Failure Has Few Fathers

Writing at The New Yorker Rick Perlstein presents what I think might be thought of as the progressive’s case against Rahm Emanuel:

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.

There are moral complaints to be made about this, to be sure. But it has also failed Emanuel on political grounds: when he found himself in trouble, he was left without a broad base of political support, unlike the previous mayor, Richard M. Daley, who in similar straights fell back on his close relationships in all fifty city wards. When one of those rich Republicans donors—Bruce Rauner, with whom Rahm has vacationed—became Illinois’s governor last year, at least the scolds could comfort themselves that their mayor would enjoy privileged access to lobby for the city’s needs. But that hasn’t worked, either: instead, Rauner has given Rahm the cold shoulder.

or, said another way, he’s a primary architect of many of the worst aspects of today’s political system. But it doesn’t stop there:

After Washington, Emanuel made eighteen million dollars in two and a half years as an investment banker. (His buddy Rauner helped get him his job.) He came back home—although diehards will insist that Emanuel isn’t really a Chicagoan, having grown up in suburban Wilmette—and won a congressional seat in 2004. His next step was chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in charge of recruiting House candidates. In 2006, he got credit when Democrats took back the lower chamber. One Democratic strategist from California who saw him working a room of worshipful admirers shortly afterward marvelled, “Inside the Beltway, Rahm is like … well, not Dylan or Madonna but maybe Britney or Paris.”

or, again said another way, he’s an exemplar of the unavoidably corrupt relationship between finance and politics that is the root of Rubinomics.

But rising from Democratic Party rainmaker from sinecure to sinecure does not mean you have political accomplishments, a base of support, or the skills of a politician. Raising money is important but it’s not enough.

Are we to believe that it’s all a coincidene?

By then Emanuel had became the mayor of Chicago, elected with fifty-five per cent of the vote in the spring of 2011. Since then, there have been so many scandals in Emanuel’s administration which have failed to gain traction that it’s hard to single them out. One signature idea was lengthening Chicago’s school day by thirty per cent—controversial because he proposed to compensate teachers only two per cent more for the extra work. The Chicago public schools’ inspector general was soon investigating allegations that a local pastor linked to Emanuel was arranging buses to pack public hearings with supporters of the idea, paying at least two “protesters” twenty-five to fifty dollars each.

The city also rolled out a new “smart card” system for customers to pay transit fares, a product of the San Diego-based defense contractor Cubic. The system, known as Ventra, worked about as well as Lucille Ball on a factory production line: some people would get on the bus for free, while others would be charged several times. The cards were supposed to double as debit cards for Chicago’s “unbanked” poor. But buried deep within the thousand-page contract with Cubic were nice little Easter eggs, like the seven-dollar fee for customers who didn’t use the card for eighteen months, and another five dollars tacked on for each dormant month after that.

The article goes on to catalogue the frauds in school improvement and crime statistics under Emanuel. Read it and weep. Weep for Chicago.