Rahm Emanuel—former campaign operative, Illinois congressman, White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor, and ambassador to Japan—is likely to run for president. You don’t have to support his campaign or even like him to see that he has important ideas that Democrats must grapple with, starting with the weight the party should place on identity politics.
Rahm grew up near me in Chicago but we didn’t meet until 1991, when he was already a top aide in Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. I covered him in the Nineties and early 2000s for Newsweek and NBC News, included a chapter about him, entitled “Rahmbo,” in my book about Barack Obama’s first year as president, and wrote about his debut as mayor for the Atlantic.
By proposing that no president, member of Congress or Supreme Court Justice can serve past age 75, Rahm has already assured that age limits will be an issue in the 2028 campaign. My guess is that almost all of the other candidates will feel obliged to endorse some form of this good idea, as will Democratic candidates for Congress, and it will become an historic law in 2029. The requirement would limit Rahm, now 66, to one term, which makes it seem (almost) like an act of selflessness.
I’m not a Cornell graduate, but I spoke recently at the New York Cornell Club about my FDR book. Rahm isn’t a Cornell grad either, but he answered questions at the same event from former Representative Steve Israel and the audience about the midterms, the future of the Democratic Party and how he would “powerwash” Washington. Excerpts:
RAHM EMANUEL:
If Democrats win the House, which I believe they will, what they do between 2026 and 2028 will determine not just whether we win the White House, but whether our relationship with the public becomes transformational rather than transactional.
Ken Martin and the DNC should be living in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There shouldn’t be a single empty spot on the ballot, from school board to governor. If there isn’t a Democrat on every line, riding the wave of 2026, the whole operation deserves to be whupped. This election is a wave election. You build school boards, you build a farm team, and you organize early in the places that will decide 2028.
Remember this: We’ve had three elections in a row where just 600,000 Americans in seven states decided who runs the country. We should have started a year ago, but at a minimum, before filing deadlines close, every office should be contested. All you’re going to hear about is US senators. I want to hear about school boards. Look at the attention paid to a public utility commissioner race in Georgia. Most people didn’t even know the job existed, but it told you more about Georgia’s governor and Senate races than any national chatter.
“…the economy collapsed, built on liar loans everyone knew were rotten. People lost their homes and life savings, while bankers screamed that they deserved their bonuses.”
That’s what I mean by transformational versus transactional. Something important is happening. In Georgia, a former Republican lieutenant governor is running in the Democratic primary. In Florida, a former Republican congressman is running as a Democrat for governor. At 20,000 feet, these are George Bush Republicans deciding their future is with the Democratic Party. If we’re smart, we open our arms and bring them in. The coalitions are reshuffling in real time.
STEVE ISRAEL:
You won the House majority for Democrats as chair of the DCCC in 2006, in part because you had an almost freaky intuition about swing voters—not base voters in Brooklyn, New York, but voters in places like Brooklyn, Iowa. We keep hearing that Democrats don’t have a message. As you travel the country, in Mississippi and elsewhere, what are you hearing now from voters who’ve gone back and forth, who voted for Biden and then for Trump?
RAHM EMANUEL:
To understand why voters are angry, look at the last 25 years. There have been four pivotal moments when American politics went off its axis.
First, we lost thousands of young men and women in a war built on a lie. Thousands more were maimed for life. We spent a trillion dollars, and no one who sold that lie was ever held accountable, not legally, not morally. Kids dead, kids maimed, a trillion dollars gone, while the people responsible landed at universities, on boards, in think tanks, writing opinion columns with no sense of shame or guilt or accountability
Second, four years later, the economy collapsed, built on liar loans everyone knew were rotten. People lost their homes and life savings, while bankers screamed that they deserved their bonuses. A two-by-four is what they deserved. And with rare exception, they never paid a professional price.
Third, four years after that, Xi Jinping came to power in China and said plainly, “We’re not strategic competitors, we’re strategic adversaries.” Meanwhile, elites in Washington, New York, and Boston keep calling China a competitor. Xi tells us exactly what the game is, and we still miss it. We catch on late, miss a beat or two, and we leave places like Battle Creek [Michigan] to face Beijing on their own. The elites feel fine. Everybody else gets the shaft.
Fourth, Covid hits. Those who can comfortably work from home do. Everyone else, labeled “essential,” has to show up. As a former mayor who ran a 400,000-student school district where 83 percent of households live in poverty, I can tell you this: Within six months, the science was clear that kids needed [to be] and could be back in school with zero health risks. But because of political weakness, we kept them out for two years. No one wanted to say, “get back into the classroom.”
At each of these moments, you can point and say, that changed our politics. I’m not claiming these are the only four, but they are mine. And together, they explain why people feel the system is broken. At every point in my view of the last 25 years, you can look and say this was a pivotal moment. I’m not saying these are the only four, but when I leave here, they’re going to continue to be my four.
Those four moments changed our politics. When Bill Clinton left the White House, America was at the peak of Pax Americana: peace, prosperity, 300,000 more manufacturing jobs, and unmatched global respect. It was a unipolar world. Twenty-five years later, it was gone. Spent.
Let me say this plainly, especially here in New York. The people I met in Mississippi have a reason to be angry. They got the shaft. Their kids join the Marines and come back with one leg. People on Wall Street made it. Don’t lecture me about why you just had to vote for someone [Trump] who breaks the law or attacks universities and research institutions. You made it. You should be full of gratitude. You are so self-absorbed.
My family came here more than 100 years ago. My grandfather was 15, working Maxwell Street in Chicago [the West Side neighborhood of Jewish peddlers]. America is a gift. We’re the luckiest people in the world. I’m a full member of the lucky sperm club. That’s why I have two kids in the armed forces. You give something back to this country.
But kids in places like Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, and Racine have a reason to be angry. People who made it to the top don’t. And too many of them, in my view, have turned on this country. Our job is to understand that through middle-class economics and middle-class values. People know something is off. They want someone to set it right—and to understand why they’re angry.
Our [upper middle class] kids are fine. But you go around the country, and you meet people who worked hard, played by the rules, saved money, bought a house, paid for their kids’ education—and they’re stuck. As I like to say, paranoid people have enemies, too. This country screwed them. We screwed them. And we were comfortable as long as our own kids were comfortable. They have a right to be angry, and our job is to understand that and fix it
You don’t have to go back 50 years to see it. Fifteen years ago, the average first-time homebuyer was 26. Today it’s 40. You know where the down payment went? Student loans. The average graduate now leaves school with $36,000 in debt. That [loan] was supposed to be the passport to the middle class. Instead, it tracks you—and keeps you stuck in the basement.
“When Bill Clinton left the White House, America was at the peak of Pax Americana: peace, prosperity, 300,000 more manufacturing jobs, and unmatched global respect. It was a unipolar world. Twenty-five years later, it was gone.”
STEVE ISRAEL:
You spoke eloquently—maybe even angrily—about the broken bargain, and rightly so. You’ve served as ambassador, mayor, and in other senior roles, and you’ve seen urgent needs as well as moments that gave you hope. Right now, what is America’s most urgent need, and what gives you the deepest hope about our future?
RAHM EMANUEL:
My greatest fear and hope are this: I don’t think the country—the public—has given up on America, and that gives me a lot of hope. My greatest fear—and this is where the two are heads and tails of the same coin—is that the moment the American dream becomes unaffordable is exactly when our politics becomes unstable.
The public hasn’t given up on America, but we have a responsibility to restore their faith in why America is right. And I want to circle back to Mississippi on this point: There is no challenge America faces today that can’t be cured by what’s already working in America.
As mayor of Chicago, we were the first city where a B average in high school meant community college was free. We got 50 percent of our kids to graduate high school with college credit. And most importantly, you couldn’t get a diploma without showing us a letter of acceptance to a four-year college, community college, the armed forces, or a vocational program. You weren’t walking [In commencement] until you told us what you were walking to.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1:
I want to ask about the rise of independents. More people are leaving both parties and registering as independents, and in places like Montana, we’re even seeing Democrats run as independents because they say the brand is broken. What do we do about that?
RAHM EMANUEL:
You’re right that people are leaving both parties, but the fastest-growing category isn’t a party at all—it’s unaffiliated. That movement is concentrated among voters under 30. As you go up the age ladder, it fades. As you go down, it accelerates. And under Donald Trump, the fastest departure from the Republican Party has been voters under 30, across all races and ethnicities.
The second premise is this: Our party has to understand that this is a generational battle, not an election-cycle battle. The reason our brand is in trouble—and I’ve been very upfront about this publicly—is that we chose to take on a set of issues based on two very faulty premises.
First, if you respond to identity politics just because the other side does, you’re making a strategic mistake. There’s more identity politics on their side than on ours, so you’re guaranteed to lose. And if you look at election after election—Clinton, Obama, Biden, Harris—identity does not produce voter loyalty. Nothing does. If it did, someone [Trump] calling Hispanics rapists and murderers would never get elected. The facts don’t bear it out. It’s dumb strategically, and it doesn’t work electorally.
Second, we chose a set of cultural issues that put us in the minority. I’ve said this repeatedly: Enough about bathroom access, start talking about classroom excellence. People send their kids to school for education—classrooms, reading, math—not bathrooms. That may shock some people in our party. I signed the bathroom access bill in 2016 as mayor. Fine. But we never let it distract us from graduation rates, reading scores, and math scores. As a party, we walked ourselves into a cultural cul-de-sac. On an 80/20 issue, we decided to take the 20. In my view, that’s crazy.
One last thing. In presidential politics, this is how parties define themselves. Bill Clinton drew a line with Sister Souljah—it became a metaphor. He was willing to say “no” to a [recording] artist who talked about killing cops and white people. Barack Obama confronted his own pastor, Reverend Wright, after remarks that were ugly and divisive. Obama said directly [to black audiences] that it’s easy to father a child but hard to be his father. John Kennedy went to Texas and said, “I will not be a Catholic president—I’ll be a president who happens to be Catholic, and I won’t take direction from the Pope.”
“Enough about bathroom access, start talking about classroom excellence. People send their kids to school for education—classrooms, reading, math—not bathrooms.”
All three of our most successful electoral presidents—I’m leaving Lyndon Johnson out because that’s a different phenomenon—were willing to say no to a member of their own family. Nobody gives you the keys to the Oval Office if you can’t tell someone in the family no. And if you can’t do that, you’re sure as hell not going to be able to tell Putin no. We’re living through that right now.
Our party has to understand how to ground itself not just in middle-class economics, but in middle-class values. For Democrats, that’s the prerequisite for getting your economic message heard. You can scream “free” this and “free” that all you want [referring to Palestine]. You’re sitting in a city right now where a mayor walked away from his own state-senate record—defund the police, police are racist, all of it—because he knew if he talked about that, nobody would hear what he had to say about the cost of living and childcare. I’m using shorthand, but the point stands.
Our most successful presidents were grounded in a clear set of values and interests. I joke about this, but I mean it: As a party recently, we weren’t very good on kitchen-table issues. We weren’t very good in the family room either. The only room we occupied was the bathroom—and it’s the smallest room in the house. Focus on the other two rooms, and we’ll do fine.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2:
Your idea of 75 and out [Emanuel has proposed that politicians should retire at 75] takes care of the upper part of the age equation. What about the extremists, particularly in our party, and the other party as well?
RAHM EMANUEL:
I’ve approached politics the same way my whole life. Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe we’re entering a different period. I’m not left of center—I’m center left. As Bill Clinton used to say, the only thing in the middle of the road is a dead armadillo.
I think your question is really about extremism in both parties. One thing I used to say to myself as mayor—and to President Obama—is, “don’t ever confuse sound with fury.” Sometimes it’s just sound. A good politician knows the difference.
And I’m not sure the premise is right. Look at the New Jersey Democratic primary for governor. Five candidates: the mayor of Newark on the progressive end, the mayor of Jersey City on the progressive end, the head of the largest teachers union, and two members of Congress—one a moderate New Democrat, the other a conservative Blue Dog. Those two members of Congress, the most conservative of the five, got 49 percent of the vote combined.
In Virginia, in the primary to replace Gerry Connolly, there were 11 candidates. The most conservative candidate, a county commissioner, won with 59 percent.
So when people say, “the left would like to kill me,” I don’t buy that moderates don’t exist. They do. You just have to give them someone who rings their bell. And don’t assume that sound equals fury. Sometimes it’s just someone lonely in their basement in their underwear.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3:
You mentioned David Jolly, a former Republican running as a Democrat in Florida. In races today, there are only about 20 truly competitive districts, because in most places, candidates are more afraid of being primaried than of losing the general election. How do we address that problem?
RAHM EMANUEL:
I’d go to ranked [choice] voting. The reason you need ranked voting is that it opens up the discussion to voters who don’t vote in primaries. [RCV is used in Alaska and Maine but was rejected in 2024 in Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, and Missouri].
One thing I’ve said to the DNC is this: New Hampshire allows moderate independents and Republicans to vote in its primary. My view is that this should be a standard for being one of the first ten states. If unaffiliated independents are 50 percent of the electorate, maybe you say, come on, let’s go to the dance together. Because if the primary decides who you’re going to nominate and you’re not thinking about the general election, that’s not strategic.
One way or another, I’m thinking the Democratic Party either goes to ranked voting, which opens up debate and dialogue to voters who don’t get addressed until it’s too late, or changes primaries across the country so those [independent] voters actually get a chance to show up, be heard, and be counted.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 4:
Building on your point about sound versus fury, there seems to be a split in the Democratic Party—moderates who vote in early primary states like South Carolina and Iowa, and activists who dominate social media and cable news. If you were advising a presidential candidate, how do you break through in the primary without creating an enthusiasm gap later, as we saw in 2016, or overcorrecting in 2020?
RAHM EMANUEL:
I think candor and authenticity will have currency and will stand out. Where you stand out in the first three [primaries] is not where you will be when it thins out to the last four. The last time we really had a debate about tomorrow, not yesterday, was 2008, both as a party between then-Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, and also eventually Senator Obama versus Senator McCain. But that was the last time we did so as a country.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 5:
You talked about angst and people feeling stuck, and I want to use myself as an example. I haven’t had a job in a year and a half. I’ve had all the advantages—education and everything else—and it still feels like the world is leaving us behind. So my question is this: What happens over the next four, eight, ten years for people in my age cohort—white-collar and light blue-collar professionals—who feel stuck, can’t afford homes, can’t afford kids, can’t make this work?
RAHM EMANUEL:
I’ve got to say this to you. If you’re here, my assumption is your parents did everything right, and you did everything right. And yet the system isn’t right. That’s the angst I’m talking about.
But we need to be honest about this: In a culture of instant gratification, we didn’t get here in a single cycle, and we’re not getting out of it in a single cycle either. If you tell people we’re going to solve the housing crisis by next November, that’s a false promise. Given how the regulations work, you wouldn’t even have a permit by then.
When I think about the American dream, I think there are four pillars that hold it up: homeownership, saving for retirement, health care, and saving for your kids’ education. Maybe there are more, but those are the basic contract.
Today, health care is unaffordable—you’re one illness away from bankruptcy. People use their 401(k)s to backstop their paychecks. And without taking on a second mortgage or going broke, many can’t pay for their kids’ college education.
From all the data we’ve seen on housing, I think that’s the biggest piece. And not just economically. Housing has a psychological and emotional weight that other things don’t. It’s the signal that you’ve made it, and that you can move on to the next parts of your life—starting a family, having kids, building a future.
The other piece is this—and I’m a beneficiary of it—we’ve treated college as the single passport to the future. If you wanted a middle-class life, that was supposed to be it.
One of the most telling signs for me—and I’m going to Michigan to talk about this—is what the CEO of Ford said a few weeks ago. He announced they have 7,000 jobs paying over $100,000, with health care and a full pension, and they can’t fill them. And over the next decade, that number will grow to 35,000.
We have to start emphasizing—and I think we did this in Chicago—that there are many paths forward. Do you want to be an electrician? Great. You want to join the Merchant Marines, the Marines, the Coast Guard, or the Air Force? Great. You want to be a nurse, a nursing aide, or a paralegal? Great.
In Chicago, if you went to the University of Chicago, you put that on your résumé. But I also wanted kids who went to Malcolm X, Harold Washington, Olive-Harvey, or Richard J. Daley [community colleges] to walk in with their heads high, knowing that their school was as much a calling as the University of Chicago or Northwestern, where I went.
The irony is, when we talk about the greatest generation, half the kids coming out of World War II went to community college. We rightly talk about the GI Bill, but to me, whether you went to electrician school, joined the Marines, went to community college, or went to a four-year college, every one of those paths counts. Every one of them should be valued, and every one of them should be respected as such.
