Rahm Emanuel Under Consideration as Top Ambassador
March 18, 2021
Nothing in his record suggests diplomacy, say Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon.
Rahm Emanuel in 2012, while mayor of Chicago. (U.S. Army Public Affairs
Midwest, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
NormanSolomon.com
Rahm Emanuel has never been associated with the word "diplomatic," but news
reports say that President Joe Biden is seriously considering him for a top
position as U.S. ambassador to Japan or China. Naming Emanuel to such a post
would be an affront to many of the constituencies that got Biden elected.
The saga of Emanuel's three decades in politics is an epic tale of
methodical contempt for progressive values.
One thing Emanuel can't be accused of is inconsistency. During his political
career, he has steadily served elite corporate interests, and rarely the
interests of the broad public or the causes of racial justice or peace.
Emanuel rose to prominence as the finance director for Bill Clinton's 1992
presidential campaign. He excelled at pulling in large checks from
super-wealthy individuals. As a high-level Clinton administration aide, he
played a major role - and bragged about it - in the passage of the
disastrous NAFTA trade bill, which was strongly opposed by unions,
environmentalists and most Democrats in Congress. He also was a sparkplug
for passage of the mass incarceration-oriented 1994 Crime Bill, with prison
term-lengthening provisions like "three strikes."
'Tough on Wedge Issues'
In 1996, Emanuel boasted to a Washington Post reporter of the
administration's "tough" policies on "wedge issues - crime, welfare, and
recently immigration." In a memo that year, he urged Clinton to move
rightward on immigration policy by working to "claim and achieve record
deportations of criminal aliens."
The next year, Emanuel's approach was explained by a senior staffer at the
Immigration and Naturalization Service who worked closely with him:
"As long as we dealt with illegal immigration, we could be to the right of
Atilla the Hun. Rahm felt that Americans believed too many people were
coming into this country, too many foreigners, so he wanted to show the
administration returning people, deporting them, putting up bigger fences,
sending them back."
In July 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress pushed through its punitive
"welfare reform" bill that ended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children
program, added work requirements and gave states the power to slash support.
April 2009: White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the Oval Office as
President Barack Obama talks on the phone. (White House, Pete Souza)
In the intense White House debate over whether to sign the bill, Emanuel was
one of the strongest voices urging Bill Clinton not to veto the bill, as the
president had done with earlier GOP welfare bills. Clinton signed the
"Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996," prompting an
outcry from anti-poverty activists and high-level administration
resignations.
After leaving the Clinton administration in 1998, Emanuel made a quick $18
million in two and a half years as managing director of the Wall Street
investment bank Wasserstein Perella, working out of its Chicago office.
Elected to Congress in November 2002, Emanuel supported George W. Bush's
disastrous Iraq invasion, and defended the war after most Democrats in
Congress and most of the public had turned against it. As head of the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel seemed
oblivious to the change in public opinion. While he took credit for
Democrats regaining the House majority, his selection of right-leaning
candidates, including Iraq war supporters like himself and former
Republicans, ultimately led to GOP gains.
While serving as President Barack Obama's chief of staff in 2009 and 2010,
Emanuel argued for mollifying healthcare reform opponents by significantly
weakening Obamacare. (He acknowledged years later it was a good thing Obama
didn't listen to him.) In a 2010 meeting with liberal leaders who planned to
publicly pressure the Democratic Party's conservative wing into supporting
healthcare reform, Emanuel famously called them "fucking retarded."
Emanuel was known in D.C. for hyper-combativeness (earning him the nickname
"Rahmbo") and his ability to gain positive spin from corporate media: "He is
on a first-name basis with every political reporter in Washington," a
Washington Post columnist asserted.
Chicago Scandals
2015 protest march in Chicago against police killing of Laquan McDonald.
(SHYCityNXR, Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0)
After being elected mayor of Chicago in 2011, Emanuel's administration faced
a series of scandals that included concerted warfare against the teachers'
union and the closing of 49 public schools, many in black neighborhoods.
In his 2015 bid for re-election, he was forced into a runoff by progressive
challenger Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, a contest that would be decided largely by
African American voters. Emanuel very likely would have lost the election
except for the fact that for 13 months, through the duration of the
campaign, his administration suppressed a horrific dashcam video showing the
death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, an African American who'd been shot 16
times by a police officer as he walked away from the officer. (The city had
paid $5 million to McDonald's family without a lawsuit having been filed.)
Soon after a judge ordered the city of Chicago to release the video, polls
found that only 17 percent of Chicagoans believed Emanuel when he said he'd
never seen the video and that most city residents wanted him to resign as
mayor.
When it was reported last November that Biden was considering him for a
cabinet post, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: "Rahm Emanuel helped
cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is
disqualifying for public leadership." Then-Congressman-elect Mondaire Jones
added: "That he's being considered for a cabinet position is completely
outrageous and, honestly, very hurtful."
Emanuel's 30-year campaign against pro-working-class policy reforms is
unending. Asked last August how he would advise the Biden administration, he
told CNBC: "Two things I would say if I was advising an administration. One
is there's no new Green Deal, there's no Medicare for All."
If Rahm Emanuel becomes the ambassador to China or Japan - countries with
the world's second- and third-largest economies - he will gain new leverage
in a region bristling with ethnic and military tensions. Everything about
his record indicates that such power would be vested in the wrong hands.
Days after Biden's election, AOC told The New York Times that Emanuel's
inclusion in the Biden administration "would signal, I think, a hostile
approach to the grassroots and the progressive wing of the party."
We'll soon find out whether Biden is willing to send such a signal.
Jeff Cohen is an activist, author and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He was
an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for
Independent Media at Ithaca College and founder of the media watch group
FAIR. In 2002-2003, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC. He is the author
of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of
many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning
Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016
and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and
executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
This article is from NormanSolomon.com