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0:01:46 Hey, folks, we took a break for Memorial Day, but before the long weekend, we sat down with Rahm Emanuel for a conversation recorded last Thursday.
0:01:52 We got into the issues surrounding Biden, the Republican transfer of wealth to the rich and what Democrats need to focus on.
0:01:53 Here’s the episode.
0:01:54 Enjoy.
0:01:58 Welcome to Raging Moderates.
0:01:59 I’m Scott Galloway.
0:02:01 And I’m Jessica Tarlov.
0:02:12 Jess, joining us today is someone who’s worn a lot of hats in American politics, two-time mayor of Chicago, former White House chief of staff, and most recently U.S. ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel.
0:02:13 Rahm, welcome to the show.
0:02:14 Thanks, Scott.
0:02:15 Thanks, Jess.
0:02:17 We’re going to jump right into this.
0:02:23 The headlines this week have been dominated by the news that President Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
0:02:28 That comes on the heels of a week already full of questions about his health and a buzzy new book.
0:02:30 Quick question.
0:02:43 Did Biden’s narcissism and entering into consensual hallucination with the Democratic Party that he was the best candidate for a president, is that a big part of the reason that we reelected an insurrectionist?
0:02:47 Look, I mean, I have a couple answers on this.
0:02:50 You know, look, White Houses are insular.
0:02:51 Yeah.
0:02:53 And the Oval Office is seductive.
0:03:00 And while you talked about his medical condition and all this, my take on this is this is Shakespearean.
0:03:06 And the reason I say that is I’ve worked with former President Biden in three different functions.
0:03:16 One, I was assigned by President Clinton when I was senior advisor to work with him on passing the Violence Against Women Act and the assault weapon ban when he’s a senator.
0:03:18 And I was, as I said, senior advisor for the president.
0:03:24 Then our offices, when I’m chief of staff for President Obama, are adjacent to each other.
0:03:34 And then as ambassador that he appointed me and I’m 8,000 miles away, we worked through this historic agreement between Japan, Korea and the United States.
0:03:36 So I’ve seen him at different stages from different locations.
0:03:38 And I’ve seen him, and I’ve seen him change.
0:03:50 And what saddens me, and I’m just saying this as a friend, genuine friend to him, he’s a good man who did good work, who wanted one thing in life, which was to be known as somebody that was significant.
0:03:56 And the tragedy here will be that his last act is going to become a defining act.
0:04:12 And it is going to actually undo the one thing he wanted out of his life, which is it’s going to, I won’t say obliterate, that’s a little dramatic, but it’s definitely going to color in a very significant way the one thing he wanted.
0:04:21 And had he stayed true to his commitment in 2020 and said, I’m going to be a transitional, I do believe this was, you know, this gets back to a question.
0:04:24 Could you have won, could the Democrat have won this race?
0:04:27 I’ve always thought a Democrat could have beaten Donald Trump.
0:04:27 Yeah.
0:04:41 He didn’t get 50 plus percent, and I feel empathy for him because he wanted one thing in life beyond doing good work, you know, some sense to be seen as a significant player, et cetera.
0:04:57 And the vanity, the power of the office, the lack of people around him that would tell him truth, and I add one thing, I mean, President Obama and President Clinton can tell you, your job at certain times of the presidency is to tell the president not what they want to know, but what they need to hear.
0:04:57 Right.
0:04:59 And that didn’t happen.
0:05:03 He or they or both got walled off from that.
0:05:10 And White Houses get very, very insular, and that office is incredibly seductive.
0:05:19 So I feel him not holding to his pledge had consequences, one, to him and two, to all of us, and we’re dealing with it today.
0:05:28 We’ll just follow up, and then just moving to solutions, we’ve decided that a 34-year-old does not have the cognitive ability or the judgment to run for the highest office.
0:05:30 Do you think we need age limits on the higher end?
0:05:34 Why wouldn’t we have age limits, say, of 75 to run for office?
0:05:36 Well, it’s not only cognitive.
0:05:40 You ever see a before and after picture of a president in the White House?
0:05:40 Sure.
0:05:41 The day they walk in and the day we walk out?
0:05:42 Yeah.
0:05:45 Every year is a dog year, okay?
0:05:53 You walk into that office, and it is a physical, mental, emotional, psychological beating by the hour.
0:05:54 Mm-hmm.
0:05:55 There should be a cap.
0:06:00 You saw it with Ronald Reagan’s, I mean, deterioration in his final years.
0:06:05 So you’re on board with an age limit at the high end, that someone who, say, above a certain age should not be able to run?
0:06:06 Yes.
0:06:07 That’s the short answer.
0:06:08 I will say one thing.
0:06:10 There’s an anecdote out of the Oval.
0:06:14 You know, obviously, I’m President Obama’s chief of staff for the first two years.
0:06:20 And one day, you know, we were going from health care to a, you know, 10-minute financial reform.
0:06:26 Then we were going into the oil well that had exploded, and it was just, you know, that was only by 1030.
0:06:35 And I told him, I said, look, man, when we get out of here, I want to get a T-shirt shack on a beach.
0:06:38 And I want to sell one color, white.
0:06:40 So if somebody said blue, I’d go, white.
0:06:42 And one size, medium.
0:06:45 Just so I don’t have to think, I don’t have to make a call.
0:06:49 And we used to have this, like we’d be in a meeting, and it was like mind-boggling.
0:06:51 I look at him, I go, white.
0:06:53 He’d look at me and go, medium.
0:07:03 Because we were going to open up a T-shirt shack on a Hawaiian beach, and all we were going to do all day is lean forward and just watch the waves so you didn’t have to think anymore.
0:07:08 And the immense pressure, as my grandfather would say, it takes the neshama out of you.
0:07:09 Yeah.
0:07:12 I like knowing that white and medium are your safe words.
0:07:14 So now I know that.
0:07:27 Before we get to the reconciliation package, I just wanted to add on to what you were saying, Scott, about President Biden and, you know, the extension of what original sin is uncovered.
0:07:37 And there are already four books, right, that are coming out about the quote-unquote cover-up in the White House, is that we have this enormous trust deficit with the American people.
0:07:47 And they’re skeptical of politicians in general, but it has never been so bleak for Democrats in comparison to the Republican Party.
0:07:57 And I’m curious, as someone with great political instincts and having been successful in many arenas of politics, how you think Democrats can deal with that?
0:08:09 Because it feels very much to me and Scott that we are going about business as usual in extraordinary times and that we need an extraordinary solution to the challenges that we’re facing.
0:08:13 You know, just, I, this wasn’t a surprise to the American people.
0:08:15 They told us over and over he’s too old.
0:08:16 Yes.
0:08:27 I mean, if you go back and do kind of an autopsy of the presidency, there’s the confluence in that first August with both what happens in Afghanistan and the recurrence of COVID.
0:08:40 And also, which I think sometimes gets lost in the analysis, he doesn’t try to deal with Afghanistan by doing a Kennedy post Bay of Pigs and say, I own this.
0:08:40 This is on me.
0:08:41 I made the decision.
0:08:50 And his response sets off triggers because he was supposed to be hired to manage better than the chaos of Trump 1.0.
0:08:54 And that starts to build a resistance to him.
0:08:58 He never then gets back to positive real estate from a polling standpoint and trust.
0:09:10 And as inflation picks up and gets deeper and he tries to tell the American people the economy is better than you appreciate, the age issue comes over as a person who’s out of touch.
0:09:14 And it grows to like a 70 mile an hour headwind straight at him.
0:09:20 And the American people could not see past that block.
0:09:24 And it grew in intensity every day that went by.
0:09:26 So it was the most discussed subject.
0:09:29 If it was a secret, the American people were in on it.
0:09:30 Right.
0:09:31 It wasn’t a secret.
0:09:34 They were in on it and they issued a judgment.
0:09:36 Now, there is a trust factor.
0:09:38 I think there’s a trust factor for politicians.
0:09:40 The truth is, there’s a trust factor.
0:09:44 The farther you get away from people’s home, the less trust there is.
0:09:46 Local politics versus national.
0:09:48 There’s not, you know, people go, oh, our democracy is that threat.
0:09:49 Not the local level.
0:09:49 Right.
0:09:50 National level.
0:09:57 I think the bigger challenge for Democrats is, and I don’t think we own universally the deficit on trust.
0:10:01 I think our challenge, Democrats are seen as weak and woke.
0:10:08 Republicans are seen as going to be in this reconciliation bill as people that stab you in the back and betray you.
0:10:11 That’s the two vulnerabilities of both parties.
0:10:17 And if we do certain things that I’ve been advocating, I can talk about it on the show.
0:10:22 I think we can make up for and address the weak and woke in a very kind of focused way.
0:10:27 I think people have clearly, because of weak and woke, disappointed in us.
0:10:30 And that has made them appropriately angry at us.
0:10:32 What do we do about that?
0:10:35 You know, we’ve heard it in every kind of denomination.
0:10:38 You know, they’re crazy, but we’re preachy.
0:10:40 They look down on us.
0:10:42 Why are you on the wrong side of a 70-30 issue?
0:10:44 Fix us, Rom.
0:10:50 Well, look, I’m sensitive to a child that’s trying to figure out what pronoun they want to use.
0:10:55 But nobody wants to be sensitive to the fact that the rest of the classroom can’t tell you what a pronoun is.
0:10:57 And to me, this is insane.
0:10:59 I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again.
0:11:07 We shut the front door of a school for two years during COVID, and then we blew open the bathroom door right afterwards.
0:11:14 And not only were we off on a tangent of a set of issues, we made them primary to us.
0:11:18 Yes, by our DNA as Democrats, we are an accepting party.
0:11:21 We became a party that advocated.
0:11:23 And that’s a mistake.
0:11:25 Go back to President Clinton.
0:11:27 That’s a formative experience for me.
0:11:32 In 1992, 40% of his advertising is on ending welfare as you know it.
0:11:37 He comes on the heels of Jimmy Carter’s loss, Walter Mondale’s loss, Michael Dukakis’ loss.
0:11:39 He ran openly as a New Democrat.
0:11:43 And that New Democrat wasn’t just the economy, stupid.
0:11:48 It was 100,000 community police officers not defunding the police.
0:11:55 It was ending welfare as we know it, not continuing kind of a failed system, even when it was self-evident that it was broken.
0:12:00 The economics and the cultural aspect were grounded in mainstream.
0:12:06 President Obama himself talked openly about it’s easy to father a child.
0:12:07 It’s different to be a dad.
0:12:09 And he got criticized for it.
0:12:10 And he stood up for that.
0:12:20 Rounding yourself in the mainstream culturally is really, really important for the whole agenda, not just tactically.
0:12:24 Democrats, and this is a thing that I would say about politics.
0:12:28 Sound is not always fury.
0:12:33 And you have to, if you’re good in politics, know the difference between sound and fury.
0:12:42 Just because a Washington group tells you to use the word Latinx doesn’t mean people use it.
0:12:46 And we have to be not cavalier attacking people.
0:12:56 We have to ground ourselves in the very conversation that families have about social media, about homeless encampments near their house, things that happen on their block.
0:13:05 And not look, we’re running off in some tangent because some Washington group with a 202 area code on their phone yelling at you.
0:13:14 And my other point to illustrate this, in the last State of the Union by President Biden, he said illegal immigrant.
0:13:20 The next morning, the Washington interest groups attack him and say, you have to use undocumented.
0:13:23 And rather than say, hey, look, they crossed the border illegally.
0:13:25 They’re immigrants.
0:13:26 I’m using illegal immigrants.
0:13:27 You want to use undocumented?
0:13:27 You use it.
0:13:28 I’m going to use what I’m going to use.
0:13:31 That would have been a sign of strength.
0:13:38 Grounding yourself in the mainstream and the strength to say when somebody who’s in the family is off sides.
0:13:39 That is essential.
0:13:41 More so for Democrats.
0:13:46 And we got caught in a cul-de-sac, driving around in a circle in the last three years.
0:13:53 So, Ron, House Republicans just passed a massive tax and spending cuts package.
0:13:59 A lot of think tanks have said this is going to be the greatest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.
0:14:05 I’m curious to get your thoughts on this bill and these tax cuts.
0:14:13 This is not an advocate for my web traffic on my piece, but I just had a piece go up on The Washington Post on this piece.
0:14:17 But I think this is a huge opportunity for Democrats.
0:14:25 You don’t have either the microphone of the Oval Office or the gavel of the congressional.
0:14:28 Both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue are owned by the Republicans.
0:14:32 There is an architecture built in to that midterm.
0:14:40 An energized opposition, two-to-one independence break from the incumbent party, and a depressed incumbent party.
0:14:44 That is already, you can see in the early polling, setting up for 2026.
0:14:48 You can see Democrats are energized in these special elections.
0:14:51 Independents have broke from the Republican Party.
0:14:56 The Republican Party is just not turning out the way they did when Donald Trump was on the ballot.
0:15:01 It’s early, but the outlines of that architecture exist today, Scott.
0:15:06 On this bill, make simplicity a virtue.
0:15:15 There is a division between the MAGA, realizing all of a sudden Medicaid affects the rural hospitals and their constituents,
0:15:21 and the fiscal, if there are such things in the Republican Party, conservatives, who like the pain of cutting Medicaid.
0:15:23 Enjoy it, actually.
0:15:31 To me, you should make the battle cry, raise taxes on the wealthy so that we can give health care to the many.
0:15:32 Very simple.
0:15:38 The Democrats should be offering one simple bill, raise taxes on people making above $2.5 million,
0:15:44 eliminate carried interest, put the corporate tax rate back up to 27%, restore all the health care cuts.
0:15:45 Don’t try to solve all the problems.
0:15:47 This is setting up 2026.
0:15:49 The one thing we can win is 2026.
0:15:50 That’s what this is about.
0:15:57 The independent voters, which are going to be key in swing states and swing districts, want reform,
0:16:03 but most importantly, they want a check on an untethered, unchecked Donald Trump.
0:16:07 And you’ve got to associate the Republicans as a rubber stamp Congress.
0:16:10 This is not about oligarchy.
0:16:11 This is not about fascism.
0:16:14 This is not about do-nothing Democrats and weakness.
0:16:17 These terms are a referendum on the party in power.
0:16:20 Make it a referendum on the party in power.
0:16:28 This is a rubber stamp Republican Congress that has decided to reinforce what I refer to as the three Cs,
0:16:30 corruption, chaos, and cruelty.
0:16:31 And repeat it.
0:16:36 Washington interest groups see corruption as the Qatar jet, the Bitcoin.
0:16:44 The public sees corruption as a well-heeled, well-connected, getting a tax cut, and we’re getting our health care cut.
0:16:46 That’s how they see, perceive corruption.
0:16:56 And we should go right at it, drive like a Mack truck right to that point, and don’t go off wandering onto other ancillary issues.
0:17:01 The wealthy are walking off with all the money, and you’re paying for it with your health care.
0:17:03 It also has the beauty of one thing.
0:17:03 It’s true.
0:17:06 I like that.
0:17:11 It’s easy and digestible, and we suffer from being too loquacious as a party.
0:17:16 No, we’re always meeting with our Ph.D. committee to explain our theory of the case, yeah.
0:17:22 Embarrassed to be a Ph.D. holder myself, but we’ll pretend that I’m not for the rest of this podcast.
0:17:25 Okay, let’s take a quick break.
0:17:25 Stay with us.
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0:19:51 This week on Unexplainable.
0:20:00 I want to tell you about this guy I came across who has tied little leashes to butterflies and moths,
0:20:06 like little leashes out of fishing line, and taken them for walks around his lab.
0:20:08 And by walks, I mean little tiny flights.
0:20:11 So, like, imagine a dude with, like, a real-life kite.
0:20:15 On the other end is a butterfly, and he’s, like, walking it around a room.
0:20:17 Um, okay.
0:20:34 You mentioned education, the classroom, and that’s why you ran to be the mayor of Chicago.
0:20:43 And I’ve been disturbed by how Democrats have lost their edge in handling all of the most important issues to Americans.
0:20:49 I think we’re only still up on climate change and abortion, and only just barely now at this point.
0:20:57 And one of the biggest losses, I think, is that parents in this country don’t trust us to handle their children’s education.
0:21:09 And I’m curious as to what you think are some good policies that we could stand behind that would reaffirm people’s trust in us on that particular issue,
0:21:19 And also what we can do about the awesome, and not in the necessarily positive way, but just in the huge way, the power of the teachers’ unions.
0:21:28 When, you know, an average person knows who Randy Weingarten is, that that’s a problem for the party, especially considering what went on during COVID.
0:21:31 So, you’re right, Jess.
0:21:38 Last 30 years, Democrats had anywhere, starting from Jimmy Carter’s creating the Department of Education and Reagan trying to, or advocating to shut it down,
0:21:43 we had anywhere, call it, from 20 to 30-point advantage on education.
0:21:46 President Obama did race to the top.
0:21:48 President Clinton did teachers of excellence.
0:21:52 But we basically kept coming at this, focused on the classroom.
0:21:54 Accelerate.
0:22:01 There’s no doubt, during COVID, we shut schools down much longer than they need to be, much longer than, quote-unquote,
0:22:04 the science told us to do, even though we kept saying we’re going to follow the science.
0:22:10 Second, we got in a bunch of ancillary discussions that had nothing to do with reading, writing, and math.
0:22:16 The name of the school, was it named after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or any other founding father?
0:22:20 Or, access to the bathroom and access to locker rooms.
0:22:24 We’ve gone into bathroom and locker rooms, and we avoided the classroom.
0:22:30 So, you have to go back, for political purposes, to the place where you build political support.
0:22:31 That’s one.
0:22:38 Now, we’re at a 30-year low on reading scores, and I think near a 30-year low on math scores.
0:22:47 Alabama, in fourth grade, is the only state that has made gains on math.
0:22:55 Mississippi, going back to 2010, but even through COVID in post, has made significant gains on reading.
0:22:58 There’s a couple common themes to that.
0:23:01 One, time on task.
0:23:04 They dedicate more time to early intervention.
0:23:08 Three, we’re needed, one-on-one instruction.
0:23:14 That should become an emergency meeting using the Oval Office, all the governors, etc.
0:23:23 How do we get, over the next 18 months, what Alabama and Mississippi’s done, what are the best practices, and how do we make them universal, and start getting back to basics of that.
0:23:28 We have an absentee rate in Chicago of double digits, and that’s true nationally.
0:23:30 We have normalized absenteeism.
0:23:37 Parents and kids have self-selected four-day school week, and we’ve made it a norm.
0:23:39 And I think we should set a national standard.
0:23:47 No child will go from fourth to fifth grade who has north of seven, I’m using for this discussion, seven percent, because we’re doing social promotion.
0:23:48 The data is quite clear.
0:23:50 Kids can’t learn if they’re not in the classroom.
0:23:53 So, if you’re not in the classroom, you’re not going to the next grade.
0:23:54 End it.
0:23:56 No more social promotion.
0:24:05 Lastly, and I think this is really important, we haven’t rethought the high school since introducing universal high school education.
0:24:06 It’s been 100 years.
0:24:12 I’m not saying we did everything right in Chicago, but we did a couple things, I think, that do matter in that reinvention.
0:24:21 We went from a mindset of a diploma machine, get you to graduation, get you a diploma, to high school was preparation for what’s next.
0:24:23 So, we did three things.
0:24:28 First, if you earn a B average, we made community college free.
0:24:31 You got free books, free tuition, free transportation.
0:24:37 And in a school district with 83% poverty, 20,000 kids have availed themselves of it.
0:24:39 Three-quarters of them are the first in the family to go to college.
0:24:41 We made it free, but you got to have a B average.
0:24:54 Two, you could not get your high school diploma without showing a letter of acceptance from a college, community college, a branch of the armed services, or a vocational school.
0:24:57 You will not get your high school diploma without that letter.
0:25:00 So, you have to help parents do that.
0:25:07 So, we hired a massive amount of college and career counselors and got them into high schools across the city.
0:25:09 We help kids starting their freshman year.
0:25:10 What do you want to do?
0:25:11 How do you want to do it?
0:25:11 Okay.
0:25:14 And every year, you met with that counselor.
0:25:16 So, you were, did you need more math?
0:25:17 Did you need more science?
0:25:19 Did, you know, where were you on this or that?
0:25:31 So, they were preparing if they wanted to go Marines, they wanted to go plumbing, or they wanted to go to Harold Washington Community College, to Northern or UIC, or wherever they want to apply.
0:25:38 And we had a 99.4% compliance.
0:25:44 We re, as best we could, rethought and reinvented the high school education.
0:25:48 So, you know, my motto always was, you earn what you learn.
0:25:51 You get a high school education, you’ll learn that.
0:25:53 You don’t get one, you’ll earn that too.
0:26:05 So, Ram, something we talk a lot about here is, along the lines of young people, is, you know, my view is that the group that’s fallen furthest fastest is the one that gets the least empathy, and that is young men.
0:26:05 Yep.
0:26:11 Four times more likely to kill themselves, three times more likely to be addicted, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated.
0:26:14 What is your view on the plight?
0:26:16 If, A, do you see it as an issue?
0:26:20 And if so, how do we address it from a social policy?
0:26:23 Can you point to any programs that you’re in favor of?
0:26:29 I know you’ve been an advocate for national service, but what do you think we do to help lift up our young men?
0:26:33 So, there’s two things I’ll get to, but I want to finish one thought I was going to say.
0:26:34 Sure.
0:26:37 Because it deals with at least that one data point you pulled out about incarceration.
0:26:48 An oversized amount of the folks in prison are black men between the ages of 18 and 35 without a high school degree.
0:26:49 Yep.
0:26:53 The only thing I can change in that is whether you have a high school degree or not.
0:26:57 Can’t change gender, can’t change race, can’t change age.
0:26:58 That changes on its own.
0:27:12 And so, to me, getting kids, one of the things that we drove, and I say we, meaning Dr. Janice Jackson and I, she was the chancellor of our schools, is if you said to our kids, what are you going to do in four years?
0:27:14 If they had to have a, they could tell you.
0:27:17 I have kids when I was mayor in Chicago, which is true today.
0:27:20 Four weeks was their horizon.
0:27:23 They didn’t know if they were going to be alive at 18.
0:27:28 You get a child that walks across that stage and gets a diploma, they have a tomorrow.
0:27:33 They don’t get to that stage, they’re not thinking about tomorrow.
0:27:35 Their horizon is different.
0:27:39 So, if you can get them thinking about tomorrow, they’re going to change the way they think about themselves.
0:27:52 Second, and this was the inspiration for President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper, University of Chicago comes to me, and they show me this program that had about 80 kids called Becoming a Man.
0:27:56 And it’s a circle group you sit in, you do about four hours a day.
0:27:57 That’s one part.
0:28:02 And then they do other things with the children for about four hours a day, five days a week.
0:28:05 I was smitten by it.
0:28:12 I got Jimmy Butler involved in it, the basketball player, I got other athletes, anybody that came, including President Obama.
0:28:16 I made him participate at Hyde Park High School, and that became his inspiration.
0:28:27 We blew it up from 100 kids over my tenure to 7,500 young men, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th grade.
0:28:31 Four hours a day, five days a week, nine months out of the year.
0:28:34 It was their mentor.
0:28:37 It was their coach.
0:28:40 And it was their role model.
0:28:49 And I’m not going to do social science, but there’s enough data about staying out of the criminal justice system, graduating high school, that it’s overwhelming.
0:28:52 And again, I’m dealing with a population in Chicago.
0:28:55 It doesn’t mean it applies across the board, but I think it does.
0:29:00 Just with a little mentoring, their lives were different.
0:29:13 You can see this hollowness in their eyes, and it’s changed when they’re involved in something that’s rewarding, which I also believe about why I think we should go to a universal national service.
0:29:18 Look, a kid’s life is 20% in the classroom and 80% out.
0:29:23 If you want the 20% to succeed, invest in the 80%.
0:29:30 Now, we blew up after-school programs and summer jobs, and we tripled the enrollment.
0:29:36 But giving kids something where they get their own sense of confidence back.
0:29:49 And I would say to you, Scott, one of the things that’s clear to me, our young men have internalized a self-loathing, a self-doubt beyond just what teenage years used to.
0:30:02 There’s something that has happened that they have – look, everybody has a level of insecurity and grows up with it, but they have internalized this anger that’s self-directed.
0:30:08 Sometimes it is outside, and there’s – you can just – they’re craving a direction.
0:30:14 And they’re craving, in my view, an adult who cares about them.
0:30:24 You know, my father used to say as a pediatrician, you know, he’s never saw a kid that was spoiled because they were told they were loved too many times.
0:30:27 So I do know what the government can do, and I know what the government can’t do.
0:30:30 A government can support parenting.
0:30:31 A government can support a child.
0:30:35 A government program can give a child certain kind of supports.
0:30:37 There’s things it can’t do.
0:30:45 And I think one of the things we have to realize is we’re not – I think you’ve talked – both of you have talked about this.
0:30:50 We’re not in a zero-sum game that somehow if you’re helping young men, it comes at the expense of young women.
0:31:03 But the crisis that is now a flashing red light, not a yellow light, is these young men, aimless, and – I mean, you can hear it in their voice.
0:31:15 And if we don’t in some way interject ourselves and start doing different things rather than the same thing, we’re going to pay a huge price, and they’re going to pay a huge price.
0:31:18 So I looked at this mentoring program.
0:31:27 I would look at summer jobs after school, and then I would – I’m a firm believer that it’s got to be across the board, universal national service for six months.
0:31:28 Everybody’s got to do it.
0:31:32 Nobody gets to cut out of it just because you’re going to go to college or med school.
0:31:33 Forget about it.
0:31:45 So you’re talking like somebody that has a plan or at least some plans that we should be thinking about for the future of the party, for the country, and all of us.
0:31:50 And you’ve joked that you’re in training for 2028, but you don’t know if you’ll make the Olympics.
0:31:54 What does that training look like for you?
0:31:56 Are you thinking about running for president?
0:32:01 Are you thinking about running for governor if Pritzker takes the plunge himself?
0:32:05 So, Jeff, here’s how I think about it.
0:32:13 There’s a lot of people, rightfully, on the other end of the pool whose entire existence is fighting Donald Trump.
0:32:17 And there’s a lot to fight, and I don’t belittle it.
0:32:22 If I’m right, this election in 2026 is a referendum.
0:32:26 2028 is a choice, not a referendum.
0:32:35 And I’m going to spend my time, as I have both writing pieces, et cetera, on education, on national service.
0:32:38 I’ve already done certain things on national security.
0:32:44 And ideas about how to make the American dream affordable.
0:32:50 I don’t think it’s an accident that the moment the American dream became out of reach is less affordable.
0:32:53 It’s exactly the time in which our politics became unstable.
0:32:54 They’re connected.
0:33:00 And so, if I think I have something to offer that others don’t, I’ll take that plunge.
0:33:10 But I am going to spend my time now thinking, writing about what I think are the big issues that we have to address.
0:33:13 That gets to the topic of lost men.
0:33:17 That gets to the topic of rethinking our educational system.
0:33:21 There’s nothing partisan about reinventing high school.
0:33:24 You know, I happen to be for free community college.
0:33:27 President Obama took our program advocating nationally.
0:33:29 But that’s not the only road to the same destination.
0:33:35 And if I think I got something that other people aren’t talking about and a way to talk about it, then I’ll dive into the deep end.
0:33:40 But I’m going to spend my time articulating that, thinking about that, talking to people.
0:33:48 And if I don’t think anybody else is going to do that, or I think if I’m present in that campaign, I can drive that, I’ll dive in the pool.
0:33:49 If I don’t, I won’t.
0:33:51 That’s how I’m thinking about it.
0:33:52 Great.
0:34:05 Open AI spent the last few years turning ChatGPT into one of the most important and popular products on the internet.
0:34:12 Johnny Ive spent the last several decades building products at Apple that became truly iconic, like the iPhone.
0:34:15 Now, those two are teaming up to work on something.
0:34:20 We don’t know much, but it’s going to be some kind of AI gadget, and they think it’s going to be a really big deal.
0:34:33 This week on The VergeCast, we talk about what Johnny Ive and OpenAI might be up to, plus everything that happened at Google I.O., the developer conference, and all of the other news in the AI and gadget world, because there is just so much of it.
0:34:36 All that on The VergeCast, wherever you get podcasts.
0:34:45 When comedian Chris Gethard was growing up, he went to a place called Action Park.
0:34:53 It was one of the first water parks in the country, and it was built by a man who had no experience building theme parks.
0:34:56 Some people called him a berserk Willy Wonka.
0:35:03 Anyone who went to Action Park understood you could get really messed up going there.
0:35:07 Not only did we know that, it was a huge part of the appeal.
0:35:09 I’m Phoebe Judge.
0:35:15 Listen to our latest episode, Action Park, on Criminal, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:35:22 Welcome back.
0:35:25 So, just some recent news here.
0:35:32 Two Israeli embassy staffers were killed in a shooting outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in D.C.
0:35:34 Obviously tragic and heartbreaking.
0:35:43 What are your thoughts on this sort of light sleeper, which is anti-Semitism, what appears to be an increase in anti-Semitism in the U.S.?
0:35:48 Well, you know, so two things got the shooter.
0:35:50 I mean, the Chicago Police Department has it.
0:35:54 He’s been at our house a number of times for protests starting in 2017.
0:35:58 So, I have a slight connection with that.
0:36:04 Second is, I have a slight twist on what you said.
0:36:05 You said an increase.
0:36:08 Anti-Semitism has always existed.
0:36:10 More visible then.
0:36:11 Yes.
0:36:13 And the question is, why is it more visible?
0:36:15 Why these people?
0:36:16 Why now?
0:36:18 Straight up, why?
0:36:21 And to me, we’re going to have to have a hard conversation.
0:36:39 There has been a permission slip for what used to be behind closed doors said about Jews or said in a kind of snide remark, etc., to where it’s said now publicly, where anti-Semitism or anti-Semitic expressions are said openly.
0:36:52 Yes, October 7th ushered in one level, but anti-Semitism has existed, and what’s new is it’s got a green light.
0:37:00 And that green light, not only to expressing it, bubbles over into violence, not just stays rhetorical.
0:37:03 And I said this last week, and I’m going to say it again.
0:37:05 I said it at the 92nd Street Watch.
0:37:19 When you have people in 2017 marching around saying Jews will not replace us, blood and soil, and the next day doesn’t call for Lincoln’s malice towards none, we say there’s good people on both sides.
0:37:20 We got a problem.
0:37:37 And I want to be very clear, I’m not saying that this is on President Trump, but we have a permission slip for what was once repressed or said in hushed tones is now fully said, and there’s no boundary to where we’ll lead.
0:37:49 You know, look, my life, adult public life, when I was working for President Clinton, because of certain things said about Rahm Israel Emmanuel, we had a dog that would smell the car before we were allowed to turn it on.
0:38:03 When we were in Japan, somebody spray-painted the fence in front of our house with neo-Nazi signs, etc., and to this day, I don’t know who, a neighbor went and painted over it.
0:38:15 I got elected Rahm Israel Emmanuel in a congressional district that used to have, represented by Dan Rossinkowski, Frank Annunzio, Roman Paczynski, Rob Bogoyevich, Flanagan, quickly.
0:38:16 You know, what doesn’t fit there?
0:38:17 Rahm Israel Emmanuel.
0:38:23 But I had people in a district vote for a Jewish kid.
0:38:30 I was elected a mayor of a city of Chicago whose Jewish population is 3%, a working-class city.
0:38:36 So I have seen the best of folks, and I know firsthand the worst of folks.
0:38:54 I think anti-Semitism today is at a heightened level, and for a host of reasons not singular, there’s a green light to expressing it that didn’t exist in years past.
0:38:59 I just quickly want to say, you mentioned, you know, I’m not putting this on President Trump.
0:39:00 I’m not.
0:39:01 No, no, I get that.
0:39:09 But there are a lot of people who would argue that it’s actually our party that has allowed the green light to anti-Semitism more.
0:39:10 And he was chanting, Free Palestine.
0:39:15 He was part of a leftist organization and college protests.
0:39:16 No, I know.
0:39:17 It was personal for you.
0:39:18 That’s what he’s part of.
0:39:24 No, look, I don’t—anti-Semitism doesn’t have a political party or political identification or ideological.
0:39:27 And if you do that, then you’re actually not dealing with anti-Semitism.
0:39:32 You’re getting sidetracked into a political discussion that’s actually extremely unhelpful.
0:39:41 I have seen, as I said, by the anecdote I gave in Virginia in 2017, that wasn’t the left, quote-unquote.
0:39:53 And I don’t find trying to figure out which party is responsible—I really not only think it’s a sidetracked argument, it actually blinds us from dealing with some core issues.
0:39:58 And we’re going to have to deal with it as a country and ask some really hard questions.
0:40:13 And I think the notion that somehow Democrats bear more of it is not just unhelpful, it’s actually trying to wash your hands of coming to crux because anti-Semitism doesn’t have a party or ideological point of origin.
0:40:22 I personally don’t disagree with you, and I’ve just been disappointed, I guess, in how life has been handled since October 7th.
0:40:41 Look, it’s a fair point, except for I want to say, you know, this country, I not only represent—I mean, I don’t want to go through my titles, but I’m the son of an Israeli immigrant and the grandson of an immigrant from Moldova who came here fleeing the pogroms.
0:40:44 This country has been incredible to the Jewish community.
0:40:50 It’s based on the rule of law, self-determination, and a series of freedoms.
0:40:54 When those get degraded, that is not good.
0:40:57 I got 2,000 years of Jewish history, but it’s not good.
0:41:00 It doesn’t have a philosophical or ideological point.
0:41:12 And the reason you stand up for these values or these principles is because it has allowed us as a community to flourish and contribute in a way that we just haven’t anywhere else.
0:41:15 And I’m not disappointed in my party.
0:41:21 I would say there are people on both parties that want to confront and fight anti-Semitism.
0:41:26 Ram, I see you as—I don’t know you well, but I’ve been following your work more closely recently.
0:41:29 I think you’re a brilliant messenger, a great strategist.
0:41:31 Will you call my mom?
0:41:34 Well, she’s clearly done an impressive—a pretty impressive job.
0:41:36 I think you’re like the Case family.
0:41:39 It’s like, who’s more successful than the other in terms of kids?
0:41:40 Who’s more neurotic?
0:41:42 Your mom’s clearly done something.
0:41:44 She should definitely write a book on parenting.
0:41:51 So what about, again, repeat what you think the one kind of puncturing message should be from the Democratic side right now?
0:41:56 Between now and 2026, rubber-stamp Republicans.
0:41:57 That’s winnable.
0:42:02 And if you get the House back, it’s going to be essential to giving us a chance in 2028.
0:42:07 In 2028, and it’s not just by election.
0:42:13 I think the core principle for the Democratic Party, the American dream is unaffordable.
0:42:18 It’s inaccessible, and that is totally unacceptable to us.
0:42:26 The idea that you have people in our country with three, four, five, six homes, and a young family can’t get a starter home is crazy.
0:42:28 It’s the core crux of the American dream.
0:42:30 I grew up—my dad was a pediatrician.
0:42:31 My mother was a radiologist.
0:42:34 If you ask a second opinion, it was another health care professional.
0:42:39 Today, it’s an insurance bureaucrat sitting on the other line telling you you can’t get that procedure or we’re not going to cover it.
0:42:47 And to me, the American dream—and this gets back to how people think corrupt—I don’t know you, Jess.
0:42:48 I don’t really know you, Scott.
0:42:53 You guys kind of know me through—I mean, our kids are going to be fine.
0:42:59 We have given every other person’s child the shaft.
0:43:08 The system has screwed them, and we have allowed both parties over the years, as long as our kids were okay and it kind of didn’t really hit a crisis, it’s fine.
0:43:09 It’s not fine.
0:43:17 And the core premise—if you want to strengthen democracy, make the American dream more affordable and more accessible.
0:43:23 And if it’s got a restriction sign around it, you’re going to get a lot of people pissed off.
0:43:27 And I don’t know if we can solve it overnight, and I don’t think we can.
0:43:30 I think it’s going to take a long time because it’s going to take a long time to get here.
0:43:37 But you can’t have a situation where people are using their 401K, which is supposed to be for their retirement, to make up for their paycheck, not covering their costs.
0:43:42 Health care—they spend more time arguing with their bureaucrat than they do talking to the doctor.
0:43:47 And we have young couples sitting at their parents’ home down in the basement and can’t find a home.
0:43:54 And unless we fix that, the rest of it is going to come apart.
0:44:09 And second, on a very crass political level, if we put that at the core, A, it will shunt out this weak and woke and will look like we’re fighting exactly for the people and against exact interests that have been giving people the shaft for years.
0:44:11 So to me, that’s the core thing.
0:44:12 That’s where I’m actually spending my time.
0:44:14 And I think it’s going to take us a long time.
0:44:25 And the reason we disappointed people, and they got disappointed in the Democrats, not only for these tangential issues, but we lost connection with what they expect from us.
0:44:35 We were always the defender of what comes under inclusive economy, that more and more people would have a shot at just the basics.
0:44:41 Own a home, save for your retirement, save for your kids’ education, afford your health care, and take a three-week vacation.
0:44:46 And none of that is affordable unless you’re well off.
0:44:53 And you shouldn’t be comfortable, if you’re well off, that the rest of the country isn’t comfortable.
0:44:57 So that’s my core thing of what the party needs to do.
0:45:03 And we get all caught up in, you know, not only tangential issues, but overthinking.
0:45:10 You look and you just, you know, as I used to do when I was a mayor and I was doing this when I used to do Congress on your corner.
0:45:16 You go to down Target, you walk down the aisles, you go to Walmart, I used to call them Target Town Halls or Walmart walk-ins.
0:45:20 And people that would stop to, you know, other people say, oh, hi, Mr. Mayor, or whatever.
0:45:21 But people would stop and talk to you.
0:45:24 This is not complicated.
0:45:35 Solving it is, but understanding people want somebody there that will get in there in the morning, roll up their sleeves.
0:45:40 And the one thing they’re going to focus on like a laser is making sure they have a shot.
0:45:52 And what survived Bill Clinton and Barack Obama through the ups, every presidency has ups and downs, is that at the core, the public knew who they were working for and who they were working against.
0:45:55 And we’ve abandoned it.
0:45:56 And guess what?
0:45:58 They got us read right.
0:46:00 We’re dead to rights, man.
0:46:09 We got caught off on bathrooms and Latinx and making people, you couldn’t use that language, you’re doing that cultural approach.
0:46:13 And people couldn’t figure out how to get a down payment on the home.
0:46:17 They had to pick which child goes to college and which one doesn’t and postpones it.
0:46:22 They were taking money that they knew in their gut was supposed to be for retirement, but they couldn’t make the bills.
0:46:24 They were taking another 401k and paying penalties.
0:46:36 We’ve put people in untenable positions just to do the basics, just to, you know, if I had a medical problem, like obviously when my dad was, I could call my dad or whatever.
0:46:40 People spend hours arguing with an insurance executive.
0:46:47 Half a doctor’s time and the nurse’s time is talking to some jerk on a telephone about a procedure that’s fundamental.
0:46:51 And I will tell you why I loved being mayor.
0:47:10 And when I did these graduations, when kids were coming with a Chicago Star Scholarship to free, the relief in a parent’s eye that they didn’t have to either take a second job, a second mortgage, or pick between the two kids who goes to college and who doesn’t.
0:47:16 That, because your son or daughter earned a B and they’re going free, they earned it.
0:47:21 That relief, I used to tell Amy, I said, you got to come to one of these.
0:47:24 So she came, I mean, people were, parents are crying inside.
0:47:37 There was an emotional catharsis because they were in this crazy Solomon choice, second job, second mortgage, or second child.
0:47:40 This is insane, insane.
0:47:43 So that’s what, to me, is what matters.
0:47:50 Rahm Emanuel is a two-time mayor of Chicago, former White House chief of staff, and most recently U.S. ambassador of Japan.
0:47:53 Rahm, really appreciate your time and your message.
0:47:54 Thank you.
0:47:56 We’re glad you’re on our side, Rahm.
0:47:59 Thanks, guys.
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0:01:46 Hey, folks, we took a break for Memorial Day, but before the long weekend, we sat down with Rahm Emanuel for a conversation recorded last Thursday.
0:01:52 We got into the issues surrounding Biden, the Republican transfer of wealth to the rich and what Democrats need to focus on.
0:01:53 Here’s the episode.
0:01:54 Enjoy.
0:01:58 Welcome to Raging Moderates.
0:01:59 I’m Scott Galloway.
0:02:01 And I’m Jessica Tarlov.
0:02:12 Jess, joining us today is someone who’s worn a lot of hats in American politics, two-time mayor of Chicago, former White House chief of staff, and most recently U.S. ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel.
0:02:13 Rahm, welcome to the show.
0:02:14 Thanks, Scott.
0:02:15 Thanks, Jess.
0:02:17 We’re going to jump right into this.
0:02:23 The headlines this week have been dominated by the news that President Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
0:02:28 That comes on the heels of a week already full of questions about his health and a buzzy new book.
0:02:30 Quick question.
0:02:43 Did Biden’s narcissism and entering into consensual hallucination with the Democratic Party that he was the best candidate for a president, is that a big part of the reason that we reelected an insurrectionist?
0:02:47 Look, I mean, I have a couple answers on this.
0:02:50 You know, look, White Houses are insular.
0:02:51 Yeah.
0:02:53 And the Oval Office is seductive.
0:03:00 And while you talked about his medical condition and all this, my take on this is this is Shakespearean.
0:03:06 And the reason I say that is I’ve worked with former President Biden in three different functions.
0:03:16 One, I was assigned by President Clinton when I was senior advisor to work with him on passing the Violence Against Women Act and the assault weapon ban when he’s a senator.
0:03:18 And I was, as I said, senior advisor for the president.
0:03:24 Then our offices, when I’m chief of staff for President Obama, are adjacent to each other.
0:03:34 And then as ambassador that he appointed me and I’m 8,000 miles away, we worked through this historic agreement between Japan, Korea and the United States.
0:03:36 So I’ve seen him at different stages from different locations.
0:03:38 And I’ve seen him, and I’ve seen him change.
0:03:50 And what saddens me, and I’m just saying this as a friend, genuine friend to him, he’s a good man who did good work, who wanted one thing in life, which was to be known as somebody that was significant.
0:03:56 And the tragedy here will be that his last act is going to become a defining act.
0:04:12 And it is going to actually undo the one thing he wanted out of his life, which is it’s going to, I won’t say obliterate, that’s a little dramatic, but it’s definitely going to color in a very significant way the one thing he wanted.
0:04:21 And had he stayed true to his commitment in 2020 and said, I’m going to be a transitional, I do believe this was, you know, this gets back to a question.
0:04:24 Could you have won, could the Democrat have won this race?
0:04:27 I’ve always thought a Democrat could have beaten Donald Trump.
0:04:27 Yeah.
0:04:41 He didn’t get 50 plus percent, and I feel empathy for him because he wanted one thing in life beyond doing good work, you know, some sense to be seen as a significant player, et cetera.
0:04:57 And the vanity, the power of the office, the lack of people around him that would tell him truth, and I add one thing, I mean, President Obama and President Clinton can tell you, your job at certain times of the presidency is to tell the president not what they want to know, but what they need to hear.
0:04:57 Right.
0:04:59 And that didn’t happen.
0:05:03 He or they or both got walled off from that.
0:05:10 And White Houses get very, very insular, and that office is incredibly seductive.
0:05:19 So I feel him not holding to his pledge had consequences, one, to him and two, to all of us, and we’re dealing with it today.
0:05:28 We’ll just follow up, and then just moving to solutions, we’ve decided that a 34-year-old does not have the cognitive ability or the judgment to run for the highest office.
0:05:30 Do you think we need age limits on the higher end?
0:05:34 Why wouldn’t we have age limits, say, of 75 to run for office?
0:05:36 Well, it’s not only cognitive.
0:05:40 You ever see a before and after picture of a president in the White House?
0:05:40 Sure.
0:05:41 The day they walk in and the day we walk out?
0:05:42 Yeah.
0:05:45 Every year is a dog year, okay?
0:05:53 You walk into that office, and it is a physical, mental, emotional, psychological beating by the hour.
0:05:54 Mm-hmm.
0:05:55 There should be a cap.
0:06:00 You saw it with Ronald Reagan’s, I mean, deterioration in his final years.
0:06:05 So you’re on board with an age limit at the high end, that someone who, say, above a certain age should not be able to run?
0:06:06 Yes.
0:06:07 That’s the short answer.
0:06:08 I will say one thing.
0:06:10 There’s an anecdote out of the Oval.
0:06:14 You know, obviously, I’m President Obama’s chief of staff for the first two years.
0:06:20 And one day, you know, we were going from health care to a, you know, 10-minute financial reform.
0:06:26 Then we were going into the oil well that had exploded, and it was just, you know, that was only by 1030.
0:06:35 And I told him, I said, look, man, when we get out of here, I want to get a T-shirt shack on a beach.
0:06:38 And I want to sell one color, white.
0:06:40 So if somebody said blue, I’d go, white.
0:06:42 And one size, medium.
0:06:45 Just so I don’t have to think, I don’t have to make a call.
0:06:49 And we used to have this, like we’d be in a meeting, and it was like mind-boggling.
0:06:51 I look at him, I go, white.
0:06:53 He’d look at me and go, medium.
0:07:03 Because we were going to open up a T-shirt shack on a Hawaiian beach, and all we were going to do all day is lean forward and just watch the waves so you didn’t have to think anymore.
0:07:08 And the immense pressure, as my grandfather would say, it takes the neshama out of you.
0:07:09 Yeah.
0:07:12 I like knowing that white and medium are your safe words.
0:07:14 So now I know that.
0:07:27 Before we get to the reconciliation package, I just wanted to add on to what you were saying, Scott, about President Biden and, you know, the extension of what original sin is uncovered.
0:07:37 And there are already four books, right, that are coming out about the quote-unquote cover-up in the White House, is that we have this enormous trust deficit with the American people.
0:07:47 And they’re skeptical of politicians in general, but it has never been so bleak for Democrats in comparison to the Republican Party.
0:07:57 And I’m curious, as someone with great political instincts and having been successful in many arenas of politics, how you think Democrats can deal with that?
0:08:09 Because it feels very much to me and Scott that we are going about business as usual in extraordinary times and that we need an extraordinary solution to the challenges that we’re facing.
0:08:13 You know, just, I, this wasn’t a surprise to the American people.
0:08:15 They told us over and over he’s too old.
0:08:16 Yes.
0:08:27 I mean, if you go back and do kind of an autopsy of the presidency, there’s the confluence in that first August with both what happens in Afghanistan and the recurrence of COVID.
0:08:40 And also, which I think sometimes gets lost in the analysis, he doesn’t try to deal with Afghanistan by doing a Kennedy post Bay of Pigs and say, I own this.
0:08:40 This is on me.
0:08:41 I made the decision.
0:08:50 And his response sets off triggers because he was supposed to be hired to manage better than the chaos of Trump 1.0.
0:08:54 And that starts to build a resistance to him.
0:08:58 He never then gets back to positive real estate from a polling standpoint and trust.
0:09:10 And as inflation picks up and gets deeper and he tries to tell the American people the economy is better than you appreciate, the age issue comes over as a person who’s out of touch.
0:09:14 And it grows to like a 70 mile an hour headwind straight at him.
0:09:20 And the American people could not see past that block.
0:09:24 And it grew in intensity every day that went by.
0:09:26 So it was the most discussed subject.
0:09:29 If it was a secret, the American people were in on it.
0:09:30 Right.
0:09:31 It wasn’t a secret.
0:09:34 They were in on it and they issued a judgment.
0:09:36 Now, there is a trust factor.
0:09:38 I think there’s a trust factor for politicians.
0:09:40 The truth is, there’s a trust factor.
0:09:44 The farther you get away from people’s home, the less trust there is.
0:09:46 Local politics versus national.
0:09:48 There’s not, you know, people go, oh, our democracy is that threat.
0:09:49 Not the local level.
0:09:49 Right.
0:09:50 National level.
0:09:57 I think the bigger challenge for Democrats is, and I don’t think we own universally the deficit on trust.
0:10:01 I think our challenge, Democrats are seen as weak and woke.
0:10:08 Republicans are seen as going to be in this reconciliation bill as people that stab you in the back and betray you.
0:10:11 That’s the two vulnerabilities of both parties.
0:10:17 And if we do certain things that I’ve been advocating, I can talk about it on the show.
0:10:22 I think we can make up for and address the weak and woke in a very kind of focused way.
0:10:27 I think people have clearly, because of weak and woke, disappointed in us.
0:10:30 And that has made them appropriately angry at us.
0:10:32 What do we do about that?
0:10:35 You know, we’ve heard it in every kind of denomination.
0:10:38 You know, they’re crazy, but we’re preachy.
0:10:40 They look down on us.
0:10:42 Why are you on the wrong side of a 70-30 issue?
0:10:44 Fix us, Rom.
0:10:50 Well, look, I’m sensitive to a child that’s trying to figure out what pronoun they want to use.
0:10:55 But nobody wants to be sensitive to the fact that the rest of the classroom can’t tell you what a pronoun is.
0:10:57 And to me, this is insane.
0:10:59 I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again.
0:11:07 We shut the front door of a school for two years during COVID, and then we blew open the bathroom door right afterwards.
0:11:14 And not only were we off on a tangent of a set of issues, we made them primary to us.
0:11:18 Yes, by our DNA as Democrats, we are an accepting party.
0:11:21 We became a party that advocated.
0:11:23 And that’s a mistake.
0:11:25 Go back to President Clinton.
0:11:27 That’s a formative experience for me.
0:11:32 In 1992, 40% of his advertising is on ending welfare as you know it.
0:11:37 He comes on the heels of Jimmy Carter’s loss, Walter Mondale’s loss, Michael Dukakis’ loss.
0:11:39 He ran openly as a New Democrat.
0:11:43 And that New Democrat wasn’t just the economy, stupid.
0:11:48 It was 100,000 community police officers not defunding the police.
0:11:55 It was ending welfare as we know it, not continuing kind of a failed system, even when it was self-evident that it was broken.
0:12:00 The economics and the cultural aspect were grounded in mainstream.
0:12:06 President Obama himself talked openly about it’s easy to father a child.
0:12:07 It’s different to be a dad.
0:12:09 And he got criticized for it.
0:12:10 And he stood up for that.
0:12:20 Rounding yourself in the mainstream culturally is really, really important for the whole agenda, not just tactically.
0:12:24 Democrats, and this is a thing that I would say about politics.
0:12:28 Sound is not always fury.
0:12:33 And you have to, if you’re good in politics, know the difference between sound and fury.
0:12:42 Just because a Washington group tells you to use the word Latinx doesn’t mean people use it.
0:12:46 And we have to be not cavalier attacking people.
0:12:56 We have to ground ourselves in the very conversation that families have about social media, about homeless encampments near their house, things that happen on their block.
0:13:05 And not look, we’re running off in some tangent because some Washington group with a 202 area code on their phone yelling at you.
0:13:14 And my other point to illustrate this, in the last State of the Union by President Biden, he said illegal immigrant.
0:13:20 The next morning, the Washington interest groups attack him and say, you have to use undocumented.
0:13:23 And rather than say, hey, look, they crossed the border illegally.
0:13:25 They’re immigrants.
0:13:26 I’m using illegal immigrants.
0:13:27 You want to use undocumented?
0:13:27 You use it.
0:13:28 I’m going to use what I’m going to use.
0:13:31 That would have been a sign of strength.
0:13:38 Grounding yourself in the mainstream and the strength to say when somebody who’s in the family is off sides.
0:13:39 That is essential.
0:13:41 More so for Democrats.
0:13:46 And we got caught in a cul-de-sac, driving around in a circle in the last three years.
0:13:53 So, Ron, House Republicans just passed a massive tax and spending cuts package.
0:13:59 A lot of think tanks have said this is going to be the greatest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.
0:14:05 I’m curious to get your thoughts on this bill and these tax cuts.
0:14:13 This is not an advocate for my web traffic on my piece, but I just had a piece go up on The Washington Post on this piece.
0:14:17 But I think this is a huge opportunity for Democrats.
0:14:25 You don’t have either the microphone of the Oval Office or the gavel of the congressional.
0:14:28 Both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue are owned by the Republicans.
0:14:32 There is an architecture built in to that midterm.
0:14:40 An energized opposition, two-to-one independence break from the incumbent party, and a depressed incumbent party.
0:14:44 That is already, you can see in the early polling, setting up for 2026.
0:14:48 You can see Democrats are energized in these special elections.
0:14:51 Independents have broke from the Republican Party.
0:14:56 The Republican Party is just not turning out the way they did when Donald Trump was on the ballot.
0:15:01 It’s early, but the outlines of that architecture exist today, Scott.
0:15:06 On this bill, make simplicity a virtue.
0:15:15 There is a division between the MAGA, realizing all of a sudden Medicaid affects the rural hospitals and their constituents,
0:15:21 and the fiscal, if there are such things in the Republican Party, conservatives, who like the pain of cutting Medicaid.
0:15:23 Enjoy it, actually.
0:15:31 To me, you should make the battle cry, raise taxes on the wealthy so that we can give health care to the many.
0:15:32 Very simple.
0:15:38 The Democrats should be offering one simple bill, raise taxes on people making above $2.5 million,
0:15:44 eliminate carried interest, put the corporate tax rate back up to 27%, restore all the health care cuts.
0:15:45 Don’t try to solve all the problems.
0:15:47 This is setting up 2026.
0:15:49 The one thing we can win is 2026.
0:15:50 That’s what this is about.
0:15:57 The independent voters, which are going to be key in swing states and swing districts, want reform,
0:16:03 but most importantly, they want a check on an untethered, unchecked Donald Trump.
0:16:07 And you’ve got to associate the Republicans as a rubber stamp Congress.
0:16:10 This is not about oligarchy.
0:16:11 This is not about fascism.
0:16:14 This is not about do-nothing Democrats and weakness.
0:16:17 These terms are a referendum on the party in power.
0:16:20 Make it a referendum on the party in power.
0:16:28 This is a rubber stamp Republican Congress that has decided to reinforce what I refer to as the three Cs,
0:16:30 corruption, chaos, and cruelty.
0:16:31 And repeat it.
0:16:36 Washington interest groups see corruption as the Qatar jet, the Bitcoin.
0:16:44 The public sees corruption as a well-heeled, well-connected, getting a tax cut, and we’re getting our health care cut.
0:16:46 That’s how they see, perceive corruption.
0:16:56 And we should go right at it, drive like a Mack truck right to that point, and don’t go off wandering onto other ancillary issues.
0:17:01 The wealthy are walking off with all the money, and you’re paying for it with your health care.
0:17:03 It also has the beauty of one thing.
0:17:03 It’s true.
0:17:06 I like that.
0:17:11 It’s easy and digestible, and we suffer from being too loquacious as a party.
0:17:16 No, we’re always meeting with our Ph.D. committee to explain our theory of the case, yeah.
0:17:22 Embarrassed to be a Ph.D. holder myself, but we’ll pretend that I’m not for the rest of this podcast.
0:17:25 Okay, let’s take a quick break.
0:17:25 Stay with us.
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0:19:51 This week on Unexplainable.
0:20:00 I want to tell you about this guy I came across who has tied little leashes to butterflies and moths,
0:20:06 like little leashes out of fishing line, and taken them for walks around his lab.
0:20:08 And by walks, I mean little tiny flights.
0:20:11 So, like, imagine a dude with, like, a real-life kite.
0:20:15 On the other end is a butterfly, and he’s, like, walking it around a room.
0:20:17 Um, okay.
0:20:34 You mentioned education, the classroom, and that’s why you ran to be the mayor of Chicago.
0:20:43 And I’ve been disturbed by how Democrats have lost their edge in handling all of the most important issues to Americans.
0:20:49 I think we’re only still up on climate change and abortion, and only just barely now at this point.
0:20:57 And one of the biggest losses, I think, is that parents in this country don’t trust us to handle their children’s education.
0:21:09 And I’m curious as to what you think are some good policies that we could stand behind that would reaffirm people’s trust in us on that particular issue,
0:21:19 And also what we can do about the awesome, and not in the necessarily positive way, but just in the huge way, the power of the teachers’ unions.
0:21:28 When, you know, an average person knows who Randy Weingarten is, that that’s a problem for the party, especially considering what went on during COVID.
0:21:31 So, you’re right, Jess.
0:21:38 Last 30 years, Democrats had anywhere, starting from Jimmy Carter’s creating the Department of Education and Reagan trying to, or advocating to shut it down,
0:21:43 we had anywhere, call it, from 20 to 30-point advantage on education.
0:21:46 President Obama did race to the top.
0:21:48 President Clinton did teachers of excellence.
0:21:52 But we basically kept coming at this, focused on the classroom.
0:21:54 Accelerate.
0:22:01 There’s no doubt, during COVID, we shut schools down much longer than they need to be, much longer than, quote-unquote,
0:22:04 the science told us to do, even though we kept saying we’re going to follow the science.
0:22:10 Second, we got in a bunch of ancillary discussions that had nothing to do with reading, writing, and math.
0:22:16 The name of the school, was it named after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or any other founding father?
0:22:20 Or, access to the bathroom and access to locker rooms.
0:22:24 We’ve gone into bathroom and locker rooms, and we avoided the classroom.
0:22:30 So, you have to go back, for political purposes, to the place where you build political support.
0:22:31 That’s one.
0:22:38 Now, we’re at a 30-year low on reading scores, and I think near a 30-year low on math scores.
0:22:47 Alabama, in fourth grade, is the only state that has made gains on math.
0:22:55 Mississippi, going back to 2010, but even through COVID in post, has made significant gains on reading.
0:22:58 There’s a couple common themes to that.
0:23:01 One, time on task.
0:23:04 They dedicate more time to early intervention.
0:23:08 Three, we’re needed, one-on-one instruction.
0:23:14 That should become an emergency meeting using the Oval Office, all the governors, etc.
0:23:23 How do we get, over the next 18 months, what Alabama and Mississippi’s done, what are the best practices, and how do we make them universal, and start getting back to basics of that.
0:23:28 We have an absentee rate in Chicago of double digits, and that’s true nationally.
0:23:30 We have normalized absenteeism.
0:23:37 Parents and kids have self-selected four-day school week, and we’ve made it a norm.
0:23:39 And I think we should set a national standard.
0:23:47 No child will go from fourth to fifth grade who has north of seven, I’m using for this discussion, seven percent, because we’re doing social promotion.
0:23:48 The data is quite clear.
0:23:50 Kids can’t learn if they’re not in the classroom.
0:23:53 So, if you’re not in the classroom, you’re not going to the next grade.
0:23:54 End it.
0:23:56 No more social promotion.
0:24:05 Lastly, and I think this is really important, we haven’t rethought the high school since introducing universal high school education.
0:24:06 It’s been 100 years.
0:24:12 I’m not saying we did everything right in Chicago, but we did a couple things, I think, that do matter in that reinvention.
0:24:21 We went from a mindset of a diploma machine, get you to graduation, get you a diploma, to high school was preparation for what’s next.
0:24:23 So, we did three things.
0:24:28 First, if you earn a B average, we made community college free.
0:24:31 You got free books, free tuition, free transportation.
0:24:37 And in a school district with 83% poverty, 20,000 kids have availed themselves of it.
0:24:39 Three-quarters of them are the first in the family to go to college.
0:24:41 We made it free, but you got to have a B average.
0:24:54 Two, you could not get your high school diploma without showing a letter of acceptance from a college, community college, a branch of the armed services, or a vocational school.
0:24:57 You will not get your high school diploma without that letter.
0:25:00 So, you have to help parents do that.
0:25:07 So, we hired a massive amount of college and career counselors and got them into high schools across the city.
0:25:09 We help kids starting their freshman year.
0:25:10 What do you want to do?
0:25:11 How do you want to do it?
0:25:11 Okay.
0:25:14 And every year, you met with that counselor.
0:25:16 So, you were, did you need more math?
0:25:17 Did you need more science?
0:25:19 Did, you know, where were you on this or that?
0:25:31 So, they were preparing if they wanted to go Marines, they wanted to go plumbing, or they wanted to go to Harold Washington Community College, to Northern or UIC, or wherever they want to apply.
0:25:38 And we had a 99.4% compliance.
0:25:44 We re, as best we could, rethought and reinvented the high school education.
0:25:48 So, you know, my motto always was, you earn what you learn.
0:25:51 You get a high school education, you’ll learn that.
0:25:53 You don’t get one, you’ll earn that too.
0:26:05 So, Ram, something we talk a lot about here is, along the lines of young people, is, you know, my view is that the group that’s fallen furthest fastest is the one that gets the least empathy, and that is young men.
0:26:05 Yep.
0:26:11 Four times more likely to kill themselves, three times more likely to be addicted, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated.
0:26:14 What is your view on the plight?
0:26:16 If, A, do you see it as an issue?
0:26:20 And if so, how do we address it from a social policy?
0:26:23 Can you point to any programs that you’re in favor of?
0:26:29 I know you’ve been an advocate for national service, but what do you think we do to help lift up our young men?
0:26:33 So, there’s two things I’ll get to, but I want to finish one thought I was going to say.
0:26:34 Sure.
0:26:37 Because it deals with at least that one data point you pulled out about incarceration.
0:26:48 An oversized amount of the folks in prison are black men between the ages of 18 and 35 without a high school degree.
0:26:49 Yep.
0:26:53 The only thing I can change in that is whether you have a high school degree or not.
0:26:57 Can’t change gender, can’t change race, can’t change age.
0:26:58 That changes on its own.
0:27:12 And so, to me, getting kids, one of the things that we drove, and I say we, meaning Dr. Janice Jackson and I, she was the chancellor of our schools, is if you said to our kids, what are you going to do in four years?
0:27:14 If they had to have a, they could tell you.
0:27:17 I have kids when I was mayor in Chicago, which is true today.
0:27:20 Four weeks was their horizon.
0:27:23 They didn’t know if they were going to be alive at 18.
0:27:28 You get a child that walks across that stage and gets a diploma, they have a tomorrow.
0:27:33 They don’t get to that stage, they’re not thinking about tomorrow.
0:27:35 Their horizon is different.
0:27:39 So, if you can get them thinking about tomorrow, they’re going to change the way they think about themselves.
0:27:52 Second, and this was the inspiration for President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper, University of Chicago comes to me, and they show me this program that had about 80 kids called Becoming a Man.
0:27:56 And it’s a circle group you sit in, you do about four hours a day.
0:27:57 That’s one part.
0:28:02 And then they do other things with the children for about four hours a day, five days a week.
0:28:05 I was smitten by it.
0:28:12 I got Jimmy Butler involved in it, the basketball player, I got other athletes, anybody that came, including President Obama.
0:28:16 I made him participate at Hyde Park High School, and that became his inspiration.
0:28:27 We blew it up from 100 kids over my tenure to 7,500 young men, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th grade.
0:28:31 Four hours a day, five days a week, nine months out of the year.
0:28:34 It was their mentor.
0:28:37 It was their coach.
0:28:40 And it was their role model.
0:28:49 And I’m not going to do social science, but there’s enough data about staying out of the criminal justice system, graduating high school, that it’s overwhelming.
0:28:52 And again, I’m dealing with a population in Chicago.
0:28:55 It doesn’t mean it applies across the board, but I think it does.
0:29:00 Just with a little mentoring, their lives were different.
0:29:13 You can see this hollowness in their eyes, and it’s changed when they’re involved in something that’s rewarding, which I also believe about why I think we should go to a universal national service.
0:29:18 Look, a kid’s life is 20% in the classroom and 80% out.
0:29:23 If you want the 20% to succeed, invest in the 80%.
0:29:30 Now, we blew up after-school programs and summer jobs, and we tripled the enrollment.
0:29:36 But giving kids something where they get their own sense of confidence back.
0:29:49 And I would say to you, Scott, one of the things that’s clear to me, our young men have internalized a self-loathing, a self-doubt beyond just what teenage years used to.
0:30:02 There’s something that has happened that they have – look, everybody has a level of insecurity and grows up with it, but they have internalized this anger that’s self-directed.
0:30:08 Sometimes it is outside, and there’s – you can just – they’re craving a direction.
0:30:14 And they’re craving, in my view, an adult who cares about them.
0:30:24 You know, my father used to say as a pediatrician, you know, he’s never saw a kid that was spoiled because they were told they were loved too many times.
0:30:27 So I do know what the government can do, and I know what the government can’t do.
0:30:30 A government can support parenting.
0:30:31 A government can support a child.
0:30:35 A government program can give a child certain kind of supports.
0:30:37 There’s things it can’t do.
0:30:45 And I think one of the things we have to realize is we’re not – I think you’ve talked – both of you have talked about this.
0:30:50 We’re not in a zero-sum game that somehow if you’re helping young men, it comes at the expense of young women.
0:31:03 But the crisis that is now a flashing red light, not a yellow light, is these young men, aimless, and – I mean, you can hear it in their voice.
0:31:15 And if we don’t in some way interject ourselves and start doing different things rather than the same thing, we’re going to pay a huge price, and they’re going to pay a huge price.
0:31:18 So I looked at this mentoring program.
0:31:27 I would look at summer jobs after school, and then I would – I’m a firm believer that it’s got to be across the board, universal national service for six months.
0:31:28 Everybody’s got to do it.
0:31:32 Nobody gets to cut out of it just because you’re going to go to college or med school.
0:31:33 Forget about it.
0:31:45 So you’re talking like somebody that has a plan or at least some plans that we should be thinking about for the future of the party, for the country, and all of us.
0:31:50 And you’ve joked that you’re in training for 2028, but you don’t know if you’ll make the Olympics.
0:31:54 What does that training look like for you?
0:31:56 Are you thinking about running for president?
0:32:01 Are you thinking about running for governor if Pritzker takes the plunge himself?
0:32:05 So, Jeff, here’s how I think about it.
0:32:13 There’s a lot of people, rightfully, on the other end of the pool whose entire existence is fighting Donald Trump.
0:32:17 And there’s a lot to fight, and I don’t belittle it.
0:32:22 If I’m right, this election in 2026 is a referendum.
0:32:26 2028 is a choice, not a referendum.
0:32:35 And I’m going to spend my time, as I have both writing pieces, et cetera, on education, on national service.
0:32:38 I’ve already done certain things on national security.
0:32:44 And ideas about how to make the American dream affordable.
0:32:50 I don’t think it’s an accident that the moment the American dream became out of reach is less affordable.
0:32:53 It’s exactly the time in which our politics became unstable.
0:32:54 They’re connected.
0:33:00 And so, if I think I have something to offer that others don’t, I’ll take that plunge.
0:33:10 But I am going to spend my time now thinking, writing about what I think are the big issues that we have to address.
0:33:13 That gets to the topic of lost men.
0:33:17 That gets to the topic of rethinking our educational system.
0:33:21 There’s nothing partisan about reinventing high school.
0:33:24 You know, I happen to be for free community college.
0:33:27 President Obama took our program advocating nationally.
0:33:29 But that’s not the only road to the same destination.
0:33:35 And if I think I got something that other people aren’t talking about and a way to talk about it, then I’ll dive into the deep end.
0:33:40 But I’m going to spend my time articulating that, thinking about that, talking to people.
0:33:48 And if I don’t think anybody else is going to do that, or I think if I’m present in that campaign, I can drive that, I’ll dive in the pool.
0:33:49 If I don’t, I won’t.
0:33:51 That’s how I’m thinking about it.
0:33:52 Great.
0:34:05 Open AI spent the last few years turning ChatGPT into one of the most important and popular products on the internet.
0:34:12 Johnny Ive spent the last several decades building products at Apple that became truly iconic, like the iPhone.
0:34:15 Now, those two are teaming up to work on something.
0:34:20 We don’t know much, but it’s going to be some kind of AI gadget, and they think it’s going to be a really big deal.
0:34:33 This week on The VergeCast, we talk about what Johnny Ive and OpenAI might be up to, plus everything that happened at Google I.O., the developer conference, and all of the other news in the AI and gadget world, because there is just so much of it.
0:34:36 All that on The VergeCast, wherever you get podcasts.
0:34:45 When comedian Chris Gethard was growing up, he went to a place called Action Park.
0:34:53 It was one of the first water parks in the country, and it was built by a man who had no experience building theme parks.
0:34:56 Some people called him a berserk Willy Wonka.
0:35:03 Anyone who went to Action Park understood you could get really messed up going there.
0:35:07 Not only did we know that, it was a huge part of the appeal.
0:35:09 I’m Phoebe Judge.
0:35:15 Listen to our latest episode, Action Park, on Criminal, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:35:22 Welcome back.
0:35:25 So, just some recent news here.
0:35:32 Two Israeli embassy staffers were killed in a shooting outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in D.C.
0:35:34 Obviously tragic and heartbreaking.
0:35:43 What are your thoughts on this sort of light sleeper, which is anti-Semitism, what appears to be an increase in anti-Semitism in the U.S.?
0:35:48 Well, you know, so two things got the shooter.
0:35:50 I mean, the Chicago Police Department has it.
0:35:54 He’s been at our house a number of times for protests starting in 2017.
0:35:58 So, I have a slight connection with that.
0:36:04 Second is, I have a slight twist on what you said.
0:36:05 You said an increase.
0:36:08 Anti-Semitism has always existed.
0:36:10 More visible then.
0:36:11 Yes.
0:36:13 And the question is, why is it more visible?
0:36:15 Why these people?
0:36:16 Why now?
0:36:18 Straight up, why?
0:36:21 And to me, we’re going to have to have a hard conversation.
0:36:39 There has been a permission slip for what used to be behind closed doors said about Jews or said in a kind of snide remark, etc., to where it’s said now publicly, where anti-Semitism or anti-Semitic expressions are said openly.
0:36:52 Yes, October 7th ushered in one level, but anti-Semitism has existed, and what’s new is it’s got a green light.
0:37:00 And that green light, not only to expressing it, bubbles over into violence, not just stays rhetorical.
0:37:03 And I said this last week, and I’m going to say it again.
0:37:05 I said it at the 92nd Street Watch.
0:37:19 When you have people in 2017 marching around saying Jews will not replace us, blood and soil, and the next day doesn’t call for Lincoln’s malice towards none, we say there’s good people on both sides.
0:37:20 We got a problem.
0:37:37 And I want to be very clear, I’m not saying that this is on President Trump, but we have a permission slip for what was once repressed or said in hushed tones is now fully said, and there’s no boundary to where we’ll lead.
0:37:49 You know, look, my life, adult public life, when I was working for President Clinton, because of certain things said about Rahm Israel Emmanuel, we had a dog that would smell the car before we were allowed to turn it on.
0:38:03 When we were in Japan, somebody spray-painted the fence in front of our house with neo-Nazi signs, etc., and to this day, I don’t know who, a neighbor went and painted over it.
0:38:15 I got elected Rahm Israel Emmanuel in a congressional district that used to have, represented by Dan Rossinkowski, Frank Annunzio, Roman Paczynski, Rob Bogoyevich, Flanagan, quickly.
0:38:16 You know, what doesn’t fit there?
0:38:17 Rahm Israel Emmanuel.
0:38:23 But I had people in a district vote for a Jewish kid.
0:38:30 I was elected a mayor of a city of Chicago whose Jewish population is 3%, a working-class city.
0:38:36 So I have seen the best of folks, and I know firsthand the worst of folks.
0:38:54 I think anti-Semitism today is at a heightened level, and for a host of reasons not singular, there’s a green light to expressing it that didn’t exist in years past.
0:38:59 I just quickly want to say, you mentioned, you know, I’m not putting this on President Trump.
0:39:00 I’m not.
0:39:01 No, no, I get that.
0:39:09 But there are a lot of people who would argue that it’s actually our party that has allowed the green light to anti-Semitism more.
0:39:10 And he was chanting, Free Palestine.
0:39:15 He was part of a leftist organization and college protests.
0:39:16 No, I know.
0:39:17 It was personal for you.
0:39:18 That’s what he’s part of.
0:39:24 No, look, I don’t—anti-Semitism doesn’t have a political party or political identification or ideological.
0:39:27 And if you do that, then you’re actually not dealing with anti-Semitism.
0:39:32 You’re getting sidetracked into a political discussion that’s actually extremely unhelpful.
0:39:41 I have seen, as I said, by the anecdote I gave in Virginia in 2017, that wasn’t the left, quote-unquote.
0:39:53 And I don’t find trying to figure out which party is responsible—I really not only think it’s a sidetracked argument, it actually blinds us from dealing with some core issues.
0:39:58 And we’re going to have to deal with it as a country and ask some really hard questions.
0:40:13 And I think the notion that somehow Democrats bear more of it is not just unhelpful, it’s actually trying to wash your hands of coming to crux because anti-Semitism doesn’t have a party or ideological point of origin.
0:40:22 I personally don’t disagree with you, and I’ve just been disappointed, I guess, in how life has been handled since October 7th.
0:40:41 Look, it’s a fair point, except for I want to say, you know, this country, I not only represent—I mean, I don’t want to go through my titles, but I’m the son of an Israeli immigrant and the grandson of an immigrant from Moldova who came here fleeing the pogroms.
0:40:44 This country has been incredible to the Jewish community.
0:40:50 It’s based on the rule of law, self-determination, and a series of freedoms.
0:40:54 When those get degraded, that is not good.
0:40:57 I got 2,000 years of Jewish history, but it’s not good.
0:41:00 It doesn’t have a philosophical or ideological point.
0:41:12 And the reason you stand up for these values or these principles is because it has allowed us as a community to flourish and contribute in a way that we just haven’t anywhere else.
0:41:15 And I’m not disappointed in my party.
0:41:21 I would say there are people on both parties that want to confront and fight anti-Semitism.
0:41:26 Ram, I see you as—I don’t know you well, but I’ve been following your work more closely recently.
0:41:29 I think you’re a brilliant messenger, a great strategist.
0:41:31 Will you call my mom?
0:41:34 Well, she’s clearly done an impressive—a pretty impressive job.
0:41:36 I think you’re like the Case family.
0:41:39 It’s like, who’s more successful than the other in terms of kids?
0:41:40 Who’s more neurotic?
0:41:42 Your mom’s clearly done something.
0:41:44 She should definitely write a book on parenting.
0:41:51 So what about, again, repeat what you think the one kind of puncturing message should be from the Democratic side right now?
0:41:56 Between now and 2026, rubber-stamp Republicans.
0:41:57 That’s winnable.
0:42:02 And if you get the House back, it’s going to be essential to giving us a chance in 2028.
0:42:07 In 2028, and it’s not just by election.
0:42:13 I think the core principle for the Democratic Party, the American dream is unaffordable.
0:42:18 It’s inaccessible, and that is totally unacceptable to us.
0:42:26 The idea that you have people in our country with three, four, five, six homes, and a young family can’t get a starter home is crazy.
0:42:28 It’s the core crux of the American dream.
0:42:30 I grew up—my dad was a pediatrician.
0:42:31 My mother was a radiologist.
0:42:34 If you ask a second opinion, it was another health care professional.
0:42:39 Today, it’s an insurance bureaucrat sitting on the other line telling you you can’t get that procedure or we’re not going to cover it.
0:42:47 And to me, the American dream—and this gets back to how people think corrupt—I don’t know you, Jess.
0:42:48 I don’t really know you, Scott.
0:42:53 You guys kind of know me through—I mean, our kids are going to be fine.
0:42:59 We have given every other person’s child the shaft.
0:43:08 The system has screwed them, and we have allowed both parties over the years, as long as our kids were okay and it kind of didn’t really hit a crisis, it’s fine.
0:43:09 It’s not fine.
0:43:17 And the core premise—if you want to strengthen democracy, make the American dream more affordable and more accessible.
0:43:23 And if it’s got a restriction sign around it, you’re going to get a lot of people pissed off.
0:43:27 And I don’t know if we can solve it overnight, and I don’t think we can.
0:43:30 I think it’s going to take a long time because it’s going to take a long time to get here.
0:43:37 But you can’t have a situation where people are using their 401K, which is supposed to be for their retirement, to make up for their paycheck, not covering their costs.
0:43:42 Health care—they spend more time arguing with their bureaucrat than they do talking to the doctor.
0:43:47 And we have young couples sitting at their parents’ home down in the basement and can’t find a home.
0:43:54 And unless we fix that, the rest of it is going to come apart.
0:44:09 And second, on a very crass political level, if we put that at the core, A, it will shunt out this weak and woke and will look like we’re fighting exactly for the people and against exact interests that have been giving people the shaft for years.
0:44:11 So to me, that’s the core thing.
0:44:12 That’s where I’m actually spending my time.
0:44:14 And I think it’s going to take us a long time.
0:44:25 And the reason we disappointed people, and they got disappointed in the Democrats, not only for these tangential issues, but we lost connection with what they expect from us.
0:44:35 We were always the defender of what comes under inclusive economy, that more and more people would have a shot at just the basics.
0:44:41 Own a home, save for your retirement, save for your kids’ education, afford your health care, and take a three-week vacation.
0:44:46 And none of that is affordable unless you’re well off.
0:44:53 And you shouldn’t be comfortable, if you’re well off, that the rest of the country isn’t comfortable.
0:44:57 So that’s my core thing of what the party needs to do.
0:45:03 And we get all caught up in, you know, not only tangential issues, but overthinking.
0:45:10 You look and you just, you know, as I used to do when I was a mayor and I was doing this when I used to do Congress on your corner.
0:45:16 You go to down Target, you walk down the aisles, you go to Walmart, I used to call them Target Town Halls or Walmart walk-ins.
0:45:20 And people that would stop to, you know, other people say, oh, hi, Mr. Mayor, or whatever.
0:45:21 But people would stop and talk to you.
0:45:24 This is not complicated.
0:45:35 Solving it is, but understanding people want somebody there that will get in there in the morning, roll up their sleeves.
0:45:40 And the one thing they’re going to focus on like a laser is making sure they have a shot.
0:45:52 And what survived Bill Clinton and Barack Obama through the ups, every presidency has ups and downs, is that at the core, the public knew who they were working for and who they were working against.
0:45:55 And we’ve abandoned it.
0:45:56 And guess what?
0:45:58 They got us read right.
0:46:00 We’re dead to rights, man.
0:46:09 We got caught off on bathrooms and Latinx and making people, you couldn’t use that language, you’re doing that cultural approach.
0:46:13 And people couldn’t figure out how to get a down payment on the home.
0:46:17 They had to pick which child goes to college and which one doesn’t and postpones it.
0:46:22 They were taking money that they knew in their gut was supposed to be for retirement, but they couldn’t make the bills.
0:46:24 They were taking another 401k and paying penalties.
0:46:36 We’ve put people in untenable positions just to do the basics, just to, you know, if I had a medical problem, like obviously when my dad was, I could call my dad or whatever.
0:46:40 People spend hours arguing with an insurance executive.
0:46:47 Half a doctor’s time and the nurse’s time is talking to some jerk on a telephone about a procedure that’s fundamental.
0:46:51 And I will tell you why I loved being mayor.
0:47:10 And when I did these graduations, when kids were coming with a Chicago Star Scholarship to free, the relief in a parent’s eye that they didn’t have to either take a second job, a second mortgage, or pick between the two kids who goes to college and who doesn’t.
0:47:16 That, because your son or daughter earned a B and they’re going free, they earned it.
0:47:21 That relief, I used to tell Amy, I said, you got to come to one of these.
0:47:24 So she came, I mean, people were, parents are crying inside.
0:47:37 There was an emotional catharsis because they were in this crazy Solomon choice, second job, second mortgage, or second child.
0:47:40 This is insane, insane.
0:47:43 So that’s what, to me, is what matters.
0:47:50 Rahm Emanuel is a two-time mayor of Chicago, former White House chief of staff, and most recently U.S. ambassador of Japan.
0:47:53 Rahm, really appreciate your time and your message.
0:47:54 Thank you.
0:47:56 We’re glad you’re on our side, Rahm.
0:47:59 Thanks, guys.
Scott and Jessica sit down with Rahm Emanuel—former Chicago mayor, Obama Chief of Staff, and U.S. Ambassador to Japan—for an unfiltered conversation about the Democratic Party at a crossroads. They cover everything from Biden’s health and GOP tax cuts to rising antisemitism, the education crisis, and the growing struggles facing young men. Plus, Rahm weighs in on 2028—and whether he’s seriously considering a run.
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