Hear me out–Rahm Emanuel may be the best candidate for president the Democrats could put forward.
Of course, that makes it an even bigger longshot than it usually is for any candidate.
President Rahm Emanuel? He Thinks So. https://t.co/pKxjddSdTj
— David Strom (@DavidStrom) May 23, 2025
I’m not a big fan of Rahm Emanuel or many of his policies, but I have a great deal of respect for him as a savvy political strategist and, I am afraid to say, one of the least insane Democrats on the playing field today. If we had to have a Democrat as our next president, we could do a lot worse than Emanuel.
Emanuel is a Clinton Democrat–Machiavellian, often infuriating, usually self-dealing, generally cozy with members of his class, and very savvy when it comes to reading the public mood. He is also very, very smart and comes from a very smart family.
You’ve got Ari, the famous sports agent, Zeke, the prominent doctor and medical advisor, and Rahm himself. They are, as Donald Trump would say, winners. They got to the top the old-fashioned way–they earned it.
I don’t mean to sound enthusiastic about Emanuel because I am not. Early on in his career, I instinctively despised him because he was a very dangerous opponent and, I thought, entirely unprincipled. I no longer think he is entirely unprincipled, just mostly so in the standard way that many a successful politician can be. But he does draw the line in a way that Joe Biden never did, as he showed when he fought the Chicago Teachers’ Union while Mayor. That was a costly battle, but a worthy one, and his unfortunate loss against them has led Chicago to its dire position today.
Rahm, in other words, was willing to pay a big price to do the right thing.
What makes me think he has at least an outside shot at being president, and why he is the least dangerous Democrat to the country, is that he clearly understands the populist moment that we are in, without adopting the AOC/Bernie style of politics. He is reading the room, in other words.
Peter Zavodnik of The Free Press interviewed Rahm about a potential–likely–run for president. It was a fascinating interview, made more so by the fact that Emanuel is clearly going to run as a populist after a long history as the ultimate insider. It seems a contradiction in more ways than one, until you realize that Emanuel IS an outsider in the Democratic Party these days.
In a party where Josh Shapiro was considered too toxic for Kamala to pick as VP, despite the obviousness of the choice, a center-left Jew who rose to prominence advising a center-left president who reformed welfare fits as well into the current Democrat establishment almost as little as I do.
On the one hand, the Democratic establishment had never come in for more deserved disdain and distrust. On the other hand, if there were ever a creature of the Democratic establishment, it was Rahm Emanuel.
Consider the résumé: senior campaign aide and then senior adviser to President Bill Clinton. Followed by a three-year investment-banking stint, during which time he raked in $16 million. Then three terms as a Democratic congressman representing the North Side of Chicago; Barack Obama’s chief of staff; mayor of Chicago; and, finally, ambassador to Japan under Biden. Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff on The West Wing, the most self-satisfied boomer television show in the history of network television, was said to be based on Emanuel. (His younger brother, the superagent Ari, was the basis for another television personality—Entourage’s Ari Gold.)
He had been in the White House when the North American Free Trade Agreement became law—and when, its critics insisted, the exodus of American jobs to Mexico commenced. He had been kind of, sort of, for the war in Iraq while on Capitol Hill. And he had been back in the White House, under Obama, in the aftermath of the financial crisis—when Obama refused to punish the bankers the way that Emanuel now says they should have been punished.
Now, he sounds like a populist. The friendly but brusque, cut-the-bullshit guy from the big city telling it like it is. Not so different from our current president.
“The system is fundamentally rigged and corrupt against the American people,” said this man who had benefited handsomely from that system. “It was true in 2016, true in 2020, true in 2024.”
Emanuel added: “There are things that are unique to 2016 but the undercurrent in ’08, ’12, ’16, ’20, ’24, the one constant, is the resentment against the establishment, because we have self-dealt us in, our kids in, and dealt everybody else out. And the system is broken and rigged.”
Is Emanuel triangulating in the Clinton fashion? Almost certainly, at least to some extent. But in a general election, that might work, and it is just possible that the man who fought the Chicago Teachers Union might mean some of it.
Of course, Emanuel would be a dream candidate for the old-style pols of the Democratic Party–especially the older donors who want predictability, to cut deals with a man who understands them, and who isn’t insane like Bernie or AOC, or brain-dead like Biden or Harris. He won’t run on social issues that are so far outside the mainstream that the candidate would have been put in an insane asylum 15 years ago, and he would remind them of the Clinton and Obama years, which were pretty good in their eyes.
All of which makes his fight to the top of the pyramid in 2028 a tough path in the Democratic Party, especially one where the major donors are less the business tycoons and more the activist types.
“The party needs to say” that “you work for a living, you’re going to have a government that works for you. We’ve got to tell them we’re on their side.”
Emanuel said: “I’m a product of Bill Clinton.” Clinton, with Goldman Sachs’s Robert Rubin as his treasury secretary, was surely the most neoliberal president the country had ever had—meaning he embodied the emerging consensus around free trade and the deregulation of markets. Was it at all odd, I asked Emanuel, that here he was, Mr. Neoliberal Elite, now demonizing the elite? Wasn’t his career intimately intertwined with the rise of our Democratic-technocratic-Silicon Valley-Hollywood overlords?
“I don’t buy those labels,” he said, meaning “neoliberal.” “I think they’re cheap. I think they’re nonrepresentative.” In the course of his career, he told me, he had battled the NRA, Netanyahu, the big pharmaceutical companies, the Chicago “education establishment.” And Emanuel spearheaded free community college and free universal nursery school for 3- and 4-year-olds in Chicago. “If free universal pre-K, if that’s neoliberal, okay,” he said. “If that’s progressive, okay. I think it’s moving people forward.”
Emanuel is an older style of Democrat, liberal, but not leftist. The sort of people who drove us nuts in the 1980s and 90s, but for whom we wish they were running the party today. Not because we agree with them, but because their goal is not to decolonize America or flood it with illegal aliens.
I asked him whether someone with his biography could win the Democratic nomination. It wasn’t just that he was part of the Democratic establishment. It was that he was a Jew with the middle name “Israel,” and he was unequivocally supportive of the Jewish state’s right to exist. According to a recent Gallup poll, Democrats support the Palestinian cause three-to-one over Israel. Among Americans ages 18 to 29, 33 percent sympathize with the Palestinians versus just 14 percent who support Israel, a Pew survey showed. Had he not seen the anti-Israel protests that had engulfed so many college campuses? Had he missed the blurring of anti-Zionist and antisemitic sentiment among the young? Had he not seen Democratic pollster David Shor’s finding that Jewish college students, irrespective of political bent, worried more about left-wing than right-wing antisemitism?
“When I ran for Congress in the Fifth District,” he said, “here were my predecessors to that district: Dan Rostenkowski, Rod Blagojevich, Flanagan”—he meant Michael Flanagan. “The current congressman is Mike Quigley. So who doesn’t fit in that lineage? Rahm Israel Emanuel.” He laughed. “I was running against a Polish woman, so, you could argue, it was stacked against me. And then I won, and I improved my margins every year.”
Rahm may have a pretty good history of winning, but his failure to secure his future as Chicago’s mayor and the subsequent decline of Chicago into a leftist failure don’t bode well for him in the modern Democratic Party. I think his instincts about where America is headed are pretty good–he “gets” the populist moment and is adapting his neoliberal commitments to the moment, but it doesn’t seem he “gets” the Democratic Party anymore.
Like so many readers of The Free Press and the centrist Democrats who have been leaving the party, he fits into an older style of Democrats who fought back the socialists who took over the party in the 1970s and early 80s. Bill Clinton reclaimed the Democratic Party in the way that Tony Blair did in Great Britain–pushing out the socialists and communists, and Rahm was a big part of that.
Well, the socialists are back with a vengeance, in both the US and Britain, and more insane than ever.
Can Rahm be Clinton or Blair? He has the instincts, but not the charisma. I’m pretty sure he is a better strategist than a frontman.
