Rahm Emanuel Helped Ruin FDR’s Party— Now He’s Back From Japan To Do Even Worse Damage

The Democratic Party establishment is, more or less, ever so slightly left of center. Compared to a GOP that has drifted out of the mainstream towards fascism, the Democrats may seem relatively progressive… although the party has been a corporate-aligned, consultant-dominated centrist entity more concerned with careerism than policy, rather than a New Deal entity, for decades— and certainly since Bill Clinton dragged the party right in the1990s. As Rahm Emanuel, a Wall Street whore and genocide-supporter, gears up for an Illinois Senate run, he’s openly making noise about pushing the party even further right.

John McCormick, a media patsy, profiled Emanuel and discussed what he’s up to in today’s Wall Street Journal, although he sympathetically calls it pushing the party to the center. The GOP talking points spouting Emanuel, he wrote, “calls the party’s brand ‘toxic’ and ‘weak and woke,’ a nod to culture-war issues he thinks Democrats have become too often fixated on that President Trump has successfully used against them. While Emanuel is coy about what he wants next for his political career, he appears to be laying the groundwork for a presidential bid. He will be the headliner at a September fish fry for Democrats in Iowa, where the party’s nomination process traditionally started until 2024… He might also run for governor of Illinois if his friend who currently occupies that office, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, decides not to seek a third term in 2026.” So McCormick swings at everything but the Senate race Emanuel is already raising money to run in… In his usual frenetic way, Emanuel is positioning himself as a savior for the party even as he has flashbacks of the movie Thelma & Louise and its suicidal conclusion.”

Cynical to his core, Emanuel babbled to the eager McCormack “The public’s not wrong. They figured it out. The system’s rigged. It’s corrupt.” There are no Democrats who culpable than Emanuel for that state of rigged corruption within the Democratic Party establishment. (Up close and personal with Rahm.) Now that he’s back in the U.S. from a sinecure stint as ambassador-in-name-only to Japan, “Emanuel has been hard to miss. He secured contracts with CNN and the Washington Post to provide commentary and has been on the speaking circuit... As he contemplates his political future, Emanuel has returned to an industry where he has made millions. He is a senior adviser at Centerview Partners, the same investment bank where he spent two years after leaving the mayor’s office in 2019, earning more than $12 million. An earlier investment-bank windfall of at least $16 million at Wasserstein Perella & Co. came after Emanuel served as Bill Clinton’s White House political director [shoving NAFTA down the throats of Democratic congress members] and later as a senior adviser.” He’s talking up a presidential race even as he lays the groundwork to replace Dick Durbin in the Senate, even though voters in Chicago hate him and he left office before he could be run out of town on a rail.

Emanuel, a one-time ballet dancer who at 5-feet, 8-inches tall earned the nickname “Rahm-bo” for his take-no-prisoners style, defended his banking work when asked how it would play in a Democratic primary.

“I didn’t become a lobbyist. I didn’t write a book, a kiss-and-tell book, and crap on other people,” he said. “I took care of my family. I’m not ashamed of that.” 

The Democratic Party has changed dramatically since Emanuel worked for Clinton, a centrist by today’s standards. It has even changed since Emanuel helped get Obama elected before serving as his first White House chief of staff, an assignment that forced him to abandon his goal of becoming the first Jewish Speaker of the House.

One of many hurdles Emanuel faces is that the party’s energy is concentrated around its progressive base and people such Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Views of Emanuel among Democrats also offer a portal into the party’s split: Some progressives despise him, while some moderates love him.

[Right-of-center] Former Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) said he thinks Emanuel can nudge the party toward the center because he did it when he led the DCCC in 2006, a year when the party gained 30 seats and won the House majority for the first time in 12 years. [Virtually all those seats were lost within 4 years as voters realized to their horror that Emanuel’s recruits were GOP-lite conservaDems.]

Israel said Emanuel has an ability to “mindmeld” with the voters that determine close elections. “He can be rough-talking and he can be blunt and he’s high-intensity, but he taps into the anxieties of swing voters,” he said.

Emanuel was a featured speaker earlier this month at a retreat in Maryland of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, a congressional caucus. Coalition member Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH) said he expects Emanuel will be a “huge voice” in shaping the party’s direction, including potentially through a presidential bid.

“He’s closer to where voters are than anyone else,” he said. “That’s his lane.”

Landsman, first elected to Congress in 2022 to represent Cincinnati, is an imbecile and a perfect example of what’s wrong inside the Democratic Party. A member of both the corporately-aligned Problem Solvers Caucus and the New Dems, his lifetime ProgressivePunch grade is a solid “F.” He’s consistently one of the 20 worst voters among House Democrats. Rahm’s kind of guy!

This is what conservative Democratic careerists like Landsman and Emanuel want to talk about instead of working class solidarity and instead of delivering systemic change for working families. This morning, Naftali Bendavid reported that “As Democrats wrestle with who to be in the era of Trump, a growing group of party members— especially centrists— is reviving the argument that Democrats need to rethink the words they use to talk with the voters whose trust they need to regain. They contend that liberal candidates too often use language from elite, highly educated circles that suggests the speakers consider themselves smart and virtuous, while casting implied judgment on those who speak more plainly— hardly a formula for winning people over, they say. The latest debate is, in part, also a proxy for the bigger battle over what the Democrats’ identity should be in the aftermath of November’s devastating losses— especially as the party searches for ways to reverse its overwhelming rejection by rural and White working-class voters.”

Emanuel was a major player in the Democratic realignment away from the working class. Over the weekend, far right GOP operative, Patrick Ruffini celebrated that realignment in an essay for The Atlantic. “The realignments of recent years— the midwestern white working class toward Trump’s GOP and the suburbs toward the Democrats— can be understood as the process of ideological and education sorting coming for groups that were the most out of place in the new political realm: rich suburban Republicans and culturally conservative working-class Democrats… As these old partisan ties begin to weaken, it’s worth remembering that something similar has happened before, when the white working class’s status as the bulwark of the old Democratic Party began to unravel in the 1960s. That was also a time of rapid social change, when a politics once focused on meeting the material needs of the working class instead started to revolve around questions more abstract: of war and peace, of race and sex. And on key points, the working class— meaning the white working class early on and a more diverse group today— was not on board with the Democrats’ growing cultural liberalism. The realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, would not stop with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party— that of being a group-interest-based coalition— was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate. The Democratic analyst David Shor estimates that Democrats went from winning 81 percent of Hispanic moderates in 2016 to just 58 percent in 2024. And these voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party. This explanation for political realignment should concern Democrats deeply, because it can’t be fixed by better messaging or more concerted outreach. The voters moving away from the Democrats are ideologically moderate to conservative. Their loyalty to the Democratic Party was formed in a time of deep racial and inter-ethnic rivalry, when throwing in with one locally dominant political party could help a once-marginalized group secure political power. The system worked well when local politics was relatively insulated from ideological divides at the national level. But this wouldn’t last forever— and national polarization now rules everything around us... A populist shift in the form of Donald Trump’s larger-than-life persona was enough to make many nonwhite voters shed decades-long partisan loyalties. Absent a big change in how these voters perceive the Democratic Party, they aren’t going back.”

The Democratic Party elite may be working for a rightward shift as a tactical necessity, but the data tells a different story: the Democratic Party’s long-term hemorrhaging of working-class support is not due to it being too progressive, but not progressive enough on material issues. Decades of triangulation, Emaanuel’s and Clinton’s NAFTA-style trade deals, privatization, and union-busting have left millions of Americans rightly skeptical of the party’s commitment to their economic well-being. Now combine that with the party’s reliance on corporate donors and consultants who view class-based appeals as gauche or outdated, and you have a recipe for the hollow technocratic liberalism that alienates the very people Democrats claim to represent.

As we never tire saying, to win back working-class voters— across racial lines— the Democratic Party must abandon its fixation on suburban moderates and instead embrace a populist economic agenda grounded in material improvement: stronger unions, a living wage, Medicare for All, a massive green jobs program and public investment in housing, transit, and education. This is both morally right and politically effective. When working families see tangible improvements in their lives and communities, they show up to vote. When the Democratic Party speaks— and acts— in the language of dignity, solidarity and economic justice— not just civility or institutionalism— it can reforge the multi-racial working-class coalition it once relied on. That’s the only real way forward— not Rahm Emanuel’s Wall Street-friendly nostalgia for Third Way politics.