If forced to place a bet on who’ll win the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, I’d wager no more than a nickel on Rahm Emanuel. OK, maybe a dime. At a moment that romanticizes outsiders, he’s as inside as they come — a former member of Congress who worked in the Clinton administration, the Obama administration, the Biden administration. If the Democratic Party awarded frequent-flier miles, he’d have an aisle seat in first class forevermore.
And the marquee entry on his résumé is his eight years, from 2011 to 2019, as mayor of Chicago, a city that eats politicians alive. He made mistakes and enemies. They’ll come back to haunt him.
But over recent months, Emanuel has offered something of a master class in drawing notice, claiming a lane and establishing his voice. He’s fascinating to watch, especially because he’s not competing with the likes of Gavin Newsom, the California governor, and JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, to be the best at berating, belittling or bucking President Trump. Emanuel’s audition focuses on issues. On ideas. And he’s choosing them wisely enough — and working relentlessly enough — to earn at least a bit of a hearing.
He made headlines last week by calling for a mandatory retirement age of 75 for presidents, federal judges and members of Congress. That wasn’t an original thought, but it was shrewdly timed, what with Trump babbling lethargically on the stage in Davos and a sense of déjà Biden taking hold. It was smart, too, in its self-effacement. Emanuel is 66. If elected president in 2028, he’d be 69 when he took office in 2029 and, under his own suggested rule, ineligible for two full terms. That makes the proposal seem all the more high-minded.
It’s still somewhat early to talk about 2028, and though Emanuel’s flurry of travel, town halls, opinion pieces and interviews makes his ambitions obvious, he could yet decide not to run. But he and other Democrats eyeing the race are already going full-bore to elevate their public profiles and expand their name recognition at a time when it’s harder than ever to command voters’ attention and the flabbergasting Trump tragicomedy tends to crowd out everything else.
Different Democrats are taking different tacks. Some have had more success than others. Newsom expertly used the successful redistricting fight in California to style himself as his party’s gladiator and savior, and he revels in taunting Trump. Representative Ro Khanna of California enjoyed months of headlines and television appearances for leading the congressional charge to get all the Jeffrey Epstein files released.
But Emanuel’s combination of policy talk, moral reflection and candid critiques of recent Democratic fixations is distinctive, and there’s impressive political savvy in what he foregrounds and how he frames it. A perfect example: a December essay he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, “Lessons From Modern Parenthood,” that went viral. He poignantly described his deep love for his three children, stressed the importance of family meals, cautioned against excessive television watching and internet use and all in all presented himself as the consummate family man to a reading audience filled with moderates in both political parties. Anyone exhausted with partisan warfare, yearning for so-called traditional values or clutching a dog-eared copy of Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” found a friend and champion in Emanuel.
He has, tellingly, taken up residence in The Journal’s Opinion section over the past six months: an essay advising Democrats to turn away from divisive cultural issues, another on the threat that China poses, yet another on ethical leadership and the cancer of corruption, several more advocating specific education reforms, including a “return to fundamentals” emphasis on reading and math. To push that approach, he has traveled to Mississippi to spotlight its progress along those lines. It’s a deep-red state, and it has no special place on the Democratic primary calendar. Message: I’m thinking and moving outside any conventionally self-serving script and tidy ideological box. I’m an antidote to such cynicism.
And I’m bold! He’s telegraphing that by taking stands — and risking upset — where many other Democrats tread with extreme caution. In an article in Axios about a week ago, Holly Otterbein wrote that she’d submitted questions about trans rights to “20 Democrats viewed as possible 2028 contenders.” Only Emanuel, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary, gave her answers. Emanuel affirmed what he told Megyn Kelly during an appearance on her YouTube show in July, when she asked him whether “boys should be able to play in girls’ sports” and “Can a man become a woman?”: He said no to both.
In a recent interview with Laura Meckler in The Washington Post, he complained that battles over school bathroom use and related debates consume much too much oxygen. “You want to pick a pronoun?” he said. “Great. Now can we focus on the other 35 kids that don’t know what a goddamn pronoun is?”
He’s announcing that he’s not beholden to progressive orthodoxy. He’s signaling that his message transcends cliques. In a profile of him in The Atlantic in October, Ashley Parker wrote that he had “appeared on so many podcasts — hosted by David Axelrod, Dana Bash, Hugh Hewitt, Hasan Minhaj, Gavin Newsom, Kara Swisher, Bari Weiss — that I began to wonder if Spotify should just add a Rahm Emanuel channel.”
How far can salty language, blunt talk and so very much of it propel Emanuel? He’ll soon find out. And he’ll make sure that we’re watching as he does.
Forward this newsletter to friends …
… and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s published every Monday.
For the Love of Sentences
In Newsday, Scott D. Reich celebrated the special thrill of watching a rookie like 18-year-old Matthew Schaefer, who plays hockey for the New York Islanders: “This stage of an athlete’s life is fleeting. Before endorsements arrive. Before contracts dominate conversation. Before the weight of legacy and expectation. For now, Schaefer skates without that. The jersey fits, but it has not yet grown heavy.” (Thanks to Liz Savitsky of Huntington, N.Y., for nominating this.)
In The Boston Globe, Christopher Muther bemoaned “diva” creep: “This extends to randomly calling fabulous individuals or difficult drag queens divas. Every time you misuse ‘diva,’ Maria Callas smashes a wine glass in heaven.” (Emily Andreano, Swampscott, Mass.)
In The Times, Ferris Jabr summarized climate change: “Several centuries ago, humanity began to pilfer an immense power from the planet: hundreds of millions of years of sunlight, channeled through the pulsing greenery of life, swallowed by the earth and compacted into outrageously energy-dense reservoirs of carbon we call fossil fuels. By setting those ancient repositories on fire, industrial nations initiated an eruption of carbon into the atmosphere at a rate that has no parallel in at least the past 66 million years.” (Stephen Anderson, Portland, Ore.)
Also in The Times, Dwight Garner reviewed the book “Departure(s),” in which the award-winning English writer Julian Barnes, now 80, recounts his diagnosis with a rare blood cancer and his deteriorating health: “Barnes’s prose is largely stripped bare — it resembles a tall ship that, in the face of a storm, has taken down and stored its sails and rigging to better endure punishment.” Barnes’s vanity is battered, too. “Now just another geezer being pushed down a hospital hallway, he wonders, touchingly, if he deserves a lapel badge that reads: ‘But I won the Booker Prize.’ We all like a pat of butter next to our names.” (Nancy Footer, Dallas, and Beth Mauldin, Yarmouth Port, Mass., among many others)
Rachel Louise Snyder appraised the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who killed Renee Good: “The man, with his face covering, his tactical vest, his handgun and his shorn hair, was kitted up to playact in a war against unarmed everybodies. He was frailty wrapped in fatigues.” (Karla Holomon, Cary, N.C., and Molly Gaffga, Sanatoga, Pa., among many others)
Maureen Dowd parsed this cursed second term of Trump’s: “Trump Redux is infatuated with drone strikes and airstrikes, tumescent with the power of the world’s greatest military, hungry to devour the hemisphere in one imperialistic gulp.” (Ellen Casey, Hope, R.I., and Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)
Bret Stephens had this to say: “Where Europe had once faced a single menace, it now faces a double one — a Scylla of unyielding Russian brutality and a Charybdis of American abandonment and territorial avarice.” (James Joska, Carmichael, Calif., and Dan Leemon, Atherton, Calif., among others)
And M. Gessen charted the emotional and psychological toll of Trump: “Ask any people who have lived in a country that became an autocracy, and they will tell you some version of a story about walls closing in on them, about space getting smaller and smaller. The space they are talking about is freedom.” (Madeline Bauer, Victorville, Calif.)
In The Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal examined Trump’s imperial impulse: “His foreign policy is like a vanity ballroom, or plastering ‘Trump’ above the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts: schlock and awe.” (Sally Hritz, Columbus, Ohio, and Joanne Hus, Vineyard Haven, Mass.)
In her newsletter, Joanne Carducci (a.k.a. JoJoFromJerz) wrote: “The rest of the world is looking at us the way you look at a family having a full-volume meltdown in the cereal aisle.” (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)
In his newsletter, Paul Krugman explained the president’s fixation on a kind of taxation: “Trump thinks, or at least wants to believe, that tariffs are a Veg-O-Matic policy that can accomplish all goals. They slice! They dice! They eliminate budget deficits! They reindustrialize! They intimidate foreigners!” (Jennifer Bardwell, Ottawa, and Carol Slattery, Birmingham, Ala., among others)
And in The Washington Post, Ron Charles recounted leaving an advance copy of a book that he was reviewing — and that he’d filled with essential notes — on the subway: “I was so discombobulated by this act of carelessness that I began to catastrophize about my now imperiled future. Desperate to confirm my mental acuity, I self-administered the Donald Trump Cognitive Test — ‘Lion! Giraffe! Hippopotamus!’ — and then, for good measure, falsified business records and pretended I’d beaten Joe Biden.” He also remembered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he rued our nation’s state of affairs: “If, as King promised, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, we could use some more torque these days.” (Dennis Blubaugh, Perrysburg, Ohio, and Lynne Gately, Randolph Center, Vt., among others)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Reading
-
The veteran political writer Matt Bai, who has done excellent work over the years for The Times and (more recently) The Washington Post, just began a column for Rolling Stone, and his debut — about the meaning of Trump’s return to the White House and what lies ahead — is a winner. It beautifully distills Trump’s destructiveness and brims with bright writing: “During his first term, Trump delegated governance to a succession of milquetoast-y aides who saw themselves as human guardrails, their job to keep him mostly inside the white lines of conservative thought. This second term, on the other hand, is an adventure in off-roading.” Indeed. I’ve noticed the extreme bumpiness of the ride, and I feel splattered with mud.
-
All the awards-season chatter about the South Korean movie “No Other Choice,” which I’ve not seen yet, sent me to its source material, the 1997 novel “The Ax,” by the American writer Donald E. Westlake. It tells the story of a long-serving company man who responds to being downsized by killing off competitors for the replacement job he covets and desperately needs. And it does so with a daring tone all its own — part comic, part clinical, with finely calibrated measures of rage and fatalism. That approach probably alienates many readers or just leaves them cold, but it drew me in and seemed to me apt for an indictment of capitalism’s callousness.
On a Personal Note
I’m increasingly convinced that when William Butler Yeats wrote that “things fall apart,” he wasn’t thinking of societies, of civilizations, of public order.
He was thinking of sandwiches.
Take, for example, the one I ate for lunch the other day at the Root Cellar in Chapel Hill, N.C., where I live. The Root Cellar has exemplary chicken salad — lively with tarragon and meaty rather than gloppy — and lovely, pillowy wheat bread. But their marriage leads instantly to divorce. The chicken salad is too loose to stay put. The bread is too fluffy to hold firm. I started out eating the sandwich with my hands and ended up eating it with a knife and fork. Which nullifies the very point of a sandwich.
And which happens all the time.
To make sandwiches more memorable, their merchants often make them bigger or busier or both. Ambition runs roughshod over architecture; the quest for bounty ignores the laws of physics. The result is no longer holdable, no longer portable, a bounty of accouterments, a chaos of condiments, something more suited to admiration than to ingestion and all too likely to end up on your shirt or in your lap.
The loaded burger exemplifies such overkill. You don’t so much savor it as scale it, and the proper attire for the ascent is a smock. It flamboyantly defies limits. It proudly fetishizes sheer volume. It’s America on an overtaxed, disintegrating bun.
The humble, compact smash burger survives as a protest of such unwieldiness, just as the stiff, waxy wrap shames the foot-long sub. They’re reminders that sandwiches exist in large part as liberation from tableware — as conveniences. They shouldn’t be evidence of entropy. They should be repudiations of it.
The post Rahm Emanuel Will Speak to You Now appeared first on New York Times.
