Rahm

Boy, it sure is sad to finally see Rahm Emanuel fall apart. Rick Perlstein’s analysis of Rahm is pretty damning. First, all Rahm has ever cared about is cash. If that means hanging out with Republicans, all the better. But even worse, Rahm the Democratic adviser to presidents, Rahm the Democratic campaign strategist, and Rahm the mayor have all utterly failed from a policy perspective, largely because immediate short-term gains combined with that love of cash flow has led to catastrophic errors.

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.

After Washington, Emanuel made eighteen million dollars in two and a half years as an investment banker. (His buddy Rauner helped get him his job.) He came back home—although diehards will insist that Emanuel isn’t really a Chicagoan, having grown up in suburban Wilmette—and won a congressional seat in 2004. His next step was chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in charge of recruiting House candidates. In 2006, he got credit when Democrats took back the lower chamber. One Democratic strategist from California who saw him working a room of worshipful admirers shortly afterward marvelled, “Inside the Beltway, Rahm is like … well, not Dylan or Madonna but maybe Britney or Paris.”

But that achievement disintegrates the more closely it’s examined. At the D-Trip, as the D.C.C.C. known, Emanuel aggressively recruited right-leaning candidates, frequently military veterans, including former Republicans. But many of his hand-picked choices fared poorly, losing in general elections. Some even lost in their primaries, to candidates backed by liberals—many of whom won congressional seats resoundingly, even after the D.C.C.C. abandoned them.

Victory, like defeat, can have a hundred fathers, and we can’t know what was ultimately responsible for the Democrats’ success that November. Anger at Republicans for the Iraq War (which Emanuel supported) certainly drove many voters’ decisions. What is indisputable is that the 2006 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the party over time. One of his winners, the football star Heath Shuler, of North Carolina, would not even commit to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and was one of many Rahm recruits to vote against important Obama Administration priorities, like economic stimulus, banking reform, and health care. Many are no longer congressmen. Some Democrats now argue that, in the long run, 2006 might have weakened the Party more than it strengthened it. “Rahm’s recruitment strategy” was “catastrophic,” the retired record executive Howie Klein, who helps run a political action committee that funds liberal congressional challengers, said, and it contributed to the massive G.O.P. majorities we have now, the biggest since the nineteen-twenties.

Yet the media always played up Rahm’s role, creating a legend that never had a basis in reality. And now we all have to suffer the consequences, although nowhere more so than Chicago.

Rahm Emanuel is giving more Tasers to Chicago cops in 2016. It won’t solve a thing.

A pair of police killings on the morning after Christmas has only increased the scrutiny of an embattled mayor who has been under fire over the Homan Square “black site” and the release of the Laquan McDonald video. It was time to make some policy changes to address Chicago’s lack of trust in its own police.

Emanuel on Wednesday announced that every Chicago patrol car will have a Taser. Forty percent of officers will have the training to use them properly, double the current number. “It’s about helping them realize the multitude of responses that are available in a tense situation,” said the mayor. “There’s a difference between when someone can use a gun and when someone should use a gun.”

What could possibly go wrong….

Karen Lewis would have crushed him in the mayoral election. What a tragedy she got sick.