Among a certain class of politics reporters and pundits, the single most legitimizing thing a Democratic politician can be is “loathed by everyone younger than, browner than, or to the ideological left of James Carville.” Safer by far than engaging with a politician’s policies, ideology, or track record is to simply take an index of how liberal and progressive types feel about him. Do they hate his guts? Then he is serious. Look out, bleeding hearts and socialist teens! This guy does not have time for any namby-pamby “believing in stuff” crap; he recognizes The Stakes. He gets that some things are just too important to approach in principled or intellectually serious ways.
This reflects at least two tidal forces in America’s legacy politics press. One is that it is largely peopled by weenie meritocrat twerps whose families have done quite well in the system as it exists; they would never dream of anything as gauche or tacky as being Republicans, but they also do not want the alternative to entail any commitment to actually changing the basic arrangement of power and privilege in American society. Better to set the leftmost edge of the Overton Window at “means-tested private-school tuition-refund vouchers for the minor children of any U.S. citizen who starts a woman- or minority-owned small business and runs it for at least 18 months in a neighborhood with population density higher than that of Jackson Hole, Wyo., and with a median per-capita household income less than 66.6 percent of that of the wealthiest census tract within 12.5 miles, provided the children commit to founding a woman- or minority-owned company within 18 months of college graduation,” and then police that boundary vigorously.
The other deranging impulse, closely related, is the legacy press’s addiction to horserace-style political analysis. The Detested Center-Right Ghoul is both a fellow adherent to and the physical embodiment of the idea that all that matters, in an election, is detecting which candidate everybody else—imagined uniformly as rubes and ignoramuses with doctrinaire Reaganite values, a wary and incoherent pink mass oscillating at all times between credulity and cynicism—will fall for, and then scolding anybody who attempts to complicate that candidate’s path to victory by starting a conversation about what they’d like government to actually do beyond rewarding election winners with jobs. You can cover Gavin Newsom, for example, without the tricky business of interrogating beliefs and policy ideas: He has none, and regards the entire concept of having any as self-evidently foolish.
Finally there is the deeply poisonous belief (which, stick around, you will see it brought to vivid life in the comments below this post), epidemic among Democrat voters for my whole adult life, that pre-compromising is always the smartest, savviest move. You can identify the sober grownups by their rejection of pie-in-the-sky “purity tests” such as “Does this person who wants to represent me in government agree with me on literally anything?” or “Is this candidate offering in even the vaguest terms to do something that I think would serve the common good?” in favor of going I dunno, this guy has good hair and teeth and everyone else in this country is stupider than I am. From this perspective, you can identify the canny congressional tacticians by their having written the opposition’s desires into the bill before it even came up for debate, instead of foolishly trying to accomplish their own goals. The surest way to be right in your belief that better things are not possible is to not only assume their defeat, but to pursue it, tactically, yourself.
By these standards, the former Chicago mayor, congressman, ambassador, and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is something like a unicorn to this class of reporters and pundits. He produces that necessary violent revulsion in every living person except for the 150 or so centrist media types who think producing violent revulsion in everyone is the mark of an invincible (or merely important) presidential candidate, plus a handful of extremely rich guys who shuffle out of their crypts every four years to keep egalitarianism out of the White House. For another, Emanuel vocally despises everything that anybody might want the Democratic Party to stand for beyond the rankest McKinseyan cynicism. He transparently holds every possible Democratic Party constituency in open contempt, with the crucial exception of some number of imaginary Republican voters who might be enticed to switch sides by the promise that meritocratic competence will finally fulfill all their party’s goals. For these reasons, and for his relentless self-promotion, the politics press has been tossing Emanuel’s name into Democratic presidential fields since Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012. Voters have been persistent about tossing it right back, but it is still happening.
To some extent Emanuel’s broad unpopularity could be a problem for the project of moving him to the center of the 2028 presidential field: YouGov has him as the 78th-most popular Democrat, significantly less popular than Harry Reid, who has been dead for five years. The mission, however, is not to make anybody like Rahm Emanuel, which is convenient since that’s impossible. The mission is to make him seem inevitable—to convince voters that, behind the scenes, in rooms they couldn’t get into, people of vast power and seriousness regard Rahm Emanuel as the heavyweight in the field. Specifically because he is so personally vile and so lavishly unloved, Emanuel becomes the ideal candidate to push upon a populace reasonably terrified that four more years of MAGA governance could be a death sentence to civilization itself. He is, you see, Not The Hero We Deserve, But The Hero We Need, Or At Any Rate The Hero We Are Going To Get One Way Or Another.
You must work with what you have at some point. Rahm Emanuel is a vicious scumbag; he tried to cover up a police murder as mayor of Chicago, opposed a federal investigation into his city’s policing tactics after that murder, and finished his term with approval ratings in the 20s; nobody likes him; nearly everybody forced to spend any kind of time in close proximity to him in fact hates the guy. Well that must be because of how Tough and Determined he is. Here is a man who will not allow such frivolities as decency, accountability, or “what the people who elected him to office want done” to stand in the way of getting things done. Here is a pit fighter, the nasty bastard called for by a moment such as this. Here is a man who, as the lede of another new feature story reports, will absolutely slaughter a fucking salad:
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — This is how Rahm Emanuel eats a salad: He rips open its clear, clamshell container with two hands. He grabs the ramekin of the dressing. He pours it across the salad. Then he picks up the salad container, shaking it with an intensity and ferocity that forces the balsamic throughout, giving no quarter to the greens and the grilled chicken.
This is material information, mind you, for his would-be 2028 Democratic presidential primary rivals. Because how Rahm eats a salad is how he does anything and everything: with intent and with verve and without mercy.
That is from Politico‘s Adam Wren, dancing at absolute light speed on Rahm Emanuel’s behalf. Quake where you stand, aspiring 2028 Democratic presidential nominees! Do you wish to be shaken, metaphorically, hard enough to move metaphorical balsamic vinegar from one part of your metaphorical body to another? Do you wish for your metaphorical greens and grilled chicken to be given no quarter? This is what you face when you stand athwart Rahm Emanuel in the crucible of a national campaign. You are but a clamshell container full of romaine to this man; he looks at you and sees Chopt’s Chile Lime Caesar Salad waiting to be consumed.
Other politicians are out here showing mercy to their salads; they are not eating their salads with intent and verve. Some of them are not shaking their salad around at all! Has their salad been forced to submit by the time they eat it? No! And if they cannot discipline a salad, how can they hope to discipline the impudent woke left? They cannot!
Here you might observe that a salad eaten “with intent and verve and without mercy” is no more eaten at the end of its eating than a salad eaten with, say, serenity and calm but expert use of utensils. You might wonder what it would look like to eat a salad with mercy, given that all its ingredients are already dead, and given furthermore that it is a salad. You might observe that a behavior accurately characterized as shaking a bowl for a few seconds can just as easily be adduced to impatience, compulsive violence, or not having thought to grab a plastic fork from the bin by the cash register as to sexier-seeming things like intent, verve, and mercilessness, whereas the choice of the latter in an article you are writing about a politician is much more easily interpreted. You might further observe that Donald Trump has consumed nothing but fast-food sandwiches, white rice, Diet Coke, and prescription drugs in the past seven decades and now wields almost completely unchecked power over the whole of the U.S. government, and so maybe there’s really not all that much to learn about a guy’s leadership capacities by watching him go sicko mode vis-a-vis applying dressing to a premade salad kit. (Here you might also observe, somewhat parsimoniously, that ripping open a container, pouring dressing in there, and shaking it is not actually “eating” a salad at all, and so it’s actually not how Rahm Emanuel eats a salad but rather how he prepares one.)
All of that is only because you are missing the point, which is that Rahm Emanuel is uhh basically Rorschach from Watchmen:
The 2028 Democratic presidential field—whether they realize it or not—has a Rahm Emanuel problem. His campaign is likely to be a rolling Sister Souljah moment for the Democratic Party’s left-leaning orthodoxy, particularly on social issues. His pugilism and his critique of the party’s leftward lurch will create a gauntlet his would-be rivals will have to navigate. And years in politics—plus countless hours on CNN—have helped him further hone his sharp-edged debate blade.
A thing I like to do sometimes with a sentence or a paragraph that I read is to think of another way of expressing the same information. It can help me to suss out the writer’s priors, or my own. Here we have: Rahm Emanuel is a dickhead who is badly out of touch with the party whose nomination for president he seeks; also he hasn’t had any job in over a year, which has given him plenty of time to study the way of the blade or whatever. Also, Adam Wren doesn’t know the difference between “gauntlet” and “gantlet.”
Anyway, Rahm Emanuel will not be the 2028 Democratic nominee for president. Have a good one.