Daniel Derajinski/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
Rahm Emanuel, left, as mayor of Chicago, and Clover Moore, lord mayor of Sidney during the Women4Climate event held in Paris, February 21, 2019.
Rahm Emanuel kept promoting himself for a Cabinet post, to no avail. Now we keep hearing that Rahm will get a major ambassadorship, China or maybe Japan. Once again, the pattern of anonymous leaks suggests the source is Emanuel himself.
But an ambassadorship makes even less sense than a Cabinet job. Rahm was famously the most undiplomatic person in the Obama inner circle. His serial failures as the bully mayor of Chicago won him few friends. He’d be hard to confirm.
The reset of the U.S.-China relationship is the most important foreign-policy challenge facing the administration. This diplomacy is intricate. Maybe have an ambassador who knows something about the subject?
Emanuel’s knowledge of foreign economic relations comes mainly from his three years making a quick $14 million on Wall Street, in between his jobs with Bill Clinton and his election to Congress. But a corporate-driven China policy is exactly what Biden and his team are rejecting.
Does Biden’s U.S. trade rep, Katherine Tai, want Emanuel in that sensitive post? National Economic Council director Brian Deese? National-security chief Jake Sullivan? I doubt it.
Nick Burns, a career Foreign Service official and former ambassador to NATO, is said to be favored for the China job. Japan, which Emanuel is promoting as a consolation prize, also presents complex policy challenges.
These are serious assignments, not trophy posts. Why would Biden want Emanuel in either position?
There is little love lost between Biden’s top people and many Obama veterans. History handed Team Obama the chance to go big and bold—and they flinched.
The Biden people are relishing the opportunity to achieve what Obama bungled. Rahm helped stunt Obama’s operation, and his subsequent move to Wall Street demonstrated how the allure of revolving-door riches undermined the appetite for transformative change.
It’s also increasingly clear that Biden, despite the scripted closeness with Obama, felt disrespected. For 2016, Obama chose his own onetime rival, Hillary Clinton, over his vice president. Biden recently told Anderson Cooper that not once in eight years did the Obamas invite him and Jill to a private dinner in the family quarters.
This coolness matters, because Rahm’s campaign for a trophy job has credibility only to the extent that Obama alums want that favor for him—maybe even Obama himself. Surely Obama has higher priorities for his own dwindling influence.
If an ambassador job must be found, pick a country with few outstanding issues for Rahm to screw up. Iceland? Paraguay? San Marino?
