Rahm Emanuel Warns Democrats Have Lost Focus On Working Class

By Jay Caruso | Washington Examiner

Rahm Emanuel has never been mistaken for a shrinking violet. As former President Bill Clinton‘s senior adviser, former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, and the mayor of Chicago, he operates with a bluntness that has made him enemies on both sides of the aisle. So, when he sits down on a podcast and unloads on the Democratic Party of which he is a member, from the right, it is worth paying attention, even if you factor in that he is almost certainly running for president in 2028 and has every reason to position himself as the adult in the room.

He is not wrong.

In a wide-ranging conversation on the Reason podcast, The Fifth Column, with Michael Moynihan and Matt Welch, Emanuel laid out a critique of the Democratic Party that is as clear-eyed as anything you will hear from a figure of his stature. The party, he argues, lost the plot. It has substituted left-wing cultural advocacy for economic populism, chased the faculty lounge while losing the kitchen table, and managed the remarkable feat of making President Donald Trump, a twice-impeached, felony-convicted candidate who promised tariffs, retribution, and the systematic dismantling of federal institutions, the more plausible champion of the American working class.

That is not a small failure. It is a generational one.

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