For many of us “better Dems” people, Rahm Emmanuel has exemplified much of what our party has been doing wrong for the past 25 years. He is all about getting money, he has contempt for the left, moving the window doesn’t matter, it’s all about co-opting GOP positions, etc., etc.
In his career he’s been a successful fundraiser for Bill Clinton, a strategic advisor in the Clinton White House, an investment banker (where he made $18 million dollars in a 2.5-year period), a Congressman, head of DCCC, Chief of Staff in the Obama White House, and now Chicago Mayor. He’s had a major impact on events.
I’m writing this diary to highlight a new article by Rick Perlstein, The Sudden But Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel (New Yorker).
Nine months later [following Rahm’s re-election], Chicagoans—and Democrats nationally—are suffering buyer’s remorse. Last month, a Cook County judge ordered the release of a shocking dashcam video of a black seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by a policeman while he was walking away. Five days later, the officer was charged with murder. The charge came after four hundred days of public inaction, and only hours before the video’s release. Of almost four hundred police shootings of civilians investigated by the city’s Independent Police Review Authority since 2007, only one was found to be unjustified. So the suspicion was overwhelming that the officer would not have faced discipline at all had officials not feared a riot—especially after it was learned that McDonald’s family had been paid five million dollars from city coffers without ever having filed a lawsuit. Mayor Emanuel claims that he never saw the video. Given that he surely would not have been reëlected had any of this come out before the balloting, a recent poll showed that only seventeen per cent of Chicagoans believe him. And a majority of Chicagoans now think he should resign.
The shocking revelation of the video of the shooting of Laquan McDonald is what’s done it. But he has done many things to tick off Chicagoans:
Since [2011], there have been so many scandals in Emanuel’s administration which have failed to gain traction that it’s hard to single them out. One signature idea was lengthening Chicago’s school day by thirty per cent—controversial because he proposed to compensate teachers only two per cent more for the extra work. The Chicago public schools’ inspector general was soon investigating allegations that a local pastor linked to Emanuel was arranging buses to pack public hearings with supporters of the idea, paying at least two “protesters” twenty-five to fifty dollars each.
and
Byrd-Bennett had taken over the job from an unfortunate gentleman named Jean-Claude Brizard, who was forced to take the fall for the unpopularity of another of Emanuel’s sketchy initiatives: closing fifty-four schools, many of which were in the city’s black neighborhoods. Why were these pillars of community stability shuttered? Suspicions of venal motives abounded, but nobody could really be sure. A fact-check by Chicago’s public-radio station, WBEZ, discovered that many of the facts the city gave about the decision were not accurate. But don’t confuse that inquiry with a joint investigation by WBEZ and the schools magazine Catalyst Chicago which discovered that Emanuel’s claim about high-school-graduation rates—that they would increase by fifteen percentage points—was also a mirage. (Dropouts are reassigned to for-profit online education programs that demand very little work, and then are rewarded diplomas from the school they last attended or one near where they live.) Or with the multi-part series by Chicago magazine that blew the Mayor’s claims about Chicago’s supposedly declining homicide rates out of the water, too. (One method: categorizing homicide victims as “noncriminal deaths.”)
It’s hard to bring down one so well-supported as Mr. Emmanuel. One can only hope ….