Democrats Should Read

The Sudden But Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel by Rick Perlstein for a few of the reasons that he is not to be trusted and certainly not to be voted for.  Here's an example:

. . . The legend continued through this past April, when Rahm—in Chicago and D.C., he’s known by that single name—won a second term as the mayor of Chicago in a come-from-behind landslide.

Nine months later, Chicagoans—and Democrats nationally—are suffering buyer’s remorse. Last month, a Cook County judge ordered the release of a shocking dashcam video of a black seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by a policeman while he was walking away. Five days later, the officer was charged with murder. The charge came after four hundred days of public inaction, and only hours before the video’s release. Of almost four hundred police shootings of civilians investigated by the city’s Independent Police Review Authority since 2007, only one was found to be unjustified. So the suspicion was overwhelming that the officer would not have faced discipline at all had officials not feared a riot—especially after it was learned that McDonald’s family had been paid five million dollars from city coffers without ever having filed a lawsuit. Mayor Emanuel claims that he never saw the video. Given that he surely would not have been reëlected had any of this come out before the balloting, a recent poll showed that only seventeen per cent of Chicagoans believe him. And a majority of Chicagoans now think he should resign.

There are many examples in the article of how Rahm was an opportunist and traitor to Democrats and how his alleged achievements and gambits (I don't think he's really a strategic thinker, he goes on his own right-wing gut feelings) were disastrously wrong.

Victory, like defeat, can have a hundred fathers, and we can’t know what was ultimately responsible for the Democrats’ success that November. Anger at Republicans for the Iraq War (which Emanuel supported) certainly drove many voters’ decisions. What is indisputable is that the 2006 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the party over time. One of his winners, the football star Heath Shuler, of North Carolina, would not even commit to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and was one of many Rahm recruits to vote against important Obama Administration priorities, like economic stimulus, banking reform, and health care. Many are no longer congressmen. Some Democrats now argue that, in the long run, 2006 might have weakened the Party more than it strengthened it. “Rahm’s recruitment strategy” was “catastrophic,” the retired record executive Howie Klein, who helps run a political action committee that funds liberal congressional challengers, said, and it contributed to the massive G.O.P. majorities we have now, the biggest since the nineteen-twenties.

Obviously, that conclusion wasn’t shared by Barack Obama in 2009, when he named Emanuel as his White House chief of staff. There, however, Emanuel’s signature strategy—committing Obama only to initiatives they knew in advance would succeed, in order to put “points on the board”—nearly waylaid the President’s most historic accomplishment: health-care reform. Emanuel wanted to scale it back almost to the vanishing point. It took a concerted effort by Speaker Pelosi to convince the President otherwise. This time, it was Emanuel who apologized: “Thank God for the country he didn’t listen to me,” he said after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, in 2012.

Rahm Emanuel is a creation primarily of his own PR and the callow unsophistication of those like the governor Bill Clinton and the two-year Senator Barack Obama.  Imagine how Obama would be remembered today if he didn't get as much of the reduced stimulus he got through Congress or if Rahm Emanuel had succeeded in killing even the impaired ACA that NANCY PELOSI WAS THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR PASSING.   Obama and Harry Reid had given up on it, it was Nancy Pelosi who got it through.  It should rightly be called Pelosi Care.  

Rahm Emanuel is someone who should have been driven out of politics by the more scandalous aspects of his career.   If he were a Woman or Black he would have probably been sent into obscurity by only a few parts of his record.   Democrats should be reminded of what a treacherous little piece of shit he has been and certainly still is.