Rahm slayer Jesus "Chuy" Garcia.
Brilliant
Nixonland and
Before the Storm author Rick Perlstein has penned the
definitive guide to Rahm Emanuel's mayorship and re-election bid, and it's not pretty.
He starts with the revelations that taking a page out of the worst of the CIA excesses, the Chicago police have a secret detention facility. Then there's his school board appointees profiting from school closures, like "the Emanuel school board appointee who runs an investment fund for companies that privatize school functions." Moving on, he discusses how 60 of Emanuel's top 106 contributors received special favors from the city, and how his public schools CEO juked graduation rate statistics, and how he used Rovian tactics to turn his progressive opponents' best strength (their reformer creds and populist record) against them. Seriously, it's a must read if you want to get on your Rahm hate, and who doesn't? The guy is a real piece of shit.
Yet despite having the advantages of incumbency and near-universal name ID, despite spending $7 million of his $15 million war chest on TV, despite having President Barack Obama stump for him ... he still got only 45 percent of the vote, with his opponents racking up a combined 55 percent.
As a Bulls fan, I've watched Rahm's constant barrage of television ads on the popular game broadcasts, so I noticed him going hard negative against his top challenger Jesus "Chuy" Garcia a few weeks ago. It was a curious turn of events, with polls showing Rahm near the 50 percent mark he'd need to avoid a runoff. It was a sign that things weren't looking good for him. You don't go negative unless you absolutely have to.
In Chicago this past weekend, I once again saw the near-saturation levels of Rahm propaganda, on TV, on billboards, everywhere you looked, seemingly. But sitting in a cab, heading out to the United Center to catch a game with my son on our father-son trip, the cabbie had on a soul station. And an ad came on, narrated by the popular Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teacher's Union, "the mayor has closed a record number of schools, 90 percent in our Latino and black neighborhoods."
Bam! It was a direct hit, feeding not just into anger over the school closings, but the blatant inequities in the decision to do so. In racially polarized Chicago, you can see in these maps by our elections team just how much Rahm suffered in non-white neighborhoods. Chuy spent less than 1/10th what Rahm did, yet notched a solid 34 percent second place, with other liberal candidates taking the rest. Rahm is wounded and vulnerable.
But you know what they say about wounded and cornered assholes animals, right? Chuy already faced $450K in negative ads from a superpac allied with Rahm, expect that to go up by multiples. But as the first round showed, all the money in the world couldn't buy Rahm love. And all his negative hits on Chuy didn't kill him. But will six more weeks of going nuclear on his opponent do the trick? That's the big question, because it's about to get REAL ugly in Chicago.
But as we saw the first round, money won't decide this. We don't need to outraise Rahm. We just need enough so that Chuy can get his message out. This is our chance to take stock of everything that Rahm Emanuel has done to our party and progressive politics over the past decade, and then say "fuck you" by throwing $3 into Garcia's campaign.