Emanuel's experience, including his leadership in getting more Democrats elected to Congress than any other Congressional or DNC chair since 2000. Throw out the old and we lose that experience, and we sure haven't seen that kind of leadership since.

[PedroXimenez]

3. I agree with Rahm, and by agree I mean the Democrats should close the door on him and anyone like him.

look how great this sounds:

Tracing a disenchantment with establishment politics which dates back to the Iraq War, and the banking crisis, both during the Bush Administration, Emanuel points out that Trump siezed on the disillusionment, a moment Democrats somehow missed. Democrats, he says, abandoned their disestablishment credentials during the pandemic, and "enthusiastically morphed into the establishment."

but look what he was saying in Aug 2020, exactly the period he was talking about

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/21/this-will-be-the-year-of-the-biden-republican-rahm-emanuel-says.html

“This will be the year of the Biden Republican,” said Emanuel, citing the appearances of John Kasich, former governor of Ohio, Colin Powell, secretary of State under President George W. Bush, and Cindy McCain, widow of Sen. John McCain, among other GOP members at the Democratic National Convention this week.

That's just an excerpt, I suggest reading the whole thing. The dems should take the "anti-establishment" advice Rahm suggests, but they should MEAN IT. They should say goodbye to Rahm, Axelrod and everyone associated with them. If we stick with them, we're going to "somehow miss" a lot of other moments.

[Alice Kramden]

8. Good point n/t

[Cirsium]

4. "Messaging"

It's the new buzz word. If you have something worthwhile to say you don't need "messaging."

Rahm Emanuel always knows which way the wind blows.

So let's see, he shepherded through passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 as an adviser to President Bill Clinton, and he opposed President Barack Obama’s pursuit of comprehensive health care reform in 2010, killed kill Obama's massive transportation and infrastructure bill, expanded the use of charter schools in Chicago, and incited a bitter feud with public school teachers, aggressively recruited right-leaning candidates at the DCCC, covered up a brutal police killing of a black teenager...

Victory, like defeat, can have a hundred fathers, and we can’t know what was ultimately responsible for the Democrats’ success that November. Anger at Republicans for the Iraq War (which Emanuel supported) certainly drove many voters’ decisions. What is indisputable is that the 2006 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the party over time. One of his winners, the football star Heath Shuler, of North Carolina, would not even commit to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and was one of many Rahm recruits to vote against important Obama Administration priorities, like economic stimulus, banking reform, and health care. Many are no longer congressmen. Some Democrats now argue that, in the long run, 2006 might have weakened the Party more than it strengthened it. “Rahm’s recruitment strategy” was “catastrophic,” the retired record executive Howie Klein, who helps run a political action committee that funds liberal congressional challengers, said, and it contributed to the massive G.O.P. majorities we have now, the biggest since the nineteen-twenties.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-sudden-but-well-deserved-fall-of-rahm-emanuel

Emanuel’s service in the last two Democratic administrations—as senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and as President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff—was crudely divisive. He went out of his way to stamp on those administrations a neoliberal brand that would haunt the party for decades after he headed off to pursue his own personal and political ambitions. It was Emanuel who was the lead strategist in bitter fights for the North American Free Trade Agreement and a host of other economic arrangements that divided the party against itself and left Democrats vulnerable to attack for selling out working-class Americans. It was Emanuel who battled against an expansive vision of the Affordable Care Act at a time when bold reform was not just possible but necessary. It was Emanuel who was accused of spewing obscenities at union members who wanted to do more to save the domestic auto industry (“Fuck the UAW!”) and at progressives who wanted to ramp up the fight for a public option in the ACA (“fucking retarded”).

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/rahm-emanuel-biden-cabinet-2/

What is it about Emanuel that causes him to leave smashed little pieces of good things in his wake wherever he goes? The answer lies in his core political beliefs, which can be described as an amalgam of every bad right-swinging idea the Democratic Party came up with in the wilderness of the 1990s. Emanuel is every inch the Clintonian Third-Way Democrat; thus, his knack for taking bad Republican ideas and making them worse. In this time of reckoning, when the party has looked back on that era and deemed it mostly a failure, Emanuel clings to the shreds of that ideology like an overboard yacht owner whose boat was devoured by termites and sank out from under him.

A short list of his notable positions over the years includes his staunch support for the Iraq War in 2003, which puts him in company with the president. He has been dogged in his pursuit of a war with Iran and passionate about increasing defense spending whenever the opportunity arises. He is a stalwart supporter of Israel, having served as a civilian volunteer for Israel’s army in the early 1990s. Emanuel has lent vocal support to Israel’s assassination policies as well as its military actions, such as the 2006 attacks on Lebanon that were denounced by Amnesty International.

https://truthout.org/articles/warmonger-rahm-emanuel-is-an-abysmal-choice-for-us-ambassador/

Now he is going all progressive-y and populist?

[PedroXimenez]

6. and the way this blog frames it

as if Rahm is giving us some kind of warning.

[Alice Kramden]

9. Apt quote:

"his knack for taking bad Republican ideas and making them worse"

[PedroXimenez]

5. and regarding the schools closing

It wasn't popular, but with declining enrollments, and in some cases, crumbling buildings requiring huge expenditures of capital to repair, the decision was made to start closing schools and merging student populations. In spite of the criticism, especially from the teacher's union, the closed schools resolved the city's budget problems at the time, and did not result in the academic crash that was predicted.

Note that Emanuel was Chicago's last mayor to be re-elected. After he closed some declining, crumbling schools.

First it's true Rahm won in 2015 after he closed those schools but it failed to mention that in 2019 he declined to run again and polls indicated he would likely have lost.

Second, should we accept this blithe account of the impact of the school closures? Just by chance, earlier this week i happened to hear someone on some program, maybe the Benjamin Dixon channel on YouTube, express a lot of anger about those closures. ( He closed 50 schools by the way.)

If anyone knows more about the impact i'd love to hear it. And in general for the Democrats I'd like to see them concerned about the impacts of decisions like these, rather than saying "oh it probably worked out ok". Which I think they often do, with an implied "who are they going to vote for anyway".

[lees1975]

14. Speculative.

And off topic.

Emanuel is the last person to be re-elected Mayor of Chicago in the current political era, and it was after the schools were closed, because, instead of paying attention to decades of old line Democratic political tradition, he and his allies decided to do what was best for the city of Chicago.

He won 55% of the vote in his first run, in which he secured the support of every Democratic party constituency in the city. Even after the school closings, and the installation of red light cameras, also not a popular move, but a huge boost for police and for city revenue, after polls showed his job approval in the high 20% range, he won 56% of the vote. That's after winning four terms in Congress in Illinois district 5, which lies wholly within the city of Chicago, his lowest vote total being his first run, at 67%, his subsequent elections picking up more than 70% of the vote. He was polling in the mid-30% range when he was probing a third shot at being mayor, ten full points ahead of his pre-second term polling and likely would have won in a landslide, given that his opposition likely would have been Paul Vallas, who lost the last election to Brandon Johnson in spite of leading in the polls.

Rahm Emanuel has been at the top of the list of success in Democratic party electoral politics, including helping more Democrats get elected to Congress than anyone else has since 2000. And yes, you make the point of his having adapted and changed his positions at various times and places, which only supports the contention that he knows how to win elections and is not bound by the stubborn insistence on tradition and protocol that cost us the White House and control of Congress this election. And that is exactly why what he has to say is so credible.

So you don't like him. Who really cares about that? So your point is "I don't like Rahm Emanuel, and I don't want to listen to his advice to Democrats but I agree with his advice to Democrats."

[PedroXimenez]

18. correct the red light cameras are making money

by making poor people even poorer. For many of the people (not all) in Rahm's north side district, they are proportionately less likely to get tickets and if they do it's not going to destroy their lives.

For the poor people supplying all this great revenue, it's destroying a lot of them.

Read about it if you're interested: https://www.propublica.org/article/chicago-speed-cameras-safety-racial-disparities

[lees1975]

19. B.S.

Most major cities and suburbs have them. Cameras just click when someone triggers it with a violation. They don't discriminate. And in Chicago, you don' t pay until your third violation. It's $100 bucks.

Yeah, so you don't like the guy. Inconsequential when it comes to what he had to say. He's helped more Democrats actually get elected than any Congressional campaign chair or DNC chair, so what he has to say is valuable and worth considering. If you want to dump everyone who is older, made mistakes and learned from them, then get used to being stuck with Trump.

[niyad]

7. Who is the writer of this piece?

The word is "seized", not "siezed" .

[Iggo]

10. Sit down, Rahm. You're overwith.

[cer7711]

11. Rahm "Where else are they gonna go," Emanuel?! Elitist, smug, arrogant banker &%!

A notorious enemy of the people.
I HATE this guy and his oligarchic ilk.
Shame on you for mentioning his name. He represents everything that is wrong with this party.

[lees1975]

16. And what is it about what he said that you don't like?

Or do you make all your political decisions based on personality?

[TBF]

12. He is the absolute last person we need to listen to, besides Carville.

Seriously. Enough is enough. It is time for the new generation.

[Wiz Imp]

13. Rahm Emanuel is a lot like Trump - a narcissist who cares more about Rahm Emanuel than he does anyone else.

[lees1975]

15. Well, so a few people don't like Rahm Emanuel.

But no one has stayed on topic to disagree with what he's said about where Democrats need to go.

And I will point out that he is a Democratic public figure, one of the most influential through two Presidencies and successful in getting more Democrats elected to Congress since 2000 than any DNC chair or anyone else who has served as the Congressional election chair of the party. So the bashing that is going on here is not productive, or beneficial to any Democratic party cause, aside from the fact that no one is disagreeing with his points.

[Blue_Tires]

20. Rahm needs to crawl back under whatever rock he came from

Exactly where was he during the 2024 campaign? Missing in action.

If other Dems are saying the same thing, then spotlight those other Dems and leave Rahm on the bench.