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Writer's pictureHowie Klein

Corrupt Anti-Union ConservaDem Rahm Emanuel Helped Lose The Working Class For His Party

Now He Wants To Do More Damage— In The Senate



Yesterday, we found out that Rahm Emanuel— soon to be officially back from Japan (he was virtually never there)— has a poll in the field testing the waters for a 2026 Senate run to replace Dick Durbin. There are a lot of reasons to hope his political career is over but one that always rings strongly for me has to do with his pivotal role in passing NAFTA, a virulently anti-worker treaty negotiated by George H.W. Bush, who signed the initial agreement on December 17, 1992, after he had already been rejected for reelection by the voters. Congress made it very clear that the Treaty would not be ratified.


When Bill Clinton took office a few weeks later. He was eager to show Big Business and Wall Street he could crush labor’s interests and deliver for them what Bush was unable to. He stuck in some phony-baloney supplemental agreements on labor and environmental issues and sent Emanuel to the Capitol, where the opposition was particularly fierce from labor union and environmental allies, to break arms and kick some ass. It is widely acknowledged that Emanuel's aggressive efforts secured enough votes from Democrats to pass the Republican legislation. It passed the House on November 17, 1993, with a vote of 234–200, with more Republicans than Democrats voting in favor but Rahm “persuaded” two prominent anti-NAFTA leaders, Dick Gephardt (D-MO) and David Bonior (D-MI), respectively the House Majority Leader and House Majority Whip, to change their positions. It passed the Senate a couple of days later 61-38, again, with more Republican votes than Democratic ones. But because Clinton signed it, Democrats got the blame.


The Clinton White House was celebratory at passage and Rahm was considered a hero for his tactics. But the passage  came with heavy political costs. Many Democrats, particularly those from labor-heavy districts, felt betrayed by the vote, contributing to the significant Democratic losses in the 1994 midterm elections where the party lost control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, shedding 54 seats and underscoring the divisive nature of NAFTA within the Democratic Party, with labor unions feeling very alienated. Not a single Republican incumbent lost anywhere in the country. 5 of Washington state’s Democrats, including Speaker Tom Foley, eventual Governor Jay Inslee and eventual Senator Maria Cantwell, lost their seats. Flipping blue seats that year, launched the congressional careers of Republicans Lindsey Graham (SC), Joe Scarborough (FL), Roger Wicker (MS), Richard Burr (NC), Bob Ney (OH)…


Thanks Rahm. But Jonathan Weisman didn’t mention Rahm in his piece yesterday, How The Democrats Lost The Working Class. It was more about how Clinton drove the party into a ditch. He began by noting how, after the catastrophic midterm losses the token progressive in Clinton’s cabinet, Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, “ventured into hostile territory to issue a prophetic warning. Struggling workers were becoming ‘an anxious class,’ he told the centrist Democratic Leadership Council… Society was separating into two tiers, Reich said, with ‘a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated. Today, the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays and an ill-defined counterculture,’ Reich cautioned. ‘But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?’ His message went largely unheeded for 30 years, as one president after another, Republican and Democratic, led administrations into a post-Cold War global future that enriched the nation as a whole and some on the coasts to staggering levels, but left many pockets of the American heartland deindustrialized, dislocated and even depopulated.”



I might add that the Democratic Leadership Council was the heart and soul of the Bill Clinton-Rahm Emanuel wing of the Democratic Party. Weisman noted that as the world changed around them some “Democratic presidents tried, with limited success, to expand safety nets at home, especially health care and income support for the poor. In the end, however, their bets on foreign policy— opening China to capitalism, halting Iran’s nuclear program, tightening economic bonds with allies— took precedence, and a new fealty to megadonors shaped fiscal policies that bolstered financial markets but shuttered many factories. The unintended [but inevitable] consequences often came at the expense of American workers. And Reich’s ‘anxious class’— neither the impoverished nor the highfliers riding the rising global stock market— felt unheard until the rise of an unlikely new kind of Republican: Trump.”


The Democratic Party’s estrangement from working-class voters first became clear with Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton in 2016, powered by broad shifts in the preferences of white voters without college degrees, and it became even more unmistakable with his emphatic defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in November. That result was a reckoning for a party that thought it had fixed its problems with blue-collar voters by heavily reinvesting in domestic manufacturing but instead discovered even more erosion, this time among Black and Latino workers.
Many Democrats have blamed recent social issues like transgender rights or the “woke” language embraced by many on the left. But the economic seeds of Trump’s victories were sown long ago.
“One of the things that has been frustrating about the narrative ‘The Democrats are losing the working class’ is that people are noticing it half a century after it happened,” said Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO. “The resentment and movement away from the Democrats began long before they were for non-gendered bathrooms. It was because their lives were becoming more precarious, their kids were leaving town, the pensions they expected were evaporating, and that took a toll.”
…William Galston, a domestic policy adviser to Clinton and an architect of the Democrats’ shift to the center, said that after the election debacles of 1980, 1984 and 1988, the party’s repositioning on social and economic issues was not a choice but an imperative.
But once Clinton took office in 1993, choices were made.
“The Clinton vision was to be a pro-growth progressive by combining major expansions in public investment and the safety net with more private investment through fiscal discipline and vibrant markets,” said Gene Sperling, an economic adviser to the last three Democratic presidents. “As the first post-Cold War president,” he continued, Clinton also tried to have “a focus on strengthening global relations through trade agreements.”
…Even then, there was concern that China’s accession into the family of trading nations could flood the United States with cheap imports and bankrupt American manufacturers. But the economy was roaring, deregulation was the order of the day as the administration worked to free Wall Street from Depression-era banking and investment rules and, most important, a reformer, Jiang Zemin, had taken control in China. The foreign policy chiefs in the White House believed firmly that cooperation was vital to securing a prosperous, peaceful and eventually democratic China.
“You might think I was nuts,” Clinton allowed last month as he discussed international trade at the New York Times DealBook Summit, “but Jiang Zemin was president of China, and he was a darn good one.”
That tendency to roll the dice on grand international bets, with working-class voters as the chips, would become a theme. Too often, the bets did not pay off.
China became more autocratic, not less. And the feared tsunami of Chinese exports indeed arrived, along with the damage. In 1998, 17.6 million Americans were employed in manufacturing. By January 2008, the “China shock” had cost U.S. manufacturers nearly four million jobs. By January 2010, as the financial crisis waned, manufacturing employment had bottomed out below 11.5 million.
“I would be the first to say the leadership of both political parties were in the grip of a theory or story that turned out to be wrong,” Galston said, “and damagingly so.”
Still, Democratic economists defend their choices. Jason Furman, an economic adviser in the Clinton and Obama White Houses, said the biggest expansions of income inequality came in the 1980s and 1990s, before the China shock. Overall, China’s integration into world markets did increase the number of jobs in the United States— selling services like insurance and Hollywood movies to the Chinese, and peddling Chinese-made goods at stores like Walmart— while sharply lowering the cost of living for American consumers.
What was less appreciated beforehand was the psychological damage that would be done by factory closures, large and small, in communities where prestige, stability and identity centered on those plants— as well as the political impacts of those closures on key industrial states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Democratic policies focused on people as consumers instead of as workers, counting on those people whose jobs were eliminated to find their way to jobs newly created— an assumption that was often flawed, given that the new service jobs frequently required out-of-reach skills or were located on the coasts, not in the upper Midwest.
Too often, said Jared Bernstein, the chairman of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, there was a “disregard for the importance of work, the dignity of work.”
“Forty people might have lost their job in a factory, but 100,000 people in the community had lower prices,” Bernstein said. “The calculus seemed obvious. But the calculus was wrong.”
Still, for years, the Democratic Party’s drift away from the working class could be papered over. George W. Bush eked out the narrowest of victories in 2000 in part because the economy was doing so well that voters could focus on his appeal to “restore honor and integrity to the White House.” Four years later, Bush was re-elected as a wartime president, his domestic agenda topped by hot-button social issues like opposing gay marriage.
But blue-collar voters, who had soured on the “trickle-down economics” of the Reagan years, turned away from the party of Bush, who had entangled the nation in two wars, and watched helplessly but angrily as Wall Street tycoons dragged down the banking and housing markets in 2008 with their opaque financial gambles.
And they spurned the GOP again in 2012 when it turned to Mitt Romney, a wealthy businessman seemingly plucked from plutocratic central casting.
David Axelrod, one of the architects of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, said the last years of the George W. Bush administration were a moment when Democrats could pivot back to policies to address the hollowing out of the industrial base, and with it, the middle class. The 2009 bailout of the auto industry was driven by those concerns, as were the re-regulation of Wall Street and the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
But under Obama, no one on Wall Street or in the banking sector faced prosecution for the global financial crisis. After Obama called bankers “fat cats” on 60 Minutes, Democratic donors on Wall Street howled.
“The masters of the universe,” Axelrod said, “turned out to be more sensitive than we thought.”
Obama tempered his language.
The 2012 campaign was marked by an early effort by Democrats to tar Romney as an insensitive, rapacious businessman willing to send jobs overseas. It worked. The working class stuck with Obama.
But the later years of his presidency veered away from kitchen-table issues as Obama tried to secure his legacy on the global stage.
That meant striking a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program, at least temporarily; completing groundbreaking regulations on trucks, cars and power plants to curtail climate change; and finalizing one more ambitious trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to unite a dozen nations on both sides of the world’s largest ocean under trade rules and in an alliance that would isolate China.
As Obama basked in those achievements, Trump campaigned against every one of them, framing them not as steps toward a more peaceful planet but as job killers again threatening the forgotten working class. Once elected, he would undo all of them within months.
The Democrats’ alienation from blue-collar voters was scarcely a unique phenomenon. Across the developed world, as Western democracies have grown more affluent and less industrially centered, so have the parties that once represented the working classes, said Thomas Piketty, the French economist who has become one of the foremost experts on wealth inequality.
It seemed to make sense politically: With the largest cities and the growing suburbs backing those center-left parties— which Piketty called “the Brahmin left,” or “parties of the educated”— shrinking towns and rural areas would matter less and less.
But there was always a problem with the theory, said Bernstein, the Biden adviser: “About 60 percent of the work force is still not college-educated.”
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a veteran Republican economic adviser in the Bush White House and for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, observed that huge shocks to the nation’s economic system— terrorism and war, the financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic— had upended many Americans’ lives, but least of all those of the wealthy. The rich did not send their children to war, their banks were bailed out, and they rode out the pandemic working from home.
“In all of it, the elites got away unscathed,” Holtz-Eakin said, “while the ordinary man took it on the chin.”
Exploiting such resentments, Trump, with his relentless economic appeals and his open disregard for America’s global leadership, broke the Democratic formula by winning over not only a large majority of the white working class but also a strong percentage of workers of color.
Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around.
Labor leaders often point to the Democratic Party’s movement away from unions as an intermediary between the party and working-class voters. During the 2008 campaign, Obama was instructed to not even use the words “labor union,” Furman recalled: Most workers were not members, and it was believed that unions were unpopular.
Podhorzer said he understood why Democrats had moved away from unions as their conduits to the working class.
“When you talk to the unions, you’re talking to an institution that can hold you accountable to the promises you are making and can ask you for specific things,” he said. “When you’re talking around them, you’re basically doing commercial marketing.”
But, he added, “that sets you up for the moment when a Donald Trump comes along, and you have a candidate who just has better marketing than you.”
…If any Democrat intuitively understood the voters who were abandoning his party, it was Biden, who campaigned in 2020 as “Scranton Joe,” the product of a small, de-industrialized city that epitomized the ground lost by the working class.
His victory may have been fueled by the pandemic, but his focus was on economics. He tried to undo or reverse some of the damage that had been done by his predecessors. He brought in left-leaning economists like Bernstein and Heather Boushey, who had often been voices of dissent in the Clinton and Obama years.
His chief at the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, zealously tried to break up monopoly industries. The United States Trade Representative, led by Katherine Tai, steadfastly avoided pursuing new trade deals that might rankle labor leaders, instead focusing on issues like strengthening labor rights in Mexico.
The new administration ushered out the belief that healthy financial markets, low unemployment and adequate support for people with the lowest income were enough to sustain an economic growth whose benefits would be shared broadly.
None other than Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary most associated with the Democratic shift toward promoting economic growth and market stability, called the Biden recalibration “constructive.” The president largely confined his “industrial policy” to promoting domestic manufacturing in arenas like semiconductors, which are vital to economic and national security, and to combating climate change, which unfettered free markets have failed to address, Rubin said in an interview.
The Biden administration also moved to bolster the clout of unions, drive down unemployment so workers would gain bargaining power and strengthen the Internal Revenue Service to go after affluent tax cheats, Bernstein said.
…In November, 56 percent of voters without college degrees voted for Trump. In 1992, just 36 percent of voters with only a high school diploma voted Republican— about the same percentage that Barry Goldwater got in his overwhelming defeat against Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Republican and Democratic economists point to a single reason: inflation. Reich’s “anxious class” was as anxious as ever, unwilling to see policy shifts that might take years to bear fruit as a salve for the immediate pain of rising prices.
Democrats said the president was the political victim of a global trend emerging from the pandemic. Republicans pointed to his policies, and one piece of legislation in particular, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, saying it poured gasoline on the smoldering embers of post-pandemic inflation.
“The American Rescue Plan killed the Biden administration in its infancy,” Holtz-Eakin said, almost ruefully. “It was the worst thing they could have done, and they did it. They were warned, and they did it anyway.”

As for Rahm, a Zionist fanatic, he was well-compensated for his efforts, paid handsomely by GoldmanSachs while still working in the White House, given a job as a bankster-with-no-MBA at Wasserstein Perella so he could amass a personal fortune, enough to launch own electoral career (albeit after Clinton gave him a job on the scandal-plagued Freddie Mac board of directors). When Rod Blogojevich's House seat opened up, Emanuel beat progressive Nancy Kaszak with a boatload of corporate cash. Pro-war and on the right-fringe of Democratic politics, he was given a job as head of the DCCC by Nancy Pelosi anyway. His rotten DNA plagues that failed organization to this day. When Biden got to the White House, he appointed Emanuel ambassador to Japan, a job that never made any sense to anyone.

3 Comments


hiwatt11
a day ago

Crapper guy below still lacks the smarts to figure out why he gets censored but I'm sure he's come up with a comfortable self-deluded reason for his narcissism to live in even if it's 180 degrees from reality.

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Rahm wants to reinvent himself. His statements about the failure of democrats to leverage populist anger are absurd, coming from him. I guess his plans to run for the senate are motivating him to don this veil of concern about the working class. What a phony. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/democrats-populism-bernie-sanders-carville-brooks-rahm-emanuel.html

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Guest
2 days ago

A vanity project at best. It's actually funny if Rahm has become just another stupid rich person who can be talked into running for office by a bunch of predatory campaign consultants.

You could put Homan Square, or Herpes, on the ballot in Chicago and they would beat Rahmbo.

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