Will the Democrats Go Centrist in the 2028 Election?
I say
“confront” rather than “embrace” on the assumption that the Democratic nominee
will want to win the election. As of the summer of 2025, the only potential
candidate prepared to confront rather than embrace his party’s ideological
pathologies is Rahm Emanuel. He hasn’t committed to a presidential run, but he
readily admits he’s thinking about it. “I’ve got a mental time frame I’m
working on,” he says in a visit to the Journal’s editorial board on Wednesday.
“My wife hasn’t tried to divorce me yet, so I’m OK so far.”
That Barack
Obama’s chief of staff (2009-10) is preparing a run for the Democratic
nomination as the centrist candidate demonstrates how far the party has lurched
to the left, and how demanding will be the effort to recall it from the edge.
Mr. Emanuel’s candidacy might seem improbable, but he has both name recognition
in political circles and an impressive political résumé: political adviser to
President Bill Clinton (1993-98), representative from Illinois’s Fifth
Congressional District (2003-09), White House chief of staff, as noted, mayor
of Chicago (2011-19) and ambassador to Japan (2022-25).
Although a
centrist Democrat by today’s standards, Mr. Emanuel, 65, has a well-earned
reputation as a political scrapper. During Mr. Obama’s first term, Andy Samberg
of “Saturday Night Live” several times lampooned the chief of staff as a
hot-tempered, foul-mouthed intimidator. If Democrats want a “fighter,” as many
say they do, they could do worse.
Throughout
our 90-minute conversation, he levels many criticisms against Mr. Trump and his
administration. But unlike other ambitious Democrats, Mr. Emanuel speaks of the
president in a way that doesn’t sound demented. “A lot of people have decided,”
he says, “and I’m not criticizing them for it”—I assume he’s talking mainly
about California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker—“but they’ve
decided they’re going to be on that end of the field, defining themselves
against Trump.” He gestures to one end of the conference table: “They’re going
to fight Trump.”
Then he waves
to the other side of the table. “I’m on this end, about how to fight for
America.” Is the Democratic Party ready for a less feral politics? He thinks
Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s victory in June’s New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial
primary—she is a former member of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition—suggests the
party rank and file may have grown weary of wall-to-wall anti-Trump mania.
“After 2026,” he says, referring to the midterm elections, “my goal is to own
all the real estate on this other side. And I’ll be willing to say things that
may be unconventional in the party, and maybe I’ll attract new people to the
party. That’s my bet.”
What sort of
unconventional things? A lot of Democrats want to separate cultural issues from
economic issues, he says, but they’re “heads and tails of the same coin.” He
switches the metaphor: In 2024, “we were absent from the family room, we were
absent from the kitchen—the kitchen-table issues—and the only room the
Democratic Party found itself in was the bathroom, and that’s the smallest room
in the house.” I gather he refers to the transgender issue. It’s a good line,
and I resist the impulse to point out that Mr. Emanuel’s old boss, Mr. Obama,
in his last year in office directed schools to allow transgender students to
use the bathroom of their choice.
Mr. Emanuel
talks a lot about housing affordability, but I point out that housing is most
unaffordable mainly in the big cities that Democrats run. What’s the solution?
His answer, to summarize, is that a lot of regulations are stupid and
counterproductive. “What California showed you after the Palisades fire,” he
says, referring to the Golden State’s waiving of permitting regulations to
hasten rebuilding, “is that a lot of this is flexible. That was a natural
disaster, but you could also say unaffordability is a disaster.”
Would a
President Emanuel support rewriting the National Environmental Policy Act? NEPA
is the Nixon-era law that enables federal agencies and private litigants to
slow down building projects, or halt them altogether, if regulators deem them
to affect the environment in some adverse way.
To answer the
question, Mr. Emanuel recalls an episode in which, as mayor of Chicago, his
government wanted to build a train station on Chicago’s L system. “The property
was an empty lot with a lot of dirt and gravel on it,” he recalls. “The city of
Chicago did an environmental study, and that took 18 months. The state did one,
that took a year. We submitted to the feds, the feds came back to each party
with different questions. That’s another nine months. Look, I don’t want to
leave office without building this fricking L station. Three years.” Mr.
Emanuel proposes a Democratic tag line: “Build, baby, build.”
Some of what
he says about deregulation sounds like a more common-sense version of the
“abundance” agenda currently popular among progressive brainiacs. The trouble
with the brainiacs is that they want to expand America’s building capacity
without doubting the fundamentals of climate apocalypticism. Mr. Emanuel
sidesteps the climate question’s substance but suggests that he is at least
aware of liberal sanctimony on the matter. Complaining about the time it takes
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (which oversees power grids) to
approve projects, he says, slapping the table rhythmically to make the point,
“You can’t tell me climate change is an existential crisis and that
we’re going to leave the permitting process at FERC as it is. It’s either an
existential crisis or FERC’s pace of granting approval is OK—they can’t be both
true.”
My colleague
Elliot Kaufman asks Mr. Emanuel: Socialism’s all the rage; why isn’t he a
socialist?
“Well,
compared to Donald Trump,” he answers, “I’m a believer in free-market
capitalism.” Having considered both men, I’m not sure about that. But he has a
case. “You’re looking at a guy”—Mr. Trump—“who’s taking golden shares in one
company, telling another company ‘fire your economist,’ shaking down a
semiconductor company before he’ll grant an export license. . . .
I’ve never seen stuff like this.” He was mayor of Chicago, so I suspect he has,
but his point is valid: “This isn’t capitalism; it’s more like state socialism
and a state-directed command economy.”
There may be
other Democrats who know how to hit Republicans on economic issues from the
right, but I am only aware of one.
Mr. Emanuel,
in my admittedly subjective opinion, nicely combines a kind of alpha-male
assertiveness with self-effacing humor. He can shout and hurl barbs at public
officials he doesn’t like, but he is also polite, in a Chicago Jewish sort of
way. When a Journal colleague thinks he has misunderstood her question, for the
very good reason that he wasn’t answering it, he says, “Sorry, I was purposely
being a jerk.” He often refers to raucous dinner-table arguments in his
childhood—his brothers, Ari, CEO of a Hollywood talent agency, and Ezekiel, a
physician, are as accomplished as he is—and his father, whom he revered,
calling him a “schmuck.”
When
columnist Holman Jenkins asks Mr. Emanuel if he has any opinion about the FBI
and CIA playing a role in U.S. presidential elections—from James Comey and
“collusion” to Hunter Biden’s laptop and “Russian disinformation”—Mr. Emanuel
says nothing and looks down, in contemplation of his answer. It isn’t a
question a Democratic presidential candidate would likely anticipate.
“Are you
asleep?” Mr. Jenkins asks.
Mr. Emanuel:
“No, I was praying.”
In the end,
he laments “criminalized politics” but concedes, “I have to think about it.”
One matter
would haunt an Emanuel candidacy. The Journal’s Kyle Peterson raises the matter
in an indirect way: Does Mr. Emanuel think the Democratic Party’s turn against
Israel, which he supports as a U.S. ally, will damage his chances at the
nomination?
“Let me
answer the question you didn’t ask,” Mr. Emanuel says. “I don’t think there’s a
problem with me being Jewish and running.” He cites his electoral victories in
a House district and a city with small Jewish populations. But he last won an
election in 2015. Much has changed. The evidence that his Jewishness is a
problem is pretty convincing: the mealy-mouthed responses by liberal university
presidents to rank antisemitic harassment on their campuses, the vile
Jew-hatred that took place (I witnessed it) outside the 2024 Democratic
convention in Chicago, the readiness among top Democratic officeholders to
believe obviously phony accusations against Israel. Will they choose Rahm
Israel Emanuel—that’s his full name—to lead their party?
He is right
to brush aside the question. On the other hand, he doesn’t quite brush it
aside. His lengthy answer to the question about the Democrats’ turn against
Israel becomes a rant about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Emanuel
indicts the prime minister for having no plan in Gaza and for failing to
capitalize on the Israeli military’s victories with diplomatic wins.
“The whole
history of the Jewish people is to leave the ghetto, economically,
geographically, politically,” Mr. Emanuel says, wide-eyed and animated. Mr.
Netanyahu is “not only isolating the state of Israel, he’s isolating the Jewish
people. And he may be the person that leads us back into the ghetto.”
That’s quite
a charge. But the idea that a Jew could lead Jews “into the ghetto,”
particularly one guilty of such vague offenses as Mr. Emanuel lists, doesn’t
sound credible to me. He has nothing but praise for the Israel Defense Forces
and their achievements in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. Had Mr. Netanyahu
nothing to do with this?
Mr. Emanuel’s
attitude toward Mr. Netanyahu has some bad blood in it. In 2009, when Mr.
Emanuel worked for Mr. Obama, the Israeli leader was reported to have called
both the chief of staff and senior adviser David Axelrod “self-hating Jews.”
The prime minister’s office denied the report, although it’s easy to imagine
Mr. Netanyahu’s saying it, so exasperated was he with Mr. Obama for assuming
Iran’s good intentions.
Mr. Emanuel
holds a grudge, and that is easy to respect. Yet his condemnation of the
Israeli leader also seems impelled by political necessity. Large parts of the
Democratic Party want to condemn Israel for any or no reason. Anyone proposing
to lead the party must find reason not simply to criticize Israel, but attach
disgrace to it. The prime minister is a scapegoat: a way to condemn Israel
without condemning it.
Asked what
might be called the Ted Kennedy question—why do you want to be president?—Mr.
Emanuel names a “hunger” for three virtues: candor, authenticity and strength.
These aren’t terrible words to describe his candidacy. The first two seem to
describe the same quality, but he has it: Followers, unlike leaders, don’t like
to contradict what important people on their own side say and believe. Mr.
Emanuel enjoys doing so. Strength? The Democratic primary will test that
virtue.
Does he have
a chance against better-funded and higher-profile governors? I note that Mr.
Emanuel, unlike the usual politician, showed up to the Journal’s editorial
office with no entourage. Not one staffer. Just him. “I’m not a governor, I
don’t have a platform, I don’t have a budget,” he says. “All I got is my
mouth.” And how do things stand with him and, say, Messrs. Newsom and Pritzker?
“We’re all
stuck at 3%,” he says. “Nowhere to go but up.”
Mr. Swaim is
an editorial page writer for the Journal.
