This morning The New York Times ran an article detailing former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan for American Higher Education. It included this paragraph of rote stenography:
Wow, he must have left office with 90% approval right?
It is true that Rahm was committed to closing schools during his tenure as the mayor of Chicago, but you would think that the Times might feel obligated to present some kind of pushback to this hagiography. You would be wrong. The bigger problem, however, is the idea that Rahm Emanuel, a man who has not been elected to anything in more than 11 years, is a serious contender for the Democratic Party’s 2028 nomination, which he very much is not. Multiple public polls have pegged his support at 0%, with a smattering of 1% and 2% findings. That his name is in these surveys at all is a huge victory for his PR team, which is cleverly manufacturing his candidacy out of absolutely nothing.
There is no groundswell of support for him, he is not remembered particularly fondly even in Chicago and all of the people who are truly excited about him could fit into a single conference room at the Searchlight Institute. He would also turn 70 during his first year in office, and the percent odds of Democratic primary voters picking an elderly Boomer as their candidate after the searing experience of the Joe Biden fiasco are zero point zero.
But it is a reminder that the Democratic Party needs to seriously rethink who and how it anoints as presidential contenders. In 2020, partly to diffuse lingering tensions from 2016, the party ran with an absurdly loose process of qualifying for the early presidential debates. For those first televised events, all you needed was to hit 1% in three different polls, or to rack up 65,000 unique donors, including at least 200 in 20 different states.
That crackpot scheme led to the enduring travesty of future Trump dignity wraith Tulsi Gabbard developing a national profile, Andrew Yang publicly bailing on the Democratic Party in 2021 after failing to become New York’s mayor and the loathesome Eric Swalwell burnishing his credentials as a credible figure. It allowed Marianne Williamson to embarrass the party on national television, and wasted precious airtime on non-entities like Bill DeBlasio and John Delaney. Those debates were mostly an unbearable waste of time.
The Democratic Party should not be obliged to allow just anyone to participate in its primary debates. This is less about picking the “right” threshold than it is about party leadership exercising some quality control and taking command of its own processes. As I argued in 2018 Democrats should televise their own debates using moderators of their choice, to avoid the never-ending “how will you pay for it?” dynamic that characterized the proceedings in both 2015-2016 and 2019-2020. These debates are an irreplaceable opportunity for Democrats to define themselves to a national audience, and with Trump (presumably) in office, viewers will be desperate to listen to decent human beings with good ideas talk about what they might do as president. It is as close as the party is ever going to get to hours of free advertising.
What they should not do is allow gadflies and washed-up ghouls like Rahm to elevate themselves into the national conversation and suck up podium space starting next summer. They should also think about how to create space for people like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore to present themselves and their accomplishments directly to primary voters without having to take 20-minute speaking breaks as people like Rahm drone on about Simpson-Bowles. The dynamics of American politics over the past two decades have made it increasingly harder for governors to get a fair hearing, because senators are better able to develop national profiles and constituencies. The last six Democratic nominees for president have been sitting or former senators. You can already see this process taking shape as buzz builds around Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff.
Ossoff is fine, maybe even more than fine. But if Democrats want a better process in 2028, they need to stop fighting over which states get to go first (a virtually never-ending debate that goes back decades) and start thinking much more seriously about how they can shape the outcome of primaries without alienating party factions that want a seat at the table. I’m not saying that will be easy, but given the reality that people like Rahm are already gaming the system to get their names on the invitations, the time to start thinking about what those guardrails might look like is now, not a year from now.
News and Notes
At The Nation, I wrote about why we shouldn’t be lulled into complacency by the frequent failures of Trump’s political retribution campaign. The most important point I wanted to make is that these prosecutions are failing not because they are destined to fail but because there are still enough judges with integrity in the right places to stop most of the worst abuses from succeeding:
I also appeared on Greg Sargent’s podcast, The Daily Blast, at The New Republic. Greg has been one of the most tireless critics of Trump over the past 18 months, and it was really a thrill to join him to talk about political payback, Iran and more.
Thanks for reading and see you next week!
-David