Wall Street’s Favorite Democrat

Rahm Emanuel is all over the op-ed pages, on podcasts and speaking engagements, warning of the dangerous influence of liberals on the Democratic Party. The Wall Street Journal has given him a quasi-regular column to tout his platform.

His pitch is a blend of anodyne criticisms of Trump, improbable technical gimmicks that won’t change America’s warped distribution of power, and potshots at liberals. His latest Wall Street Journal column is titled, “Trump’s Research Cuts Play into China’s Hands.” Well, yes.

A signature Emanuel proposal is a mandatory retirement age of 75 for presidents, cabinet officials, members of Congress, and federal judges (which would achieve what exactly?). And good luck getting it done. Incidentally, Emanuel is 66 today and would be 69 on Inauguration Day 2029, which means his proposal would limit him to one term.

A favorite one-liner is the supposed obsession of liberals with transgender bathrooms. “I am done with the discussion of bathrooms—and we better start having a conversation about the classroom,” he likes to say. At a fundraiser in Birmingham, Michigan, he declared, “We weren’t very good in this last election at the kitchen table … The only room we occupied in the house was the bathroom—and it’s the smallest room in the house.”

This tactic, aping Republican talking points, allows Emanuel to duck where he stands on more urgent economic issues where regular working people are being crushed by the power of Emanuel’s Wall Street allies, which won’t be fixed by such Emanuel proposals as better targeting of the investment tax credit.

In March, Politico’s Adam Wren followed Emanuel around on a factory tour in Michigan and wrote a puff piece titled, “Democrats have a Rahm Emanuel Problem.” The smitten Wren declared, “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.”

Except that Emanuel, for all of his self-promotion, doesn’t even register on presidential preference polls. His is a candidacy for president of the Wall Street Journal editorial page—and nowhere else.

Emanuel has been cagey and disingenuous about whether he is running, telling a questioner at the annual Milken conference last week, “If I were running for president, I wouldn’t announce it here.”

On June 5, he will begin a bicycle tour of New Hampshire (of all places), cycling 113 miles from Portsmouth to Hanover and talking to voters along the way. “I just feel like this gives me the chance to see New Hampshire up close before all the craziness (of the presidential primary) starts,” Emanuel told Yahoo News, adding that New Hampshire is lovely in June. Sure.

But Emanuel’s timing is terrible. As primaries keep demonstrating, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party keeps getting its clock cleaned. PACs associated with crypto and AI and Israel keep finding that money can’t buy you love. This dynamic will only increase as more and more rank-and-file Democrats get engaged in electoral battles.

Despite all the money that corporate Democrats spend to take over the nominal party of the people, they are losing altitude while authentic leaders like Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner combine personal charisma with a compelling narrative and policy ideas that would make a real difference.

Emanuel epitomizes everything that’s wrong with corporate Democrats. And it’s worth recalling his own rise.

He began as a White House fundraiser and staffer for Bill Clinton, where he was a champion of Clinton’s balanced budget agenda. In late 1998, Emanuel’s White House contacts helped him get a lucrative job in the Chicago office of the investment banking firm Wasserstein Perella & Company, where he would make more than $18 million in just two and a half years, and even more Wall Street contacts, before running for a seat in Congress in 2002.

By 2006, after serving just two terms, he became head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where his strategy was to recruit corporate Democrats to run for Congress and raise lots of corporate money. He made sure that they would take seats on the House Financial Services Committee, the better to raise even more corporate money. He then became Barack Obama’s chief of staff, where he was on the wrong side of the fiscal and regulatory issues that led Obama to be a far more centrist president than he might have been, paving the road to Trump.

When Barney Frank, as the Financial Services committee chair, was working to pass what became the Dodd-Frank bill in 2010, Emanuel had larded up the committee with so many corporate Democrats that Frank had lost control of his own committee, resulting in watered-down reform legislation. The leader of the corporate Democrats on the committee was Emanuel’s close ally Melissa Bean of Illinois, who will be returning to Congress, one of the few corporate Democrats this year to win a primary, in a fractured field.

Emanuel went on to be elected mayor of Chicago, where he had a badly blemished two terms, and then was appointed by Joe Biden as ambassador to Japan. I can’t prove it, but since there was no love lost between Biden and Emanuel, the appointment had all the hallmarks of a phone call to Biden from one Barack Obama.

Emanuel, as a prospective corporate Democrat presidential nominee, is bad news. The good news is that he is likely to be trounced.