If the Democratic National Committee is trying to find a new leader proficient at alienating Black voters, it couldn’t do better than Rahm Emanuel.
Emanuel has indicated in recent days that he’s interested in the job. If he goes for it at the party's upcoming meeting, much of the old Democratic guard is likely to back him, setting up an intra-party brawl.
Last week, David Axelrod served as a digital advance man for his former Obama White House colleague, posting that “Dems need a strong and strategic party leader, with broad experience in comms; fundraising and winning elections,” while touting Emanuel as just the man for the job: “Dude knows how to fight and win!”
In terms of well-connected power-brokering, Emanuel’s ties with Democratic elites and corporate donors have been second to none. And he can boast an impressive political resume — senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, congressman from Illinois, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Democrats' 2006 sweep, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, and White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, before becoming mayor of Chicago in 2011.
But his eight-year record as mayor could trip up Emanuel if he runs for DNC chair. Long before leaving office in 2019, Emanuel had fallen into disrepute. By the end of 2015, a poll found that his approval rating among Chicago residents had sunk to 18 percent. No wonder he decided not to run for a third term.
Emanuel stands out at provoking bitter enmity from Black people, crucial voters in the Democratic Party base.
He earned notoriety for the cover-up of a video showing how Chicago police killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald one night in October 2014. For 13 months, during Emanuel’s campaign for reelection, his administration suppressed a ghastly dashboard-camera video showing the death of McDonald, an African American who was shot 16 times by a police officer while walking away from the officer. (A jury later convicted the officer of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery.)
Memories of Emanuel’s malfeasance have remained vivid. In 2020, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) expressed a widely held view when she tweeted: “Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.”
Last weekend, amid reports that Emanuel was weighing a bid for DNC chair, Ocasio-Cortez denounced him as a symptom of what ails the party: “There is a disease in Washington of Democrats who spend more time listening to the donor class than working people. If you want to know the seed of the party’s political crisis, that’s it.”
Longtime Chicago journalist and activist Delmarie Cobb wrote a scathing assessment of his mayoral record in 2021. While mentioning that Emanuel “closed 50 public schools in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods,” Cobb also pointed out that “he closed six of 12 mental health clinics in these communities.” She added: “Now, who needs access to mental health care more than Chicago’s Black and brown residents who are underserved, underemployed and under constant threat of violence?”
Emanuel’s response to the McDonald killing was emblematic of his arrogant leadership method, routinely clashing with the basic interests of racial minorities and the non-affluent. When Emanuel was nearing the end of his last term, The Nation magazine summed up his term this way: “The outgoing mayor’s legacy will be defined by austerity, privatization, displacement, gun violence, and police brutality.”
It’s fitting that Axelrod is leading the charge for Emanuel to win the top post at the DNC. Both of them were well-compensated for providing services to the giant Exelon Corporation, a public utility with the nation’s largest set of nuclear power reactors. In fact, Emanuel “helped create the company through a corporate merger in 2000 while working as an investment banker,” the New York Times reported.
During that stint as an investment bank director — after leaving the Clinton White House and before entering Congress — Emanuel used his connections to make $18 million in just two-and-a-half years. It’s that kind of coziness with economic elites that has caused Democrats’ appeals for working-class votes to ring hollow.
A frequent refrain at Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign rallies was “We won’t go back!” But if Emanuel ends up as the DNC chair, the message will be quite the opposite — signaling that wealthy power brokers have fully recaptured the party.
As Emanuel’s days are numbered in his position as ambassador to Japan, the chance to become chair of the DNC might be too tempting to pass up. Shortly after President Biden nominated him for the diplomatic role, Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke wrote that the idea was “laughably absurd.” As mayor, Huppke recalled, “Emanuel was, as he always has been in public life, a pugnacious bully.”
The Democratic National Committee should not choose for its chair a pugnacious bully who relishes fighting with the party’s most loyal constituencies and committed activists.
Norman Solomon is cofounder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” was published in 2023.
