Top Democrats pressed for Rahm Emanuel to lead Biden campaign

The Scoop

At the low point of President Joe Biden’s polling this winter, top New York Democratic donors pushed to bring the legendary Democratic politico Rahm Emanuel back from his posting in Japan to run the re-election campaign.

Two prominent Democratic sources told Semafor that they’d been involved in discussions aimed at bringing the combative and connected Emanuel — a former top Clinton aide, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman, Chicago Mayor, and member of a legendary set of brothers — in to energize what they saw as an isolated and somnolent Biden inner circle that seemed to be hiding the president from public view.

The donor-led push — like most efforts to influence Biden’s tight inner circle — was received coolly in Wilmington and Tokyo. Emanuel dismissed the effort as “not real” in a text message to Semafor.

And the donors’ anxiety subsided in January when Biden began his reelection campaign in earnest with a feisty State of the Union address, which reassured his party. Since then, positive economic numbers and hints of positive trends in national polling have pushed the mainstream of the Democratic party back into hopeful and resigned alignment with the president.

Asked about the push to install Emanuel, Biden campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo replied: “We don’t comment on fan fiction.”

Ben’s view

The previously unreported effort by New York’s big-money power base was part of a final spasm of buyer’s remorse in a Democratic Party whose members are lukewarm about their nominee but lack any mechanism to exert pressure on him to drop out or change course.

The donors, like Biden’s handwringing allies in the media, have since largely fallen into line. The mood in the party’s elite is now a kind of confident resignation: They’re bracing for the sensation either of relief or regret in November.

And Democrats now have a new focus for their anxiety: the left wing of their own party, whose growing protest movement is proudly unconcerned about the outcome of the November election.

Room for Disagreement

“Biden’s inner circle is defiantly sanguine,” Time wrote last month. “They see a candidate with a strong economy, a sizable cash advantage, and a record of accomplishments on infrastructure, climate change, industrial policy, and consumer protections that will register for more voters as the campaign ramps up. They see a pattern of Democrats overperforming their polling in recent years, from the 2022 midterms to a spate of special elections and abortion referendums. Most of all, they see a historically unpopular opponent”

Notable

• The other great strand of Democratic panic came from a circle aligned with President Barack Obama, one of whose favorite journalists, Ezra Klein, published a plea for Biden to drop out before the Democratic National Convention.

• Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote in November that Biden should bring Emanuel back to chair his camapign: “Doing so would demonstrate a willingness by Biden to broaden his inner circle, create a manic urgency in the campaign that is Emanuel’s trademark and, by elevating one of the most ferocious operatives of our times, signal that when Trump goes low the Democrats will go f***ing lower.”