Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral record ‘disqualifying’ for a possible presidential contest, Johnson says
As former Mayor Rahm Emanuel revs up for a 2028 presidential bid, Mayor Brandon Johnson on Thursday described Emanuel’s eight years as mayor as “disqualifying.”
Johnson didn’t determine Emanuel by identify when he talked in regards to the one Democrat within the crowded discipline of possible presidential contenders whom he wish to, as he put it, “x-out.”
But there was little question about whose potential presidential marketing campaign Johnson was attacking, even earlier than Emanuel has formally introduced.
“I have very deep concerns about the former mayor of the city of Chicago. What he did in Chicago — from school closures to privatization to austere budgets,” Johnson mentioned throughout his month-to-month look on WBEZ-FM’s “Ask the Mayor” program earlier than a stay viewers.
“There was a boy who was murdered by a police officer and it was covered up,” Johnson added. “That’s disqualifying for me.” Johnson’s cover-up allegation was a reference to the 2014 homicide of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by now-convicted former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke.
Dashcam video of Van Dyke taking pictures McDonald 16 occasions whereas {the teenager} was strolling away from the officer with a knife in his hand was held by the town till a circuit decide ordered the town to launch it 14 months after the taking pictures.
Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree homicide and aggravated battery. He was launched from Taylorville Correctional Center in central Illinois in February 2022 after serving lower than half of his 81-month sentence.
In the furor that adopted launch of the video, Emanuel weathered weeks of protests and unprecedented calls for for his resignation earlier than in the end politically selecting retirement over the uphill battle for a third mayoral time period. In an try to tamp down the controversy, he informed the City Council a “code of silence” existed within the Chicago Police Department.
Johnson’s political broadside got here a day after Emmanuel appeared at a Wall Street Journal Live occasion in Washington and floated a 10% federal tax on on-line sports activities betting and prediction markets to extend income for science and expertise. On Thursday, Emanuel refused to answer Johnson’s remarks.
“I’m not going to engage,” Emanuel informed the Chicago Sun-Times. Emanuel’s spokesperson, Matt McGrath, added, “Why would anyone care what Brandon Johnson says? Springfield doesn’t. The City Council doesn’t. And judging by its approval ratings, most Chicagoans are bidding their time until there’s a new mayor next spring to put an end to the chaos and incompetence and get the City back on track.”
Former longtime Inspector General Joe Ferguson spent a lot of his tenure at loggerheads with Emanuel. He reiterated Thursday what he wrote to members of the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee who had been deciding in 2019 whether or not or to not affirm Emanuel as US ambassador to Japan.
“That is not the fact” that there was a cover-up, based on “an evidence-based record that was developed from many forms of inquiry and investigation,” Ferguson mentioned. “And we’re better served not relitigating controversies of the past.”
Ferguson mentioned he was not stunned by Johnson’s assault on Emanuel with simply a few months to go earlier than Johnson should resolve whether or not or to not search a second time period.
“In a heightened political environment, we’re always going to hear things like this,” mentioned Ferguson, who now serves as president of the Civic Federation. “The problems of the city are of such magnitude that it’s critically important that all attention be focused on them because we have work to do.”
A realistic centrist who has by no means backed down from a political battle, Emanuel has lengthy been within the crosshairs of Johnson and his fellow far-left Democrats.
As a paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson protested Emanuel’s determination to cancel instructor pay raises, triggering the 2012 lecturers strike, in addition to Emanuel’s determination to shut 50 colleges in a single fell swoop.
Johnson usually talks about having “taken an arrest” whereas protesting Emanuel’s determination to shut Dyett High School.
Last yr, Johnson accused Emanuel of getting devised and “executed” the anti-Black, neoliberal “playbook” that Johnson says is now being adopted by President Donald Trump.
At the time, Johnson mentioned there had been a “long, sustained movement” in Chicago to push again towards the “neoliberal agenda” that Emanuel championed to “set up austere budgets” concentrating on African Americans and the “public accommodations” that supported them.
“The playbook that Donald Trump is running is a playbook that Emanuel executed in this city,” Johnson mentioned then. “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.”
Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson defended Emanuel’s stewardship of CPS throughout her tenure: “The data doesn’t lie. By Mayor Emanuel’s last year in office, CPS students were leading all big cities in academic gains… and set a new standard for graduation and college acceptance rates.”
