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"No amount of rebranding can change the fact that Rahm Emanuel's political career has been an abject failure—neoliberal centrism is exactly the wrong direction for the Democratic Party," said one critic.
Progressives were left fuming and flummoxed over reporting Friday that Rahm Emanuel is considering running for chair of the Democratic National Committee, with many leftists wondering whether the party has learned anything from its loss of the White House, Senate, and, arguably, the country's working-class voters.
Axiosfirst reported that Emanuel—President Joe Biden's ambassador to Japan and a former congressman, Chicago mayor, and chief of staff to former President Barack Obama—is mulling whether to seek the top DNC post. Current DNC chair Jamie Harrison, who was elected to the post in 2021, is unlikely to seek a new term, which would begin in March.
Emanuel has some powerful backers among the war-and-Wall Street wing that has dominated the Democratic party for decades.
"If they said, 'Well, what should we do? Who should lead the party?' I would take Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, and I would bring him back from Japan, and I would appoint him chairman of the Democratic National Committee," prominent political consultant David Axelrod, who ran both of Obama's successful presidential campaigns, said Wednesday on his podcast.
Axelrod followed up the next day with a post on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, in which he wrote of Emanuel, "Dude knows how to fight and win."
Reaction came fast and furious, with Jonathan Cohn, policy director at the group Progressive Massachusetts, asking on the social network Bluesky, "How is this not a sick joke?"
Center for International Policy executive vice president Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) writing on X that "if you assembled a team of top scientists and told them to come up with a plan to ensure that the Democratic Party continues to lose working-class voters, I doubt they could do better than 'Make Rahm Emanuel head of the DNC.'"
Comedian, author, and podcaster Kate Willett
said on X: "If I had to pick one individual who set the stage for what seems like it may be decades of Trumpism, it's Rahm Emanuel. Imagine if Obama had saved peoples' homes in 2008 and put the bankers in jail? Truly fixed healthcare? Rahm worked diligently to make sure that didn't happen."
Miles Kampf-Lassin, the senior editor at the progressive website
In These Times, wrote, "I've said it before and can't believe I have to say it again: No amount of rebranding can change the fact that Rahm Emanuel's political career has been an abject failure—neoliberal centrism is exactly the wrong direction for the Democratic Party."
Hafiz Rashid argued Friday in a
New Republicarticle that, if he wins the post, Emanuel could be "the worst possible DNC chair."
"The fact that Emanuel has been disconnected from local and state politics for years... seems unlikely to help," Rashid asserted. "Democrats are currently expected to tap someone with expertise at the grassroots level and an understanding of how Democrats are winning elections now—two things Emanuel sorely lacks."
Apparently questioning the strategic wisdom of Vice President Kamala Harris' failed Democratic presidential run, Warren Gunnels, a staff director for Sanders,
said on X, "Ruling Elite: Let's get Dick Cheney's endorsement and anoint Rahm Emanuel as DNC Chair."
"One word," he added. "No."
"We could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in," said one critic. "They'll be fine though."
While much ink has been spilled on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's relationship with the world's richest person, tech billionaire Elon Musk, the Republican's electoral victory this week has also provoked conversations about how the very wealthy plutocrats behind Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris may have contributed to her loss.
After Trump's win, The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reached out to folks in the inner circle of President Joe Biden—who passed the torch to Harris after a disastrous debate this summer—for their postmortem. The staff writer reported Thursday that although Biden advisers "were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign."
According to Foer:
One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump's oligarchical allegiances. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, "We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends."
While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.
Responding on social media, Drop Site News' Ryan Grim said: "Reporters always heard that Tony West was functionally one of Kamala's most important advisers. Still galling to read this. I wonder who West even voted for."
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, declared that "we could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in. They'll be fine though. They're already onto their next contracts, or their next vacation home. And that should piss you off."
Progressive organizer Aaron Regunberg argued that "if we want to get out of this wilderness we need to purge every one of the Tony West crony corporatists in this party. Democrats need to be able to point to and talk about villains. Tony West is one of those villains."
Revolving Door Project founder and executive director Jeff Hauser put out a lengthy statement in response to the reporting that, as he summarized, "West convinced Vice President Harris to ratchet down her populist messaging lest it upset the Silicon Valley and Wall Street elites he was courting on her behalf."
Hauser highlighted that Foer's article also came after Cuban last month "bragged about his role in exiling a Harris surrogate" and former staffer of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) "for the sin of supporting a wealth tax during a television appearance."
Harris on Tuesday "ran far stronger in the states that she saturated with television ads than the ones she did not. Those TV ads were, as Semafor's David Weigel observed, 'grinding on this economic message (anti-price gouging, Medicare covering home care, etc),'" he noted. "It's impossible to know whether the additional two points or less needed by Harris in the pivotal states would have been secured by basing her public 'earned media' and social media messaging on the same populist economic platform which informed her television ads."
"However, it is clear that the more successful paid media message was more populist and less informed by plutocrats like Cuban and West," Hauser continued. "Further, it seems exceedingly likely that downballot Democrats outside the swing states would have benefited from an ecosystem featuring the type of messaging we heard at the Democratic Convention."
"In a populist moment in which the candidates were battling for the mantle of change, the sitting vice president had to be identified as clearly against some powerful institutions," he added. "Her campaign showed early signs of an aggressive message, arguing that her record as California attorney general included taking on crooked big banks and shady student loan servicers."
"While VP Harris stuck to a comparably anti-plutocratic message in her television ads, she did not in her interviews and public appearances. This divergence appears to have been based on the advice of plutocrats," Hauser concluded. "Hopefully future candidates will learn from this, and oppose plutocrats consistently."
Appearing on CNN this week, Kate Bedingfield, Biden's former White House communications director, suggested the issue is not confined to Harris.
"I think Democrats across the board clearly have a challenge connecting with working-class voters. This is not unique to Vice President Harris' campaign," she said. "This is a demographic shift, a realignment in this country that's happened over the course of the last 10 years."
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020 but spent this cycle campaigning for Harris—said Wednesday that "it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
Sanders also asserted that "the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control" the party are unlikely to "learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign" or "understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing."
Proving his point, Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist for giant companies who now chairs the Democratic National Committee, claimed Thursday that Sanders' analysis was "straight up BS" and listed achievements of the Biden-Harris administration.
Responding to Harrison on social media, Michael Sainato, a labor reporter with The Guardian, said that "being pro-worker means being clear about who and what is anti-worker and the Democratic Party has failed miserably at that."
"We absolutely need a cease-fire," said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Tuesday that "escalation after escalation" in the Middle East is pushing the region to the precipice of all-out war, a message that came after Israel invaded Lebanon and Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel.
"I condemn the broadening of the Middle East conflict," Guterres wrote on social media as news of the Iranian missile fire broke and Israel called up reservist brigades and other armed forces to take part in the ground assault on Lebanon.
"This must stop," Guterres added. "We absolutely need a cease-fire."
Hours earlier, Stéphane Dujarric—a spokesperson for Guterres—said the U.N. chief believes that "an all-out war must be avoided in Lebanon at all costs, and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon must be respected."
Other U.N. officials issued similarly urgent statements in the wake of Israel's U.S.-backed ground invasion of Lebanon, which followed weeks of bombing that killed more than a thousand people and displaced around a million.
Liz Throssell, a spokesperson for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said Tuesday that "we are gravely concerned by the widening hostilities in the Middle East and their potential to engulf the entire region in a humanitarian and human rights catastrophe."
"The prospects that the situation may deteriorate further with terrible impact on civilians, and that it could rapidly expand to embroil other states in the region, are real," Throssell added. "With armed violence between Israel and Hezbollah boiling over, the consequences for civilians have already been terrible—and we fear a large-scale ground invasion by Israel into Lebanon would only result in greater suffering."
"Turning a blind eye to the deteriorating catastrophe in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory will not help in finding a solution to the deteriorating situation in Lebanon."
Hours before Israel launched its invasion of Lebanon, a group of U.N. experts condemned Israel's "use of the same destructive violence that was applied in Gaza to its attacks on Lebanon" and said that "we should step back from the brink."
"The fundamental regional factors that feed the escalation of violence, including the supply of arms, technical assistance, and training to non-state actors, extrajudicial killings, and continuing illegal occupation of Palestine, must be central to the sustainable search for peaceful solutions,” the experts said. "Turning a blind eye to the deteriorating catastrophe in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory will not help in finding a solution to the deteriorating situation in Lebanon."
The statements from U.N. officials came shortly before Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel, a move that Iran said was retaliation for Israel's killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh as well as Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Abbas Nilforoushan.
Earlier Tuesday, an unnamed official from the Biden White House warned that "a direct military attack from Iran against Israel will carry severe consequences for Iran," heightening concerns of more direct U.S. involvement in the escalating regional conflict. The Pentagon announced Monday that it would send a few thousand additional troops to the Middle East—including "squadrons of F-15E, F-16, and F-22 fighter jets and A-10 attack aircraft, and the personnel needed to support them"—as Israel prepared to invade Lebanon.
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, said Tuesday that the Biden administration "must realize that months of failure to impose meaningful consequences on [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu for grave international humanitarian law violations and obstructing a cease-fire in Gaza has contributed to the disregard for U.S. and international concerns with which Israel has now acted in Lebanon."
"The ability of the United States to prevent an all-out war that could draw in the U.S. and Iran and imperil millions in the region, including American personnel, rests on whether President Biden is finally willing to take the steps necessary—including suspending offensive weapons deliveries—to prevent a horrific conflagration," Duss added.