Mayor Brandon Johnson tried Tuesday to undermine a potential political comeback by Rahm Emanuel — accusing the former two-term mayor of having devised and “executed” the anti-Black, neoliberal “playbook” that Johnson says is now being followed by President Donald Trump.
A pragmatic centrist who has never backed down from a political fight, Emanuel has long been in the cross-hairs of Johnson and his fellow far-left Democrats.
It started long before 2015, when Emanuel chose political retirement over the uphill battle for a third term in the furor that followed the court-ordered release of video of the 2014 police shooting of Laquan McDonald.
Now, Emanuel has turned into Johnson’s punching bag just as the ex-mayor and former U.S. ambassador to Japan potentially lays the groundwork for another run for elected office — perhaps for president, senator, governor or, once again, the city’s mayor.
Johnson’s barbs directed at Emanuel came when he was asked during his weekly City Hall news conference whether the school funding increase he plans to seek next week during a lobbying trip to Springfield would be enough to avert a stalled, $300 million, high-interest loan at the Chicago Public Schools.
Instead of answering the question directly, Johnson unleashed a tirade against Emanuel, whom he has attacked before, though never so aggressively.
The mayor said he was watching an interview with Emanuel recently and was “incredibly bothered by his temerity.” Johnson said there has been a “long, sustained movement” in Chicago to push back against the “neoliberal agenda” that Emanuel championed to “set up austere budgets” targeting African-Americans and the “public accommodations” that support them.
“The playbook that Donald Trump is running is a playbook that Emanuel executed in this city,” Johnson said.
“We didn’t get here because we just happen to have a tyrant in the White House. We got here because someone gave him the script… The shutting of schools. The firing of Black women. Privatizing our public education system is why the system is as jacked up as it is today.”
Johnson said Emanuel, who famously closed nearly 50 public schools in 2013 in one fell swoop, had “immense disdain for public education and particularly Black, Brown and poor children, and he was vocal about it.”
“He told one of my heroes — sheroes — that 25% of children won’t become anything. Those are his words directly to Karen Lewis,” Johnson said of the late Chicago Teachers Union president whose planned 2015 mayoral campaign against Emanuel was derailed when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
“And now, he’s prancing around this country asking people to reconsider him,” Johnson said. “It is not just frustrating. It is beyond offensive.”
Emanuel, now a paid political commentator for CNN, refused to comment on Johnson’s tirade.
However, Democratic political strategist James Carville, who considers Emanuel to be one of his oldest and closest friends, came to the ex-mayor’s defense. The two men have known each other since 1991 when they served together in the Clinton White House.
Carville did not mince his words in standing up for Emanuel, who gave up his seat in Congress to serve as White House chief-of-staff under then-President Barack Obama.
“Chicagoans are going to ask themselves, whose judgment do they trust — Brandon Johnson’s or Barack Obama’s,” Carville said.
“If this guy thinks that he’s smarter about human beings than Barack Obama, then that’s his business,” Carville added. “I don’t think people agree with him… Barack Obama clearly thought that Rahm was a person of integrity and competence, and Brandon Johnson has a different view.”
The anti-Emanuel put-downs are not new for Chicago’s embattled first-term mayor.
Johnson has made repeated references to Emanuel’s school closings and blamed Emanuel for the financial mess that he inherited, ignoring the political capital the former mayor spent to double Chicago’s property tax levy to chip away at the city’s pension crisis and identify dedicated funding sources for the city’s four employee pension funds.
But Tuesday’s remarks were the strongest yet — and Carville fired back.
“Incompetent people are jealous of competent people,” Carville said.
Brandon Johnson is “a guy who has failed at his job and he’s very insecure about it. That’s what I really think is at the core of this.. …When people fail at one thing, they try to deflect attention to something else and, clearly, that’s what he’s trying to do.”
Carville said he did not know whether Emanuel will again seek office.
“He’s probably got the most accomplished resume of any American that hasn’t been president in the last 30 years, so he has an array of choices to make,” Carville said.
An Emanuel confidante, who asked to remain anonymous, branded Johnson’s remarks as an “embarrassing attempt to distract” from Johnson’s “consistent leadership failures.”
The Emanuel confidante said the fallacy of Johnson’s argument about Emanuel being anti-Black was underscored by the emotional tributes Emanuel received from African-American alderpersons during the former mayor’s final City Council meeting.
City Council dean Walter Burnett (27th), Johnson’s Zoning Committee chair, talked on that day about the helping hand that Emanuel extended to CHA residents, the homeless and ex-offenders.
“You’ve helped so many people. They come up to me on the street,” Burnett said on that day, his voice breaking.
Veteran Democratic political strategist Peter Giangreco said Tuesday’s attack appears to be Johnson’s attempt to create a “false enemy to try to get his base back together.”
“When your approval rating is below 20%, I guess attacking someone else is how you try to pull yourself up. But I don’t understand the calculus,” Giangreco said.
“When Mayor Johnson makes the comparison to former Mayor Emanuel, it just reminds people how much better the city ran under Emanuel. Test scores were going up. Cranes were up. Crime was going down. Emanuel wasn’t perfect, but when you compare now to then, what Johnson is trying to do will have a very high backfire rate.”