If you had to summarize the predicament confronting the Democratic Party as its members stumble through the political wilderness, Rahm Emanuel saying that his good friend David Axelrod put him up to the job would do nicely. The party’s activist grassroots base yearns for systemic progressive change – but it remains bogged down by connected establishment insiders who have no plans of relinquishing power to the new blood anytime soon.
Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, also known as ex-President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, might be running for president in 2028. Then again, maybe he’ll run for governor of Illinois – or senator. Who knows? When asked if he might be mulling a 2028 White House run, he told the hosts of ABC’s The View: “I am in training – I don’t know if I’ll make the Olympics.” So yes, he’s considering it – but there are other options to weigh as well.
Rahm Emanuel: Just Put Me Somewhere
Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker’s second term expires in January 2027, and there is nothing to prevent him from seeking a third four-year tenure except higher political ambition. Pritzker, who governs as a social leftist but is also a multibillionaire with strong establishment ties, is eying a 2028 presidential campaign of his own, and one man is urging him to go for it.
“Third terms are notoriously perilous, and things that can go wrong tend to go wrong in third terms,” David Axelrod, former chief strategist and senior advisor to Obama, told WBEZ Radio in Chicago on May 13. “If your attention is divided between running for president, which is a hellacious job in itself, and … dealing with crises at home, that is a very difficult balance to strike.”
Wait a second. He has an idea.
“I honestly think time may be better spent for him if he wants to run for president, traveling the country and interacting with people and not just speaking, but listening. It would enrich him as a candidate and give him a head start,” Axelrod, who now serves as a CNN commentator, continued.
It would also get him out of the way, Pritzker noted. “David’s a friend of mine. Here’s what I can say,” the governor told CNN in reply to Axelrod’s remarks. “I think he has in mind the idea that his friend Rahm Emanuel would like to run for governor of Illinois.”
Is it that obvious? Yes, it is. Last November, Emanuel briefly flirted with the notion of becoming Democratic National Committee chair before backing away, partly due to progressive opposition.
“I never even thought of the DNC until my best friend [Axelrod] decided to float it out there,” Emanuel bluntly admitted to NBC 5 TV in Chicago on December 3.
Do you see the problem here?
Political lifer Emanuel, who had been serving as ambassador to Japan in the Biden administration, needs a new gig, and he is leaning on his blue power player “best friend” to nail one down for him. DNC? Eh, guess not. What about the US Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)? That might be nice. Or perhaps a governorship if Pritzker doesn’t run again? Sounds intriguing. Or maybe the Democratic White House nomination in 2028?
“You can put on your dancing shoes, your best smile. I’m not doing that. We’ll see. I have to talk to people that live here,” Emanuel said to NBC 5. That quote certainly says a mouthful. He is conceding that selling himself to the general public is not the way to go here. Private conversations with “people” is the right approach. But who are these people? Given his decades-long insider standing, an average voter on the street is unlikely to be a part of the equation.
Democrats Are Your Father’s Oldsmobile
A hard-boiled political veteran like Rahm Emanuel knows that prominent Democratic candidates are selected, not elected. The man has been in and out of the White House since the Clinton administration; he understands how political machines work. And that sums up the disastrous position Democrats as a national party find themselves in today. They remain stuck in the world of 2012, where a Mitt Romney could be anointed as a presidential nominee for one of two major political parties in the United States with absolutely no grassroots support – or a Hillary Clinton in 2016.
It’s a deliberate refusal to acknowledge that the populist phenomenon of Donald Trump ever happened – that he wasn’t a far-right coup manufactured by Russia and that the American people, on a very basic level, avidly supported his outsider ascendancy to the White House. Remarkably, this mindset gives more credence to the notion that Joe Biden’s controversial 2020 election will prove far more damaging to Democratic politicians in the long run than to Trump.
Trump doesn’t even have to try to stick one of his devastating labels on the elites of the Democratic Party. They’ve made themselves the party of an old-guard way of practicing politics that Americans not only have no interest in but emphatically despise.
Here’s a sobering statistic to contemplate: Three senior citizen Democratic House members have died in office this year. And it’s only May. In December, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) successfully leveraged insider baseball to fend off young progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in the race to become the ranking party member of the powerful House Oversight Committee. The 75-year-old then had to step down from that post in April due to esophageal cancer. He died on May 21.
Two months earlier, two other aged Democrats passed while still allegedly representing the citizens of their congressional districts. Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-TX) died at age 70 on March 5, and Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) died at age 77 on March 13.
Does this sound like a dynamic party of the future?
As long as establishment ladder-climbing dinosaurs like Rahm Emanuel can count on their “best friends” in high places to help them advance in party circles, the Democratic Party’s fadeout to total irrelevance will continue unabated.