Editorials & Other Articles

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.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-sudden-but-well-deserved-fall-of-rahm-emanuel

Emanuel’s service in the last two Democratic administrations—as senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and as President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff—was crudely divisive. He went out of his way to stamp on those administrations a neoliberal brand that would haunt the party for decades after he headed off to pursue his own personal and political ambitions. It was Emanuel who was the lead strategist in bitter fights for the North American Free Trade Agreement and a host of other economic arrangements that divided the party against itself and left Democrats vulnerable to attack for selling out working-class Americans. It was Emanuel who battled against an expansive vision of the Affordable Care Act at a time when bold reform was not just possible but necessary. It was Emanuel who was accused of spewing obscenities at union members who wanted to do more to save the domestic auto industry (“Fuck the UAW!”) and at progressives who wanted to ramp up the fight for a public option in the ACA (“fucking retarded”).

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/rahm-emanuel-biden-cabinet-2/

What is it about Emanuel that causes him to leave smashed little pieces of good things in his wake wherever he goes? The answer lies in his core political beliefs, which can be described as an amalgam of every bad right-swinging idea the Democratic Party came up with in the wilderness of the 1990s. Emanuel is every inch the Clintonian Third-Way Democrat; thus, his knack for taking bad Republican ideas and making them worse. In this time of reckoning, when the party has looked back on that era and deemed it mostly a failure, Emanuel clings to the shreds of that ideology like an overboard yacht owner whose boat was devoured by termites and sank out from under him.

A short list of his notable positions over the years includes his staunch support for the Iraq War in 2003, which puts him in company with the president. He has been dogged in his pursuit of a war with Iran and passionate about increasing defense spending whenever the opportunity arises. He is a stalwart supporter of Israel, having served as a civilian volunteer for Israel’s army in the early 1990s. Emanuel has lent vocal support to Israel’s assassination policies as well as its military actions, such as the 2006 attacks on Lebanon that were denounced by Amnesty International.

https://truthout.org/articles/warmonger-rahm-emanuel-is-an-abysmal-choice-for-us-ambassador/