The full title of the New Yorker piece is The Sudden but Well Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel.
The New Yorker piece is instructive because it backs up what I and many people here have been writing regarding who is responsible for destroying the Big D Democratic Party.
Regarding kissing corporate arse and raising corporate money:
Start with the 1992 Presidential campaign. Emanuel persuaded Clinton to prioritize raising money. This, to put it lightly, caught up with him. And while Emanuel was never tied to the fund-raising chicanery involving forgotten names like James Riady, Yah-Lin Trie, and John Huang, it was that zeal for cash that provided Clinton’s Presidency its original taint of scandal. Obsessive fund-raising is also the foundation of Emanuel’s political operation in Chicago. When two reporters for the Chicago Reader filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Mayor’s private schedule in 2011 (unlike previous mayors, his public schedule was pretty much blank), they discovered that he almost never met with community leaders. He did, though, spend enormous blocs of time with the rich businessmen, including Republicans, who had showered him with cash.
It’s not just scandal that’s the problem here. I don’t give a crap whether or not Bill received certain amorous favors from a fangirl while in the White House. There are much larger moral issues and obviously huge moral failures since Bill Clinton was President.
The problem for we progressives is our party doing the exact same things as the GOP, and no amount of silly dancing/excuse making here can obscure this is indeed a big problem, particularly if you’re trying to convince the voters your party is “better/different” than the GOP on major policy issues.
But return to Washington in the early nineteen-nineties, when a grateful Clinton awarded his young charge a prominent White House role. There, Emanuel’s prodigious energy, along with his contempt for what he called “liberal theology,” rocketed him higher and higher into the Clinton stratosphere. “He gets things done,” Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, enthused late in 1996, when Emanuel usurped George Stephanopoulos as senior advisor for policy and strategy. Among his special projects was helping to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and the 1994 crime bill. He also tried to push Clinton to the right on immigration, advising the President, in a memo in November, 1996, to work to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” These all, in the fullness of time, turned out to be mistakes.
NAFTA, in alienating the Party’s working-class base, contributed to the Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives in 1994. As for the crime bill, which included a “three strikes” provision that mandated life terms for criminals convicted of violent crimes even if their other two offenses were nonviolent, Clinton himself has apologized for it, saying that the policy “made the problem worse.” The attempt to out-Republican the Republicans on immigration never took off. Republicans are the party solely associated with vindictive immigration policies, which leaves them in the long-term crisis they’re finding themselves in now—identified as anathema by Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group. If Rahm had had his way, that never would have happened.
The attempt to out-Republican the Republicans on immigration…..
BINGO! Our “political leadership” and I maintain many so called democrats in congress becoming more conservative during Clinton’s Presidency and since then is a total disaster for the democratic party.
Clinton and Emanuel pushing for conservative, stupid policies like the hideous “three strikes” tough on crime legislation and NAFTA, among other conservative policies was just that: stupid. Millions of Americans paid a steep price for these stupid mistakes.
It’s more than difficult be empathize with Mayor Emanuel now that the situation in Chicago has finally reached a tipping point— after decades of the underlying problems being more or less ignored by democratic mayors and administrations.