One story that was perhaps overshadowed by Donald Trump’s incessant bluster this week was the fervent call by Chicago residents, Black Lives Matter activists, and others for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s resignation.
If protesters empowered by the BLM movement manage to take down Rahm, it will mark the symbolic surrender of Clinton-era centrism to the newer more unapologetic progressivism of Obama-era movements. The former was a vision, conceived in the Clinton White House and carried forward by Democratic lawmakers, that sought to rein in the natural impulses of liberals in order to make Democrats more palatable to a wider swath of voters. The latter is an unabashed call for our political leaders to meet the urgent needs of the moment, regardless of how that plays at the ballot box.
Few people better epitomize the old-guard centrist thinking than Rahm Emanuel. A student of Bill Clinton’s political education—his failures and his successes—Rahm came to disdain much of the Democratic base and he didn’t mind showing it. His attack-dog instincts were often aimed at anyone who dared to insist on accomplishing real Democratic initiatives.
In 2007, he declared immigration reform a political pariah.
"For the American people, and therefore all of us, it's emerged as the third rail of American politics,” Emanuel said.
When Attorney General Eric Holder made the mistake early in 2009 of suggesting the Obama administration would push to re-up the assault-weapons ban, Rahm sent him a message: “shut the fuck up.”
He also “begged” President Obama not to set his sights on achieving health care reform. When Obama insisted, he turned his fury on progressive activists who were prepping ads against conservative Democrats standing in the way of the health care effort.
"F—ing retarded," Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants. He warned them not to alienate lawmakers whose votes would be needed on health care and other top legislative items.
Well, whatever political leverage Rahm once wielded in Washington has been stripped away in Chicago by his reprehensible mishandling of the Laquan McDonald shooting. Rahm went from trying to keep the video under wraps, to expressing befuddlement at the horrific footage he claimed to have first seen just last month, to firing the police chief, to delivering an impassioned apology this week during an address to the city council.
It’s all too little, too late, protesters told NPR’s David Schaper this week.
NATAKI RHODES: We out here because we're demanding justice.
SCHAPER: And by justice, 43-year-old Nataki Rhodes means more than just the murder charge in the Laquan McDonald shooting. She wants more resources and better opportunities in neighborhoods such as hers on Chicago's South Side. Mayor Rahm Emanuel's impassioned address, in which he got choked up, didn't impress.
RHODES: I cry, too, every time my nephew get locked up. I cry, too, every time somebody gets shot in Chicago.
Another protester, Douglass Bevel, dismissed Rahm’s “crocodile tears,” calling them “not genuine to me.”
On Wednesday, a bill to recall Emanuel was filed in the State House by Rep. LaShawn Ford, a Chicago Democrat. And guess what, it turns out the mayor’s press office knew about the video as early as December 2014, a couple of months after the shooting.
Rahm Emanuel is quickly losing his grip on a local incident with national implications that might be much bigger than many people realize. If he is ultimately held to account by a core part of the Democratic base that lawmakers like him have been taking for granted for years, it could usher in a new day in Washington.
No one better represents the ethos of letting electoral politics trump liberal ideals than Rahm, who carried the Clinton torch into the Obama White House. The disappointment of many progressives in those first two years of Obama’s presidency helped inspire a new mindset among liberal activists in the DREAM, climate change, minimum wage, LGBT, and now BLM movements. They are no longer content to let Democratic lawmakers trade the urgency of their issues for votes at the ballot box.
The ouster of Rahm would send shivers through old-guard Democrats on Capitol Hill and perhaps even Hillary herself. The ‘90s way of doing things is fast becoming a losing proposition in an era where progressive movements refuse to subordinate their goals in service of Democratic gains. These movements are committed to an ideal more so than to a party or a politician—something that Rahm Emanuel is learning firsthand as he fights for his political life in the streets of Chicago.