The problem is we'll keep letting it happen

Rick Perlstein takes us on a brief tour of Rahm Emmanuel's worst sins and they are many. It's difficult to pick a favorite but I always enjoy the bits that are almost too super-villainous to be real.

The city also rolled out a new “smart card” system for customers to pay transit fares, a product of the San Diego-based defense contractor Cubic. The system, known as Ventra, worked about as well as Lucille Ball on a factory production line: some people would get on the bus for free, while others would be charged several times. The cards were supposed to double as debit cards for Chicago’s “unbanked” poor. But buried deep within the thousand-page contract with Cubic were nice little Easter eggs, like the seven-dollar fee for customers who didn’t use the card for eighteen months, and another five dollars tacked on for each dormant month after that.

The damage done by amoral power brokers like Rahm is always obvious to everyone once they finally receive their comeuppance.  But somehow that never helps us to undo that damage or even learn to change the course that allowed it to happen.

Perlstein concludes,

Now the sins of Emanuel are finally catching up with him. Lucky for him, however, the compounding police-shooting scandal has erased from the news a peccadillo from this past November: the mayor’s press team was eavesdropping and recording reporters while they interviewed aldermen critical of the mayor. A spokesman responded to the press by saying that their only intent was also “to make sure reporters have what you need, which is exactly what you have here.” That made no sense. But then so much of the legend of Rahm Emanuel’s brilliant career makes little sense. The bigger question, perhaps, is what this says about a political party and the political press that bought the legend in the first place.

Even as we're finally tiring of this person in particular, there's never a shortage of "smart guys" willing to hand out favors to wealthy benefactors and punish poor people more or less for existing in the first place just waiting to become the next celebrated realist grown up who gets things done. In modern American politics there is no higher calling.

The only way to change that is to do something about these people while we have a chance to... you know.. quit electing them to stuff. But Hillary has a double digit lead so...

Always bet the under

Bibi looks like he's going to hang on.

Polls just closed in Israel and a raft of exit of polls show a big comeback for Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud, who closed the last two days with a round of racist, anti-Arab Israeli appeals to consolidate the right wing vote in Likud. It seems to have worked. The exit polls don't all agree. But most show a virtual tie between Labor and Likud in the high 20 seat range. In other words, both major parties seem to have over-performed their numbers.

So, incidentally, does Rahm.

CHICAGO, March 15 (Reuters) - Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has opened a 10 percentage point lead in his re-election bid against Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, an opinion poll on Sunday showed, though his challenger received a hard-won labor union's endorsement that could bring in campaign cash and volunteers.

The Chicago mayor's race went to an unprecedented run-off when well-funded Emanuel, mayor since 2011, failed to clinch the 50 percent of the vote he needed for an outright win on Feb. 24.

In other words, democracy, basically, doesn't work. 

The Cow Slaying Club

One way to understand Mitch Landrieu's "Aspen Ideas" brand of ideology is to keep an eye on his counterpart celeb-Mayors in other parts of the country. We've mentioned Cory Booker before but outgoing NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg is another one Mitch often seeks to emulate.

And then, of course, there's Rahm Emanuel. 

While media like to play the scary number game -- $20 billion in unfunded pension liabilities – this comes to about to about 0.5 percent of the city’s GDP over the next 30 years, the time period in which the shortfall would have to be made up. The city could of course raise this much revenue, but the current mayor Rahm Emanuel thinks it would be too inconvenient. And hey, these are just contracts with workers, not obligations to people who really matter.

Emanuel’s cavalier attitude toward contracts with the city’s workers apparently does not apply to its other contracts, for example its deal with Morgan Stanley to lease its parking meters for 75 years. The city arguably received less than half the market price for this long-term lease, but Emanuel apparently thinks the city can still afford to honor its contract with the huge Wall Street bank.

Contracts with Wall Street types always seem to draw more respect than contracts with workers. Folks may recall that when AIG was bankrupt and effectively a ward of the government, we were told by the Obama administration (where Emanuel was then chief of staff), that it had to pay out $165 million in bonuses to its senior staff. Many of the AIG employees, who had taken the company into bankruptcy, pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from these bonuses.

Last month, Mitch referred to city obligations to its employees' pension funds as "sacred cows" he needs to "slay." 

Maybe they're still out to get cows in Chicago after all this time but you'd think in New Orleans we'd have a little more patience.  But Club Aspen is as post-regional as it is "post-partisan" which is one reason electoral politics in any of these cities is starting to feel less fun than it used to.

Whoopsie!

Rahm Emanuel booted off ballot by court

Update: Today is a very good day to follow @MayorEmanuel on Twitter. Also yesterday was a good day to do that.