Chicago’s current mayor, the former ballerina Rahm Emanuel, is on the ropes. First, the Washington Post:
Mayor Rahm Emanuel cut short a family vacation this past week and returned to a city in crisis: On the North Side, more than a dozen people stood outside his house, hurling insults. On the West Side, a close aide was punched and kicked while attending a prayer vigil for a police shooting victim. And all week long, there were protesters, haunting one of Emanuel’s biggest political donors, haranguing his police force, beating a papier-mâché likeness of his face at City Hall.
More than a month has passed since a judge forced Emanuel (D) and other city officials to release a graphic video of a white Chicago police officer shooting a black teenager 16 times.But public anger over the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014 has not dissipated. Instead, it has grown bitter and more personal.
“Oh, it’s personal, all right. We’re making it personal,” yelled Ja’Mal Green, 20, a former Emanuel supporter who spent hours in bone-cold weather on the sidewalk outside the mayor’s spacious Ravenswood home, mocking him and urging him to resign.
The protests reflect frustration with chronic problems Emanuel inherited in Chicago, a city long plagued by police brutality, failing schools, rampant gang violence and dire finances. But as Emanuel enters his second term, critics say he has deepened distrust in City Hall through a string of scandals affecting his administration, a lack of transparency and his abrasive personal style. More anger may be on the way.
God, let’s hope so. Emanuel is one of the most widely loathed people in public life, a Clinton hack who has amassed millions of dollars and run Chicago into the ground. The thoroughly corrupt Windy City hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Big Bill Thompson back in 1931 (and he was corrupt, too), but voters never seem to be able to connect corruption to the bipartisan criminal class that runs the place. The foul-mouthed Emanuel’s bullying antics were tolerated for decades, but now it seems his usefulness has come to an end.
Meanwhile, The New Yorker explains that the real problem was that Rahmbo was too conservative:
It’s hard to remember a time when Rahm Emanuel wasn’t a Democratic Party superstar. Go back to 1991, when the thirty-two-year-old took over fund-raising for Bill Clinton. He was soon renowned for making the staff come to work on Sundays, shrieking into the phone to donors things like “Five thousand dollars is an insult! You’re a twenty-five-thousand-dollar person!”—and, not incidentally, helping Clinton afford the blitz of TV commercials that saved him from the Gennifer Flowers scandal, clearing his course to the White House. The legend continued through this past April, when Rahm—in Chicago and D.C., he’s known by that single name—won a second term as the mayor of Chicago in a come-from-behind landslide.
Nine months later, 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.
For twenty years now, there have been those who say that this emperor never had any clothes on in the first place. Given the speed and intensity of his fall, perhaps it’s time to reconsider their case.
Love how quickly the Left moves away from the political corpses when they really start to stink. Especially that of Rahm Emanuel, Reagan conservative:
But return to Washington in the early nineteen-nineties, when a grateful Clinton awarded his young charge a prominent White House role. There, Emanuel’s prodigious energy, along with his contempt for what he called “liberal theology,” rocketed him higher and higher into the Clinton stratosphere. “He gets things done,” Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, enthused late in 1996, when Emanuel usurped George Stephanopoulos as senior adviser for policy and strategy. Among his special projects was helping to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and the 1994 crime bill. He also tried to push Clinton to the right on immigration, advising the President, in a memo in November, 1996, to work to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” These all, in the fullness of time, turned out to be mistakes.
NAFTA, in alienating the Party’s working-class base, contributed to the Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives in 1994. As for the crime bill, which included a “three strikes” provision that mandated life terms for criminals convicted of violent crimes even if their other two offenses were nonviolent, Clinton himself has apologized for it, saying that the policy “made the problem worse.” The attempt to out-Republican the Republicans on immigration never took off. Republicans are the party solely associated with vindictive immigration policies, which leaves them in the long-term crisis they’re finding themselves in now—identified as anathema by Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group. If Rahm had had his way, that never would have happened.
The body isn’t even cold yet, but for the Left, it’s always time to move on when it’s time to move on.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member