Rahm Wants to Run.
Yes, that Rahm. And, yes, for that office — the presidency.
“I’ve only been back two months, I have no idea what I’m doing,” Rahm I. Emanuel, operative-turned-politician-turned-diplomat told me before adding his stock line since returning from serving as ambassador to Japan. “I’m not done with public service and I’m hoping public service is not done with me.”
Ignore that evasion. Rahm Emanuel is voting with his feet.
Since coming home in January from his stint in Tokyo — a job he repurposed to be American envoy to all of Asia — Emanuel has been as visible as any other Democrat. Never mind that he currently holds no office and hasn’t been on a ballot for a decade.
Name the political podcast and Emanuel has likely been on it or will be shortly. He immediately snagged a CNN contract and regular Washington Post column, no small accomplishment for a former official at a moment of retrenchment for news organizations.
He’s also hitting the lecture circuit, appearing for paid and gratis gigs before audiences such as the Realtors and the Chicago Economic Club. Emanuel is pointedly avoiding Ivy League campuses and later this month will make his first stop on a service academy tour when he speaks at West Point.
Just as striking is to talk to anybody in high-level Democratic politics who knows Emanuel — which is to say most everyone — and hear how matter of fact they are about the inevitability of his candidacy.
The biggest Rahm-may-run tell, though, is that he’s already road-testing the first outlines of a stump speech, or at least an issue he can make his own.
I caught it last month when he came to Washington to appear before a conference held by Democracy Forward, a liberal group helping to lead litigation efforts against the Trump administration.
“I am done with the discussion of locker rooms, I am done with the discussion of bathrooms and we better start having a conversation about the classroom,” Emanuel said, drawing applause as he alluded to a new study showing more than two-thirds of eighth graders can’t read at grade level.
He kept coming back to the study and eventually and explicitly tied the policy to the politics, in Rahm’ian fashion.
“We can lead a discussion and force a topic onto the agenda of this country that’s worthy of having a debate about,” Emanuel said about the dismal student data. Unlike, say, the fate of a heretofore obscure federal agency, whose demise dominated elite coverage in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency. “The New York Times put crumbs all the way to the front door of the USAID headquarters and we just walked along back there,” he lamented of his party.
Shortly after his trip to Washington, Emanuel dashed out to Los Angeles to appear on Bill Maher’s show, where he went even further for a less sober audience.
“In seventh grade, if I had known I could’ve said the word ‘they’ and gotten in the girls’ bathroom, I would’ve done it,” he said. “We literally are a superpower, we’re facing off against China with 1.4 billion people and two-thirds of our children can’t read eighth grade level.”
There it all was, in two appearances.
There were the assets.
Emanuel’s gift for finding a towering issue hidden in plain view; his tactical skills for grasping the political benefits it could confer, delivered with a snappy sound bite to elevate statistics off the page; linking domestic policy to geopolitics and sending a message about another, more controversial topic; and not merely urging Democrats to move on from trans youth issues, but using them as a vehicle to shift the conversation to ground he, and most in his party, would prefer to fight on. Gavin, are you listening?