Rahm Emanuel is the former mayor of Chicago and chief of staff to former President Barack Obama. He was also ambassador to Japan under the Biden administration. He is and always has been a political animal, jumping from one position of power to another with an eye on the ultimate prize: the presidency.
With the 2028 race becoming a reality, Emanuel has been positioning himself as the common sense presidential candidate. As the sane candidate. As the guy who rejects all of the patently insane things coming out of his party these days courtesy of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose name is an oxymoron.
He rightly rejects the DSA platform that includes abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, abolishing the presidency, abolishing the Senate, “Medicare for all,” eliminating all student debt, universal rent control, and defunding the Department of War. He thinks impeaching President Donald Trump is pointless, because it is. He has also repeatedly declared in interviews that the socialists need to get their own separate party.
“They are their own party. They had a convention here in Chicago just six weeks ago,” Emanuel noted in an interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press last Sunday.
“They believe in defunding the police. That’s just not a Democratic position. They believe in open borders,” he continued. “That is not a Democratic Party position. They believe in letting prisoners out of prison. That is not a Democratic Party position. If you’re confident that that’s what people want, I’ll see you in November.”
OK, fair enough. But when the conversation turned to foreign policy and conflicts overseas, particularly as it pertains to the Israel-Hamas war and the contention of Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul el Sayed that Israel was carrying out a “genocide” in Gaza, Emanuel showed he had the spine of a jellyfish.
“If you’re going to use that term, then we have to have a conversation about Sudan. We gotta have a conversation about Ukraine. We got to have a conversation about the Armenians,” Emanuel argued. “We got to have a conversation about what happened in Cambodia. Having one conversation about one country means you are politicizing a term that has huge and historic moral obligations.”
“Let me ask you this, because given el Sayed’s position, given how you’re saying how complex this issue is, will you endorse Abdul el Sayed?” Welker asked in response.
“Yeah, it’s a complex issue,” Emanuel replied.
“Will you endorse Abdul el Sayed? Do you support him given that position?” she followed.
“We have massive disagreements. I support the Democrat Party. I support the Democratic candidate. I’ll be going to Michigan again, I’ve been there repeatedly to help the gubernatorial candidate,” Emanuel said without referencing el Sayed by name. “I support the Democratic Party position, because it happens to come up as the Supreme Court Justice Alito said he’s thinking about retiring, and I’m not playing around anymore with what they did under President Obama on the Supreme Court or what this Supreme Court did giving President Trump a get-out-of-jail card as it relates to all the corruption, which is why you’re seeing this.”
“But just to be clear do you…” Welker interrupted as Emanuel clearly attempted to filibuster his way out of answering the original question.
Emanuel: “I just said it, I will support—”
Welker: “Do you support Abdul el Sayed?”
Emanuel: “My support’s not important — I said yes,” Emanuel insisted despite not directly saying he would support el Sayed. “My support is not important. It’s the Michigan voters’ support that’s important. And he needs to work on that and earn their vote.”
Emanuel here sounds like a typical politician not willing to take a stand or definitively pick a side.
It should also be noted that he was raised in a strict Jewish household growing up in Chicago, along with his oldest brother Zeke, a decorated oncologist who went on to serve on the Biden-Harris COVID board. Years prior, Zeke was the architect of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. His youngest brother is Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood superagent portrayed by Jeremy Piven as Ari Gold in the hit HBO series Entourage. And his father served in the Israeli military before coming to the United States.
“If my faith is a problem for you, don’t vote for me,” Emanuel told Welker when asked if the country was ready for a Jewish president. “I’m not changing my faith.”
So if that’s the case, why exactly did Emanuel avoid answering Welker on el Sayed? This is the same candidate who invited the profoundly antisemitic Hasan Piker to Michigan to campaign with him. And if a list of the things Piker has said in the past to show that he is outright hostile to Jews and America in general is needed as a reminder, here you go:
“America deserved 9/11.”
When asked if the U.S. is worse than al Qaeda: “Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes. We have caused tremendous terror all around the world.”
“Jews are inbred.”
“I hate America.”
“I hate cops.”
“Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel.”
“If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
If that isn’t a call to violence, nothing is. In a related story, because Piker has been platformed to share his views in glowing profiles in the New York Times and in interviews with national networks like CNN and MS Now, it’s hard not to connect the dot partially back to the fact that anti-Jewish hate crimes have more than doubled in the past five years, approximately a 125% increase overall, and that number peaked after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas than left more than 1,200 Israelis dead.
“There are 3 million people who listen to Hasan Piker, and I want to offer them a pathway into an electoral movement,” el Sayed recently told ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, basically admitting he’ll condone antisemitism if it means gaining power.
“Here’s this massive effort to cancel Hasan — my point is that I don’t do cancel culture,” he also told radio host Charlamagne tha God.
Emanuel hears all of this and simply doesn’t care. He’s no different than el Sayed in his thirst for power. And if that means fear of not alienating fans of someone as horrible as Piker, apparently power wins over principle and loyalty to his faith every time.
He’s the former mayor of Chicago who once had an approval rating in the low 20s. When he considered running for a third term, a damning survey at the time showed half of voters preferred his resignation instead.
Emanuel wants to run from the center but also needs to cater to the far-left socialist wing of the party, the same wing he says has no business calling themselves Democrats, in order to win in the primaries.
We saw this movie with Michael Bloomberg in 2020, another former mayor of a major city who also attempted to run from the center. Bloomberg spent more than $1 billion of his own money, but it didn’t matter because the loudest voices in the party rejected the same pragmatism from the middle that helped him win three terms in New York City as a centrist.
After 104 days, Bloomberg was gone.
Will Rahm Emanuel suffer the same fate? It’s too early to tell.
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But he needs to decide whether he truly wants to take on the socialists or not, especially considering his upbringing and faith.
Because if history is any indication, trying to play both sides in these situations never ends well.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
