I’ve decided not to seek reelection.” These words are spoken far too seldom in American politics, but few have spoken them with better reason than Rahm Emanuel. In his nearly eight years as Chicago’s mayor, he has failed by almost any metric.
He was once a rising star of Democratic politics. Emanuel served as senior adviser in the Clinton White House, caucus chairman in the House of Representatives, and Barack Obama’s first chief of staff. When he won the mayoralty of Chicago, Emanuel was commonly talked about as a potential presidential contender. He may still entertain such an opinion of his electability, but voters in Chicago certainly wouldn’t agree.
The murder rate had steadily fallen during the 22-year tenure of Emanuel’s predecessor, Richard M. Daley, and Emanuel campaigned on making the city even safer. Crime held steady for his first few years, but things fell apart in his second term. Between 2014 and 2018, the number of murders in Chicago increased by 43 percent. Criminal sexual assaults increased by 47 percent. In 2016, the city had 762 murders, more than the number in New York and Los Angeles combined—despite the far larger populations of both those cities. Rather than address this appalling state of affairs boldly by increasing the number of police officers, ramping up stop-and-search policies, and aggressively prosecuting gang leaders, Emanuel offered bromides and an equally ineffective increase in surveillance cameras.
Emanuel had campaigned on racial reconciliation, too, and Chicago is now debilitated by racial strife to a degree it hasn’t seen since the riots of the 1960s. Every big-city mayor is accused of favoring some constituencies over others, but the accusation has some merit in Emanuel’s case. In 2013, he shut down 50 public schools in predominantly black neighborhoods on the grounds that they had low attendance and the city budget couldn’t sustain them. The affected school zones have degenerated in the intervening years—despite a mayoral promise to turn the shuttered institutions into facilities to aid the neighborhoods. Much the same happened when the mayor opted to shutter a series of mental health clinics in low-income and black communities. Understandably, Cook County’s black population is declining—in 2017, more than 14,000 voted with their feet in search of better opportunities elsewhere.
Chicago’s budget is usually in a state of disrepair, but Emanuel leaves it in crisis. A large pension-funding deficit will greet his successor, who won’t be able to look to taxation. Emanuel’s repeated hikes in property taxes, water and sewer fees, garbage-removal fees, cable-TV taxes, vehicle fees, and parking fees have angered residents across the city. The city’s combined sales tax is 10.25 percent, tied with Long Beach, Calif., for the highest in the nation.
We fear things will get worse before they get better. A gaggle of Obama administration veterans are said to be lining up to take Emanuel’s place: former education secretary Arne Duncan, former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, former chief of staff Bill Daley (brother and son of Chicago mayors). Another Democrat, Garry McCarthy, the police chief Emanuel fired in 2015, wants to be mayor, too, but he is a proponent of the same tired orthodoxy on crime that put Chicago in its present chaotic state.
Emanuel did his best to wreck a great city, and the result is painful to behold. That he also wrecked the political ambitions of Rahm Emanuel perhaps spares the nation a similar fate.
