Rahm Emanuel Is Gearing Up to Run
for President
The former Chicago mayor
is already on the hustings, finding new ways to attack Trumpism from the
center.
03/12/2025 05:55 AM EDT
Rahm Wants to Run.
Yes, that Rahm. And,
yes, for that office — the presidency.Read More
“I’ve only been back two months, I have no idea what I’m
doing,” Rahm I. Emanuel, operative-turned-politician-turned-diplomat told me
before adding his stock line since returning from serving as ambassador to
Japan. “I’m not done with public service and I’m hoping public service is not
done with me.”
Ignore that evasion. Rahm Emanuel is
voting with his feet.
Since coming home in January from his
stint in Tokyo — a job he repurposed to be American envoy to all of Asia —
Emanuel has been as visible as any other Democrat. Never mind that he currently
holds no office and hasn’t been on a ballot for a decade.
Name the political podcast and Emanuel
has likely been on it or will be shortly. He immediately snagged a CNN contract
and regular Washington Post column, no small accomplishment for a
former official at a moment of retrenchment for news organizations.
He’s also hitting the lecture circuit,
appearing for paid and gratis gigs before audiences such as the Realtors and
the Chicago Economic Club. Emanuel is pointedly avoiding Ivy League campuses
and later this month will make his first stop on a service academy tour when he
speaks at West Point.
Just as striking is to talk to anybody
in high-level Democratic politics who knows Emanuel — which is to say most
everyone — and hear how matter of fact they are about the inevitability of his
candidacy.
The biggest Rahm-may-run tell, though,
is that he’s already road-testing the first outlines of a stump speech, or at
least an issue he can make his own.
I caught it last month when he came to
Washington to appear before a conference held by Democracy Forward, a liberal
group helping to lead litigation efforts against the Trump administration.
“I am done with the discussion of locker rooms, I am done
with the discussion of bathrooms and we better start having a conversation
about the classroom,” Emanuel said, drawing applause as he alluded to a new study showing more than
two-thirds of eighth graders can’t read at grade level.
He kept coming back to the study and
eventually and explicitly tied the policy to the politics, in Rahm’ian fashion.
“We can lead a discussion and force a
topic onto the agenda of this country that’s worthy of having a debate about,”
Emanuel said about the dismal student data. Unlike, say, the fate of a
heretofore obscure federal agency, whose demise dominated elite coverage in the
first weeks of Trump’s presidency. “The New York Times put crumbs all the way
to the front door of the USAID headquarters and we just walked along back
there,” he lamented of his party.
Shortly after his trip to Washington,
Emanuel dashed out to Los Angeles to appear on Bill Maher’s show, where he went
even further for a less sober audience.
“In seventh grade, if I had known I
could’ve said the word ‘they’ and gotten in the girls’ bathroom, I would’ve
done it,” he said. “We literally are a superpower, we’re facing off against
China with 1.4 billion people and two-thirds of our children can’t read eighth
grade level.”
There it all was, in two appearances.
There were the assets.
Emanuel’s gift for finding a towering
issue hidden in plain view; his tactical skills for grasping the political
benefits it could confer, delivered with a snappy sound bite to elevate
statistics off the page; linking domestic policy to geopolitics and sending a
message about another, more controversial topic; and not merely urging
Democrats to move on from trans youth issues, but using them as a vehicle to
shift the conversation to ground he, and most in his party, would prefer to
fight on. Gavin, are you listening?
There were also the liabilities.
Emanuel can also come off more as the
tactician he was than the politician he was, sound glibly dismissive about
people (USAID workers, the trans community) and generally exude a brusqueness
that may obscure his talents in places such as, well, Orangeburg, South
Carolina.
Which brings us what many of you have
probably been thinking since the first sentence: Really, Rahm for President?
“20 years ago it would have been an
article in The Onion,” cracked Doug Sosnik, who worked with Emanuel in the
Clinton White House and now thinks the pugilistic man may meet the moment and
that no other potential contender is nearly as qualified.
David Axelrod, a longtime friend of Rahm, has also warmed
to the idea. “Who has more relevant experience?” Axelrod asked, adding that
Emanuel has two other alluring assets for his party right now. “He understands
how to win and speaks bluntly in an idiom that most folks understand.”
I’ve wondered if Rahm may land on a
White House bid since seeing him in Tokyo shortly after last year’s election,
when he was still ensconced in the onetime home of Douglas MacArthur but
inserting himself in all manner of post-mortem stories by
retailing good quote.
In the weeks after Democrats lost the
presidency, Emanuel was like a lusty knife-and-fork man eyeing the buffet laid
out before him. He wanted to dig into it all: DNC chair immediately, Illinois
governor in 2026, the state’s maybe-soon-to-be-open Senate seat held by Richard
J. Durbin the same year, Chicago mayor in 2027 and yes the presidency in 2028.
However, the party chair contest
became a student government race among committee members, Gov. JB Pritzker is
widely seen as seeking a third term, Emanuel surely doesn’t want to risk ending
his career losing a primary for a Senate seat he doesn’t crave and he’s already
been mayor.
There’s something larger than the
musical chairs, though.
Presidential races are about timing,
and if ever there was a period where Emanuel would be viable, it’s now.
Democrats are as demoralized as any time in modern history, their voters
desperately want to win and were open to untraditional candidates even before
Trump (see Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg) and the new attention economy
favors the pithy. Oh, and they’re also dying for somebody who can wield a blade
and take it to Republicans.
Who, Democrats want to know, can break
through like Trump and put the opposition on their heels? Well, Emanuel offers
two important traits: relentlessness and ubiquity.
He has, as they say in sports, a
motor.
Didyaseemyoped? (Translation: Have you read my recent column, which until
he signed on with the Post could be on any number of topics and in any number
of publications?)
He’s so full of ideas, angles,
proposals and one-liners that in the pandemic days of 2020 — a year removed
from city hall and already itching — he called, texted and emailed former
President Joe Biden’s campaign so often that aides had to eventually assign
pollster John Anzalone to also handle the Rahm account.
By the end of Trump’s term, voters may not want to see the
president on camera every day — which the president seems determined to be —
but it’s hard to imagine another Democrat who could find a way into seemingly
every issue. I joked with colleagues that there should be a profile of the poor
State Department official on the Japan desk who had to monitor the
ambassador’s Ohtanian output in word and deed.
And that was when he was, ostensibly, focused on foreign affairs.
For all of his affection, and
consumption of traditional media, Emanuel is well-suited to a TikTok campaign,
in which provocation is all but imperative (and you wonder why Biden and former
Vice President Kamala Harris struggled with changing consumer habits).
Yet Emanuel is also unlike Trump in
important ways.
To borrow the formulation of Axelrod,
Rahm’s longtime friend and (not literal) rabbi, Emanuel could be the remedy,
not the replica, of a president with little interest in governance and the
chaos that flows from that.
There’s not another living Democrat
who hasn’t already run for president who’d better grasp every dimension of the
job. In fact, this side of Leon Panetta, who’s even close? Emanuel worked on
campaigns, including a presidential, was a senior aide in two White Houses, did
a cameo in high finance, served three terms in Congress, was a big-city mayor
for eight years and then envoy to one of the world’s largest economies for
nearly four. And he’s only 65.
He has longstanding relationships with
many of the leading figures in politics, diplomacy, military, business, the
media and, thanks to his agent brother, even
Hollywood. Plus, yes, the donors.
It’s easy to understand why Emanuel
would think, well, why not me?
The Republican analogues are James A.
Baker III and Dick Cheney, both of whom ended their careers in public life with
enviable posts.
Which gets to what may be the most
logical reason why Emanuel may, and perhaps should, run: Even if he loses, he
still may elevate himself to lock in a similar such closing act, whether at the
State Department or Pentagon. (Would any nominee dare make Rahm vice anything?)
“If you run for any other office, you
win or lose,” as Axelrod put it. “But if you run a smart, spirited race for
president you can elevate yourself. So why not jump in the pool?”
As one of Emanuel’s friends reminded
him — not that it hadn’t occurred to the ultra-competitive Chicagoan — he’d be
crushed if he ran for any other office and lost.
Even in these early days, Emanuel was curious to know how
his potential competition fared at the Democracy Forward conference, I’m told,
and was asking people present how Pritzker fared in the room. Emanuel has never
been defeated and he kept that unblemished record intact by not running for a
third term as mayor in 2019, a race he may have lost.
He had ferocious clashes with
teachers’ unions in Chicago and infuriated liberals over his handling of the
killing of Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager who was shot as he walked away
from a police officer.
Yet if there’s a group who’d be more
unhappy with him representing the Democratic Party than the left, it’s
Republicans, who fear he’d tug his party toward the center.
Rahm’s Republican peers admire his
skills and moxie and he wowed a younger generation of lawmakers in both parties
who came through Tokyo expecting a jerk and instead found gifts in their hotel
rooms.
“Rahm Emanuel is the best all-around
player for the Democratic Party,’” said Rep. Tom Cole, the Oklahoma Republican
who served with Emanuel in the House. “Who else has been as successful as a
political operative, a party leader, an elected official, a high-level staffer
and a diplomat?”
Democratic primaries are not, though,
determined by the likes of Tom Cole.
Few names — and as with Cher and
Madonna only the first is necessary — trigger such visceral contempt on the
left as Rahm. He’d face loud and determined opposition from progressives,
both over his more centrist economic views in an era of ascendant plutocracy
and over his eagerness to tack to the middle on culture and identity. [Who gives a shit about these loser asshole progressives?]
Yes, I know, those far-left voices are
somewhat muted now. But will they be three years from now? And even if
progressives are diminished, the voices of Black voters, the ultimate deciders of Democratic
primaries, will not be — and it’s an open question if Emanuel can
win them over.
“I’m not sure people in South Carolina
know or care who Rahm Emanuel is,” Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a longtime South Carolina
Democratic lawmaker told me. “His connection to Barack Obama is decades old.
We’re in a different time.”
Indeed, politics moves ever more
swiftly.
Consider the period often likened to
the present, the aftermath of 2004. Who thought the way to reclaim red states
like Indiana and North Carolina — remember the Jesusland map?
— would be to nominate a big-city liberal with African roots and a Muslim name?
Not the conventional wisdom crowd, they were eyeing white Southerners.
A white male pushing 70 who’s
delighted to pick fights with the left and speak hard truths about the
Democratic brand seems sensible now, but it could be fighting the last war
after three years of Trumpian rampaging.
Emanuel’s biggest challenge, should he run, may be what his
longtime friend James Carville memorably said about George H.W. Bush in
1992, as captured in The War Room documentary: “He
reeks of yesterday.”
As Emanuel concluded at the Democracy
Forward conference, a middle-aged attendee sitting behind me muttered
sarcastically: “Bring back the DLC, yay, I feel like I’m in high school again.”
If Democrats — as they did in 1992 and
again in 2008 — are ultimately guided by wanting tomorrow over yesterday it
could doom Emanuel.
Of course, he found prominent roles
with both next-generation Democrats who won in those elections. And he likely
would again. The only question left is does he feel it’s essential to first run
or could he ascend without going through with a campaign, same as Cheney and
Baker who both considered but never pursued bids.
Yet that’s to assume he wouldn’t run
to win.
“Nobody,” Rahm told me, “looks at a presidential campaign
and does it to say, ‘Well, we’ll see what this feels like.’”
