Rahm Emanuel has been busy. According to a commentary published this week in American Thinker, the former Chicago mayor and onetime Obama chief of staff has now produced his 21st recent op-ed, the latest appearing in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal dated Friday, September 18, 2026.
That column reportedly closes with a flourish: the assertion that “the Midwest is as wholesome as social media is toxic.” For John L. Smith, the American Thinker writer taking aim at Emanuel, that line raises an immediate question — is Chicago not in the Midwest? And if so, which chapter of the city’s history is Emanuel describing?
Smith’s piece, titled simply “See Rahm Run,” uses that closing line as a springboard into a broader indictment of Emanuel’s party and, by extension, Emanuel himself. He frames the Midwestern wholesomeness claim against what he describes as the “mayhem” that has become a regular feature of life in the Windy City — a city he notes was once poetically praised by Carl Sandburg, and which he ties to a Democratic Party “stranglehold” on local governance.
The ‘Crisis’ Doctrine, Revisited
The centerpiece of Smith’s critique is a callback. When Emanuel became President Obama’s chief of staff, he gave an interview to the same Wall Street Journal — on November 19, 2008 — in which he famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Smith seizes on that quote to ask what Emanuel wants to do “for us, or to us, now.” It’s a rhetorical move that casts the op-ed as less a piece of persuasion than a preview — the latest offering from a man Smith labels a “self-described crisis opportunist.”
Whether one finds that framing fair or not, it captures a durable line of criticism on the right: that Emanuel’s brand of governance treats disruption as raw material rather than something to be avoided. The American Thinker piece is less interested in litigating the specifics of Emanuel’s newspaper column than in using it as evidence for a broader case about the Democratic agenda.
Public Unions and Unsustainable Promises
Smith devotes considerable space to public service unions, arguing that multi-year contracts and guaranteed pensions effectively “neuter the votes of taxpayers” by locking them into obligations he describes as permanently unsustainable. The result, in his telling, is a familiar squeeze: taxes that “go up and up” while public safety recedes and student scores in reading, writing and arithmetic “go down down down.”
It’s a sweeping claim, and Smith presents it as self-evident rather than sourced to any particular study or dataset. Readers looking for empirical grounding here won’t find it in this commentary — the argument runs on assertion and analogy. That’s worth noting for anyone weighing the piece as policy analysis rather than polemic.
He also takes a swing at the branding power of the modern Democratic Party, crediting it with the skill of “the best of Madison Avenue advertising agencies” in selling what he calls “so-so, or worse” as the greatest thing going. Public service unions, he adds, do this constantly — another example, in his view, of messaging outrunning reality.
The sharpest line in the piece comes when Smith defines the Democratic agenda outright: “subsidies for only a few on the monies taken at threat of prison from the many.” It’s a formulation he returns to, applying it even to the language of social justice, which he says is “neither sociable nor just” but rather the same transfer mechanism in a friendlier wrapper.
‘See Rahm Run’
The title of Smith’s commentary plays on the classic children’s book cadence — “See Rahm Run, Run Rahm Run” — turning Emanuel’s evident productivity as an opinion writer into a kind of punchline. The implication is less about running for something than about running in place: a politician churning out columns while, in Smith’s account, the party he represents produces outcomes that diverge sharply from its rhetoric.
That contrast — between what a party says it’s doing and what it actually produces — is the organizing principle of the piece. Smith asks readers to “look though at what his party is producing and has produced, and contrast it with what they say they are doing.”
It’s a classic opposition tactic, and hardly unique to this writer. But the Emanuel column gives it a fresh hook. Here is a figure who has moved through Chicago’s mayoralty, the Obama White House, and now a busy second act as a public commentator, still deploying the language of Midwestern virtue while, in the view of his critics, the city he once ran tells a much messier story.
What the Column Actually Argues
It’s important to be precise about what the American Thinker piece does and doesn’t establish. It reports the existence of Emanuel’s op-ed, quotes its closing line, resurrects the 2008 crisis quote, and builds a critique of Democratic governance and public sector unions on top of that foundation. It does not present data on Chicago crime rates, pension shortfalls, or school performance — the assertions about those are made at the level of rhetoric.
That doesn’t make the commentary worthless as a window into a political argument; it simply means the argument is being waged at 30,000 feet. Smith is making a case about priorities, incentives, and the gap between branding and results. Whether the reader accepts the case depends on premises he largely assumes rather than defends.
What the piece does demonstrate is that Emanuel remains a reliable lightning rod on the right. Twenty-one op-eds in, he’s still generating responses — and still, in the eyes of critics like Smith, carrying the same baggage from 2008. The crisis quote, nearly two decades old, refuses to retire.
The American Thinker commentary ends with a pitch for reader support, framing donations as a way to keep conservative ideas “heard and our voices strong” — a reminder that this is opinion journalism with an explicit point of view, not a neutral accounting of Emanuel’s record.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/see-rahm-run/