Rahm Emanuel

Farewell to the King (February 23, 2011)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

 

Well, I admit I was hoping for a runoff. I never liked the way Rahm Emanuel’s win in yesterday’s Chicago’s mayoral election was accepted as a foregone conclusion almost from the moment he announced his candidacy. We have spent the last 22 years voting (or not) for a virtually uncontested monarch, Richard M. Daley. To quote myself from the link above, “Mayor Daley may have done great things in terms of beautifying the landscape and attracting new business but anyone who has lived in the city for the last 22 years knows how much damage his interminable term has done: skyrocketing property taxes, unaffordable homes, runway gang crime and terrible fiscal decisions.”

Yesterday’s trip to the polls presented a chance for residents to take their city back, to peacefully foment a revolution, inspired by the examples that are quickly spreading across the Middle East. “Change” has been a political buzzword for several years now, but I am starting to wonder if the citizenry of Chicago is interested in that all. Because now we have Rahmbo. And no matter how young (relative to Daley), good looking and tough he is, is there anyone out there who really believes Rahmbo will make a clean break from The Machine politics of the Daley dynasty? If so, I have an extensive VHS collection I’d like to sell you (valuable vintage!)

I am willing to give Emanuel a chance. In some ways there is much to celebrate in accordance with his trouncing of the competition, earning 55% of the popular vote. We have our first mayor of Jewish descent. And we are spared the indignity of being led by Carol Mosley Braun, whose meager tax returns indicate a woman incapable of running a business (which, make no mistake this city is), and whose mouth suggest a woman incapable of talking sense. I invite Ms. Mosley Braun to crawl back under the pop cultural rock from whence she came.

And if I have mixed feelings about Rahm Emanuel as Chicago’s new mayor (intertwined with my reservations about Bill Daley serving as the President’s new Chief of Staff), I am unequivocally thrilled to be rid of the Daley regime. The AP succinctly contextualizes the long running relationship as follows: “It was the city’s first mayoral race in more than 60 years without an incumbent on the ballot and the first in more than two decades without Daley among the candidates. Daley and his father have led Chicago for more than 43 out of the last 56 years.”

If ever there was an argument for term limits, Daley was it. I was never a fan but I have been forced to stand by idly for two decades as the term “affordable housing” became an oxymoron. Chicago has failing schools, rampant gang activity, and for anyone who raves about all the “beautification” initiatives Daley has undertaken, I invite you to take a trip o the South Side with me. For the most part, the King and his cohorts labored under the misguided impression that the North lakefront was the whole of the city. Coincidently, the North lakefront is where you will find all of Daley’s big and rich contributors. I am sure this is merely coincidence.

No matter who was declared the victor last night, I would be happy because today is 24 hours closer to being able to give Daley and his parking meter lease the boot. And not that this has any impact on his eventual ability to govern, but Rahm is certainly an aesthetic improvement over old Dick, with his trained ballet dancer grace and sexiness.

At least Chicago received some national political attention of the positive kind, rather than the interminable corruption charges, trials and imprisonments of our state governors. I know we have wisely placed a moratorium on the death penalty, but couldn’t we waive it just this once to rid ourselves of Blago? That clown is like the shame gift that keeps on giving (unasked).

Daley? Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. Rahmbo? You better mean it, unlike your former boss, when you say you’re prepared to ask Chicagoans to make the “touch choices” that will bring the city back to fiscal solvency. I’ll be watching.

Rahm Vs. Chuy: How Emanuel’s Divisive Racial Politics Could Clear A Path To Mayoral Victory (April 7, 2015)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

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In September 2013, frustrated urban liberal populists experienced a jolt of genuine excitement with the New York City election of now-Mayor Bill De Blasio. All at once it seemed like the promise of the Occupy Wall Street movement had some real legs. After 12 years and three terms of the Father Knows Best leadership of one percenter Michael Bloomberg, the Big Apple proved it was serious about change.

Residents of “the Second City,” also known as Chicago, Illinois, are waiting with bated breath to find out if we’re having our own De Blasio moment this year. The polls are officially open, with local and national media eyes trained on the runoff Mayoral election between incumbent and former White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, and his opponent, Jesus G. “Chuy” Garcia. Although technically a Democrat and a former top aide to President Obama, frustrated Windy City residents and political dissenters have grown increasingly vocal about Emanuel’s presumptive sovereignty in shuttering public schools, privatizing the city’s public transit system and a host of other issues.

After being outspent by a wide margin and making a late entry into the candidate field, conventional wisdom had Emanuel enjoying a comfortable re-election on February 24. As writerWhet Moser observed for Chicago magazine, “No one, outside of the Garcia camp, seemed to expect he’d survive to a runoff.” Although unions have been weakened by right-wing efforts in recent years, never bet against angry educators and parents when it comes to mobilization.

With Emanuel jolted and on the runoff defensive, Garcia found a big opening to capture the zeitgeist and hand Chicago a populist revolution. On March 3, the South Side Weekly anointed Chuy the “standard-bearer for a movement of Chicagoans deeply distrustful of the Mayor’s claims that he has improved lives over the past four years, [embracing] the notion that Emanuel’s administration embodies the worst of corporate excess that makes victims of ordinary Chicagoans.”

But as any lifelong resident of the Windy City will tell you, racial divides remain. Paradoxically it appears that the white, elitist Emanuel is having an easier time uniting his coalition of African-American supporters than Garcia, a candidate of Mexican descent. If the trend holds, Chicago’s 33 percent black population could play a critical role in handing Emanuel a second stint at City Hall.

On April 3, Julie Bosman of the New York Times wrote Candidate for Chicago Mayor Struggles to Unite Latinos and Blacks. And she wasn’t talking about Rahmbo. She assesses the Chuy problem as such:

“Mr. Garcia’s strategy was to build a coalition of white liberals, blacks and Latinos — angered by Mr. Emanuel’s closing of dozens of schools and supportive of a plan to shift development from its wealthy downtown to poorer neighborhoods.

But a Chicago Tribune poll released Tuesday showed Mr. Emanuel with a commanding lead. He not only has large margins among white voters, but a nearly two-to-one margin among black voters, 53 percent to 28 percent. Mr. Garcia has not been able to increase his share of the black vote.”

What could be driving Garcia’s alienation from the black community? In 1980, Chicago’s Hispanic population stood at 14 percent. 30 years later, it hovers close to 30 percent. Unfortunately what that amounts to is a lot of the same demographic fear and distrust playing out across the country every time the phrase “immigration reform” is dropped.

The Times piece quotes Martha Biondi, chair of the African-American Studies Department at Northwestern University as saying, “Unfortunately, African-American communities in Chicago are faced with extraordinarily high unemployment rates — there’s just an ongoing, really dire economic crisis…And instead of blaming employers or the leaders of the major parties, many people who are suffering will sometimes blame immigrants or working class rivals.”

It would be a real shame if Emanuel, one of the key architects in tilting Chicago’s economy toward the vested interests of the white one percent, ironically profits from his own machinations with a rubber stamp from Chicago’s black community.

Rahm the Inevitable (February 21, 2011)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

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Now that the wide variety of political shenanigans that have come to exemplify the 2011 Chicago mayoral race have been exhausted, it seems there’s nothing left to do but wait for Tuesday’s electoral returns. At that point we may stop referring to former U.S. Congressman and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as the “presumed favorite,” move beyond his Goliath campaign and start seeing the new CEO of Chi-town in action.

After all, there’s no way anyone could take him at this point, right? Rahmbo has five times more campaign funds at his disposal than nearest fiscal competitor, Gery Chico. His slick print ads and television spots depict the handsome, well-dressed former ballet dancer as a family man who cares about the middle class, ready to make the “tough choices” that will put Chicago back on the fast track to claiming its status as an affordable, world class city. A few of his TV plugs contain public endorsements from not one but two U.S. Presidents, current POTUS Barack Obama, as well as immediate predecessor William Jefferson Clinton.

From the moment on October 1, 2010 when Rahm Emanuel formally announced the resignation of his big-time White House post to throw his hat in the ring for the Chicago mayoral race, his candidacy had an almost pre-ordained quality. His name would certainly be the biggest in the contest, and all too often in U.S. politics, bigger means more viable. Rahmbo is a bulldog by reputation, which fits very well with the Windy City’s blue collar, tough guy image, yet he knows how to construct a sentence. The current mayor, Richard M. Daley, speaks with the eloquence of a barely housebroken pitbull, and his constituents (and machine conspirators) love him for it. Emanuel seems positively refined by comparison, no matter how many “f” bombs he drops.

In terms of name recognition, Rahm Emanuel’s only real competition comes in the shape of political hasbeen, former U.S. Senator Carol Mosley Braun. Although ignorance is bliss where Braun’s legislative past is concerned, most Chicagoans over the age of 35 well recall her terrifically tone deaf response to Newsweek contributing editor George Will’s 1998 examination of the various corruption charges against her: “I think because he couldn’t say nigger, he said corrupt.” She went on to compare Will to a Ku Klux Klansman, stating “I mean this very sincerely from the bottom of my heart: He can take his hood and put it back on again, as far as I’m concerned.”

One might labor under the mistaken belief that Mosley Braun has since learned to police the crazy, having undone her career once already. But no, that’s incorrect. Open your web browser and log onto to Google. From there, enter the search term “carol moseley braun crackhead.” What do you see? All the links you can handle reporting a January 30, 2011 incident at a live debate where Senator Braun addressed opposing candidate Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins as follows: “Patricia, the reason you didn’t know where I was for the last 20 years is because you were strung out on crack…Now, you have admitted to that.”

Van Pelt-Watkins had of course, admitted to no such thing, but move over Whitney Houston. The legendary singer’s 2006 utterance to journalist Diane Sawyer that “crack is whack” was heretofore the most infamous commentary regarding the illegal substance.

So yeah, with opposition of this ilk, Rahm Emanuel’s path to the mayor’s office has been relatively smooth sailing. I do not mean to suggest, with this review of Carol Mosley’s Braun’s uninterrupted political gaffes, that Emanuel faces no serious challengers. He certainly does. It’s just that former Richard M. Daley Chief of Staff Gery Chico and City Clerk Miguel del Valle, both respected public servants, cannot complete with the sexy, baby kissing, cash flush spectacle of Emanuel.

The thing is though, I think many residents of Chicago have grown tired of being told who their leaders will be before having the chance to evaluate. Though the town has never done much to dispel it’s reputation as a one-party, corrupt patronage operation, much like the recent liberation of Egypt by its own democracy-staved citizens, I smell a similar passion for change in the Midwest air. Three ex-governors in the last 35 years have been sent to the clink, and a fourth, Rod Blagojevich, is surely on his way. Mayor Daley may have done great things in terms of beautifying the landscape and attracting new business but anyone who has lived in the city for the last 22 years knows how much damage his interminable term has done: skyrocketing property taxes, unaffordable homes, runway gang crime and terrible fiscal decisions.

Though change is in the air in one form or another, is there anyone naive enough to believe that Rahmbo will represent a clean break from The Machine? I am still having a hard time digesting the coincidental swap of Rahm Emanuel for Bill Daley, the outgoing mayor’s younger brother, as the President’s Chief of Staff. No, there’s nothing suspect about that at all.

With Rahm demonstrating a commanding lead in the polls, 49 percent of the popular vote to Chico’s 19, it seems pointless to consider an outcome other than his total domination at the polls this week. But wait! For those of us perversely hoping for a dark horse spoiler (and no, Carol Mosley Braun, before you even start, that is not racist), we do have the prospect of a runoff. In order to prevent a general election showdown between Rahmbo and the number two finisher, the foul mouthed one needs at least 51 percent of the vote. 49 just won’t do. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that some hard last minute campaigning by Chico and del Valle (who has my vote) will prevent Emanuel from sailing into City Hall on Wednesday. Run-offs are generally not the friend of front-runners because they allow time and opportunity for a once splintered opposition to develop a united front.

However unlikely, as a lover of democracy residing in a city that doesn’t see a lot of balanced elections, that’s what I’d like to see happen. I want Rahmbo, if he is indeed our mayor-to-be, to have to sweat it out at a bit more than he has. Those lame residency challenges, which Emanuel continued to swat away like pesky mosquitoes, do not satisfy the appetite for electoral combat. After 22 years of Daley hostage-taking, Chicago deserves a real fight for its future.