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Media Wants To Talk About 2028, And I'm Not Impressed By Their List Of Candidates. [1]
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Date: 2025-05-29
Looks like the legacy media and the pundits wants to discuss the horse race for the 2028 Election, at least from what I can read online and watch on YouTube. Frankly, I’m more focused on the fact that I may not have a job soon and Trump’s fascism to worry about 2028. The legacy media’s obsession with horse race narratives is how we got into this present crisis for our democracy. But what makes all this even more painful to listen to is the cast of so called candidates who are being discussed for 2028. And the cherry on the top of this shitcake of speculation is none other than Rahm Emanuel.
If there is any reason to stop all this bullshit about 2028, it’s to stomp, piss, and shit on the Rahm Emanuel “presidential” plan.
Why bring this up? It’s because it shows how out of touch the legacy media and pundits are with any voters, especially those in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party already has a huge problem with the American public, and Rahm is not the cure for that problem, which is that the Democratic Party leadership is seen as the party of the status quo. Rahm is the embodiment of all that is wrong with the current Democratic Party leadership.
Let’s count the ways that Rahm is the wrong man for this moment in history:
There are myriad of ways to describe Rahm’s political stances. Corporate “Democrat” and fundraiser. Blue Dog House Democrat. Neoliberal. All of which are out of vogue with most voters who claim they are unhappy with the status quo.
OK. Reactionaries who want to see the federal government eviscerated like Rahm’s neoliberalism.
But neoliberlism is how we ended up with jobs shipped overseas and the greatest income inequality in America since the Guilded Age. It’s also how we got a reactionary billionaire taking a chainsaw to the federal government, and a fascist dictator in the White House.
Rahm is also a corrupt, failed mayor of a large American city — Chicago.
Rahm absolutely hates what he calls “liberal theology” in the Democratic Party. He’s also on the record calling liberal groups, “fucking retarded.” By the way, Rahm apologized to the Special Olympics for using the R-word, but even as Reason Magazine pointed out, Rahm never said he was sorry to liberals.
It’s because Rahm is insulting to progressives that he has this little trial “boomlet” of speculation among some pundits like Tim Miller of The Bulwark.
OK. To be fair to Miller, he only speculates that a Democrat needs to be in your face like Rahm, and he is not exactly saying Rahm running for president is a good idea (he calls it “strange” and Katie Couric calls it “weird”). And don’t get me wrong, I would love to see a progressive or even a moderate have a fighting tone to their political rhetoric.
However, Rahm is a wealthy white CONSERVATIVE who thinks that progressives and other Democrats not like him suck. And his record as a political strategist and mayor of Chicago prove that Rahm is a terrible politician. He wanted to run for a third term as mayor, but Chicagoans had their fill of Rahm’s corporate agenda and protection of a racist and dysfunctional police force.
Oh, Adrienne Elrod, he was NOT a successful mayor!
From Ron Perlstein from 2015:
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… By then Emanuel had became the mayor of Chicago, elected with fifty-five per cent of the vote in the spring of 2011. Since then, there have been so many scandals in Emanuel’s administration that have failed to gain traction that it’s hard to single them out. One signature idea was lengthening Chicago’s school day by thirty per cent—controversial because he proposed compensating teachers only two per cent more for the extra work. The Chicago public-schools inspector general was soon investigating allegations that a local pastor linked to Emanuel was arranging buses to pack public hearings with supporters of the idea, paying at least two “protesters” twenty-five to fifty dollars each… Byrd-Bennett had taken over the job from an unfortunate gentleman named Jean-Claude Brizard, who was forced to take the fall when Emanuel lost a teachers' strike in 2012.* She was then tasked with another of Emanuel’s sketchy initiatives: closing fifty-four schools, many of which were in the city’s black neighborhoods. Why were forty-nine pillars of community stability ultimately shuttered? Suspicions of venal motives abounded, but nobody could really be sure. A fact-check by Chicago’s public-radio station, WBEZ, discovered that many of the facts that the city gave about the decision were not accurate. But don’t confuse that inquiry with a joint investigation by WBEZ and the schools magazine Catalyst Chicago which discovered that Emanuel’s claim about high-school-graduation rates—that they would increase by fifteen percentage points—was also a mirage. (Dropouts are reassigned to for-profit online education programs that demand very little work, and then are awarded diplomas from the school they last attended or one near where they live.) Or with the multi-part series by _Chicago _magazine that blew the mayor’s claims about Chicago’s supposedly declining homicide rates out of the water, too. (One method: categorizing homicide victims as “noncriminal deaths.”)
Elrod thinks that Rahm is onto something with his “weak” and “woke” statements about the Democratic Party. How is allowing a racist police force off the hook and closing 50 schools in the black community improving things for POC in Chicago? In fact, none of Rahm’s promises of what would happen when he closed those schools ever came about.
As for Rahm being terrific for Clinton and Obama. Rahm was all for NAFTA! And he was all for the 1994 Crime Bill that even Clinton says was wrong. And if it had been up to Rahm, we wouldn’t even have the ACA! Rahm was against it and fought it as a waste of political time and resources. Nancy Pelosi had to push for the ACA to get it passed.
And I know for a fact that Rahm was wrong when he ran the DCCC. He came into KY and spent money on two loser conservative Democrats while withholding money from the liberal Democrat who were all running in 2006. The liberal Democrat, John Yarmuth, won without any help from Rahm, who, once again, hates liberals and progressives. The two Blue Dog wannabees lost.
And Rahm made his fortune after government service for Obama through a wealthy donor who landed him a great investment banker gig. It provided up to 18 million dollars for Rahm. It’s also why Rahm went out of his way to protect the wealthy voters of Chicago by not pressing for any local tax increases on them.
But count on Chris Jansing, Adrienne Elrod, and Charlie Sykes of so called liberal MSNBC for pushing this repellent idea of a Rahm Emanuel presidential run to save us all from Trump.
Other candidates being promoted, at least from what I see, are Gov. Newsom (oh fuckin’ no) and Gov. Whitmer. Newsom is busy moving rightward, and Whitmer has played pattycake with Trump, who has ended up humiliating her on multiple occasions (the latest is his attempt to pardon two of the men who planned on kidnapping Whitmer and putting her on trial). How much you bet that Trump pardons those guys and Whitmer says nothing?
We can do better than these clowns, and we don’t need the legacy media and conservative pundits pushing dumbass politicos for us.
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