“We’re sorry. We made a mistake.”
That’s what Democrats need to say to the American public in explaining their decision to close schools for months (and, in some places, years) during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
I spoke to Emanuel on Wednesday afternoon for my Substack Live show “Out of the Wilderness” in which I am talking to party strategists and elected officials about what went wrong in 2024 — and how it can be fixed before 2028. (You can watch past “Out of the Wilderness” episodes here, here and here.)
Emanuel has recently returned from Japan where he spent the last three year as U.S. ambassador under Joe Biden. Prior to that he spent eight years as mayor of Chicago. He’s also been a member of Congress from Illinois, the head of House Democrats’ campaign arm and Barack Obama’s first presidential chief of staff.
Like him or hate him — and there’s lots of people in both camps — Rahm is, to my mind, one of the best message people in modern politics. He is also the ultimate practitioner of realpolitik — focused like a laser on how to win elections and accrue power.
And Emanuel is convinced that the way his party climbs out of its current hole is by re-capturing its mojo on the issue of education.
He notes that when Jimmy Carter was president, Democrats had a 20+ point edge on which party the public trusted to handle the issue. Today? The two parties are equally trusted.
What happened? Rahm’s diagnosis is that the party leaned far too heavily into school closures during Covid — and stuck with the closures long after the science made clear the virus wasn’t deadly to the vast majority of young people.
That, plus the focus on who can use what school bathroom and whether we should change the names of schools, got Democrats WAY off track on education — and voters noticed.
As Rahm wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last month:
My real point was that we’re facing a Sputnik moment in education, and almost no one among the nation’s purported adults seems to want to solve the problem. Democrats can’t be the party that believes in equity as a core principle while simultaneously being complacent about math scores still languishing below pre-pandemic levels and reading scores hitting their lowest in more than 30 years.
We need to shape up real fast.
On both sides of the aisle, we’re caught in wild and beside-the-point education debates: whether the Education Department should be closed, which students should change in which locker rooms or participate in which sports, and whether curriculums should be stripped of diversity, equity and inclusion. All those disagreements deserve a hearing. But they are shiny baubles distracting us from the real crisis — namely, our children’s failure to meet basic standards in reading, writing and arithmetic.
I have long wondered why Democrats abandoned education as a central tenet of their political platform. Emanuel clearly believes the party needs to bring it back — and that to do that they need to re-establish credibility with the public by saying they messed up with schools during Covid.
Rahm and I talked for the better part of an hour. Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or just someone sort-of interested in politics, I really think it’s a conversation worth listening to. Among the other topics we hit on:
The two totally different campaigns Kamala Harris ran in 2024
How “establishment vs everyone else” is the best way to understand politics now
The real lesson from the Florida special election
How Democrats need to talk about the American Dream
Democrats won the culture wars — and then went too far
What Luigi Mangioni revealed to Rahm about the public
Rahm 2028? (He is CLEARLY considering it!)
Watch or listen. It will make you think. And I hope make you smarter.
Thank you
, , , , and (among many others) for tuning in live. (We had more than 2,000 people watching live!) Want to catch my next Substack Live? Make sure you download the Substack App!
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