Former Democratic Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel locked horns with The New Yorker’s David Remnick on Tuesday over whether the Democratic Party should still prioritize transgender issues.
The former Chicago mayor is expected to be one of the Democratic Party’s potential candidates in 2028, and is one of many prominent Democrats who have spoken out numerous times about how they need to move away from far-left culture wars and focus on kitchen table issues.
Remnick grilled Emanuel on this during his interview on “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” noting, “You say you’re, quote, ‘Done with the discussion of locker rooms. I’m done with the discussion of bathrooms, and we better start having a conversation about the classroom.’ Now, bathrooms in this context, this means transgender rights in general.”
He added further, “You’d like Democrats to be done with that, but Republicans clearly aren’t. Should Democrats really be silent in response to attacks on trans people? It just seems that this line is clever, but it doesn’t do service to some human beings who want their rights.”
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Emanuel responded by both touting his success on education reform during his term as mayor as well as his early support for transgender access to bathrooms.
“Well, two things. Since it’s about education, and I spent a good part of my tenure, the entire tenure as mayor, taking the worst public school system to what Sean Reardon and Stanford called the single best. In 2016, I passed a law, a decade ago, on bathroom access,” he replied. “Did I take my eye off in the graduation rates that we took from 56% to 84%? Not a chance. That’s why parents send kids to school.”
“Why can’t you do both?’ Remnick asked.
Emanuel then appeared to argue that the Democrats, as a party, shifted toward far-left culture war initiatives rather than everyday issues that were critically important amid a pandemic.
“Because you have an issue, in which coming out of COVID also is a lightning rod that distracted,” he argued. “I didn’t take Abraham Lincoln’s name off a school in San Francisco. I didn’t ask for defunding the police. I didn’t get yourselves wrapped around the axle on the term ‘Latinx,’ which nobody identifies with.”
“It was an example, David, not just of this particular issue, of a party — when people’s backs are against the wall, they’re holding on to that windowsill, and they can’t make a college payment, they can’t make a home mortgage payment, their healthcare is now being denied to them, they expect us Democrats to show up,” he warned. “And we’re showing up talking about bathroom access, sporting events, who gets to participate?”
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He recalled further how dire the circumstances were on a variety of issues that, unlike transgender politics, impact most of the population.
“We’d just come out of COVID. Our reading scores and math scores are in the tank. Fifty percent of our kids cannot read or do math at grade level. And we’re going to talk about bathroom access?” he asked. “So my view is, if you want to win elections, and you also want to help kids get prepared for the future, focus on the bottom line of what schools —”
Remnick went on to compare transgender issues to the civil rights era battles in the time of Martin Luther King Jr., referring to one of his famous writings.
“I understand that, Rahm, but all I would say is that there were earlier times with other groups that didn’t have their rights, and they were told to be patient too, and that focusing on their rights was distracting,” Remnick said. “That’s what ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ is all about, patience versus urgency.”
“As a country, we proved we couldn’t do it because you haven’t told me and asked me a single question how to get 50% of our kids — ” Emanuel began.
When Remnick claimed that such questions were on their way later in the interview, Emanuel was not impressed, replying, “No, wait a second. You started where you thought was a priority.”
Remnick pushed his argument further, saying that he was merely asking about the rhetoric by Emanuel that has become “a kind of a tagline to differentiate yourself. I think that’s the motivation.”
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“It’s not just a tagline!” Emanuel said. “I passed a bill in 2016, ten years beforehand. I made sure the kids had access to a bathroom. I just didn’t let it distract from reading, math, or graduation rates. This is why I went down to Mississippi before anybody knew about the reading scores, because I pay attention to this. Not that others don’t, but they went from 49th to ninth.”
He went on to blast politicians both high and low and among both parties, warning that “people have accepted failure” to the point where “Fifty percent of our kids can’t read at a third-grade level, which doesn’t make fourth and fifth and sixth grade and high school any easier.”
“You have to prioritize what’s an A and a B. I’m going to make sure children feel accepted. And the best way to make sure they feel accepted, is they know reading, math, and high school graduation,” Emanuel added further. “One of the things we did in Chicago — the only city to do it, the only education system — nobody gets a high school degree without showing us a letter of acceptance from a college, a community college, a branch of the armed forces, or a vocational school. That makes every child ready for tomorrow.”
