Ready or not, the aughts revival is in full bloom. Take note of Gen Z’s ugly retro-future fashion, the return of mall punk and nu-metal, and the fact that we’re on the verge of another Mideast war with a country whose name starts with the letter “I”— all experienced this time through the soul-deadening filter of smartphones. Among all the detritus, another unfortunate artifact of that era threatens to resurface: Rahm Emanuel. Barack Obama’s former chief of staff and the Democratic Party’s once-and-future hatchet man is reportedly tanned, rested, and ready after his low-key gig as Joe Biden’s ambassador to Japan and is testing the waters for a presidential bid for 2028.
That might sound far-fetched now, but the writing is already on the wall. Emanuel’s tried-and-true mantra — “Never let a good crisis go to waste” — is back in fashion in liberal circles. The crisis, of course, is Trump: a singular, exhausting force whose re-election has caused moderate Democrats to yearn for the days of “Build Back Never” and the blunt instrument of a potential nominee who both sharp-elbowed and sharp-tongued.
Since November, Democrats have started talking like they’ve been binge-watching Veep on HBO rather than their old favorite: The West Wing. Party operatives and candidates are swearing like sailors in interviews, swaggering on social media (The Democratic National Committee itself even promoted Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s labeling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as “a fucking liar”), and senators are testing out their best “tough-guy” impressions. Likewise, mainstream outlets abound with op-eds insisting that liberals must elect a bully and “learn to punch back.” The stage-managed belligerence is new; the emptiness behind it is not.
Enter Emanuel, who smells opportunity and is eager to cast himself in that role — grizzled, pragmatic, and so combative that he was once nicknamed “Rahmbo.” As a bonus, no one else has a resume of salty language in politics like Rahm; he’s been wielding F-bombs in Washington longer than congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh has been alive. (The unfunny fictional Twitter thread turned coffee table book The F—ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel even made cursing his entire personality.)
But the big fucking problem with Rahm trying to become president isn’t his attack dog style, it’s who and what he’s barking at. The pithy catchphrase he’s market-testing on the talk-show circuit these days is that the current batch of Democrats “is weak and woke,” which is a fine diagnosis, but Rahm himself is bad medicine. He’s the Machiavelli of moderation, a veteran of nearly every Democratic Party capitulation of the last few decades, from NAFTA to the Wall Street bailout to a health-care law designed not to offend the insurance industry. “He gets things done,” was the line from Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, in 1996, but what Rahm was building was the ideological cul-de-sac that Democrats have been stuck in ever since: socially liberal, fiscally neoliberal, and emotionally constipated.
When Rahm admitted recently that he was “a product of Bill Clinton,” it was an unintentional self-own. I’m sympathetic to the view, espoused by author Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, that Clinton was secretly the biggest villain of the neoliberal era of US politics because he spearheaded the Democratic Party’s heel turn from Party of the People to the Party of Technocrats, bought and paid for by Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. While Republicans were busy tut-tutting “Slick Willie” for his scandals and affairs, Clinton was busy enacting their agenda. He accomplished things that neither Ronald Reagan nor George Bush (H. or W. — take your pick) could only dream of: welfare reform, the crime bill, NAFTA, and the deregulation of the financial and communication industries — legislation that hurt his coalition but boosted the party coffers.
“If you couldn’t beat the neocons, his logic seemed to go, you might as well become them”
Rahm didn’t just ride that wave — he helped engineer it. As the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the mid-2000s, he built the model that defined the party’s soul-sickness for decades. The so-called blue wave of the 2006 midterms was mythologized in the book The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Finally Ended the Republican Revolution. His formula was simple: stoke fear about Republican extremism, then run safe, centrist technocrats (preferably veterans) in swing districts to peel off liberal-leaning GOP voters. Then legislate like you’re trying to please Lindsay Graham and Barney Frank. If you couldn’t beat the neocons, his logic seemed to go, you might as well become them, but with better manners, more bike lanes, and cooler gay bars. As Thomas Frank once put it, “(Rahm) loves one class of citizens and strongly disapproves of another.” Entrepreneurs, good. Labor, bad.
During his tenure as Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel played the role of enforcer not for bold ideas, but for trimming them down to a size acceptable to Joe Lieberman and the pharmaceutical lobby. He opposed including a public option in the Affordable Care Act from the start, dismissing those demanding comprehensive health care reform as “fucking retarded” and instead backed a deal that locked Americans into private insurance. He urged Obama to abandon ambitious climate legislation, slow-walked financial reform, and urged caution at every major turn — an odd posture for someone known for yelling and sending a dead fish in a box to a pollster. Under Emanuel’s watch, “Hope and Change” got converted into “No Fucking Way.”
When he wasn’t magically shrinking Obama’s agenda, Emanuel was making bank on Wall Street — more than $16 million as an investment banker in a few short years. He also served on the board of directors at Freddie Mac at a time when it misstated its annual revenue, and later, the mortgage giant was blamed for playing a key role in the 2008 financial crisis. Oops.
Then came Chicago. After he was elected mayor in 2011, Emanuel ran the city like a SimCity expansion pack for the financial elite. He closed public schools by the dozen, declared war on teachers’ unions, outsourced public services, and shoveled tax incentives toward developers and corporations. Then came scandals, like the cover-up of a dashcam video of a black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald, killed by Chicago police. Chicago journalist Ben Joravsky once described Emanuel as Mayor One Percent, who possessed “as much determination, will, and chutzpah as anyone alive,” but that he wastes it all on “wimpy policies that largely preserve the status quo.”
And yet, everyone’s collective memory seems stuck in a Covid brain fog, as if history started sometime in 2016. To desperate Democrats who have an exceedingly thin bench, Emanuel looks like a grownup. To everyone else, he seems like the reason they stopped voting. His brother Ezekiel (no, not the Hollywood agent, the other one, the doctor) once wrote an essay in The Atlantic headlined Why I Hope to Die at 75, arguing that ambition curdles and creativity fades with age and that it’s better to flame out than fade away. By that logic, Rahm’s political career should’ve been dead and buried long ago.
Instead, it’s threatening to return like a nostalgic aughts-era sequel no one asked for; one about as welcome as wearing low-rise jeans with a visible thong to a Senate confirmation hearing.
