Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Why don’t they like you, Rahm Emanuel? I’ve finally put my finger on it

01.19.2015 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

No one in Chicago likes our mayor, Rahm Emanuel. An election's coming up and he'll probably get re-elected because he is slick and well-backed by corporate interests. We are afraid of crossing slick corporate-backed dudes. We have this funny feeling that if we reject them, they'll pull their slick corporate money out of our town and everything will immediately rust out and fall apart and our property values will go down and we'll spend the rest of our miserable lives staggering around in burlap smocks.

But it really is true that no one in Chicago likes Rahm. At least, I've never spoken with a single Chicagoan who said, "I like Rahm!" (And though Mayor Daley had many critics, some of them vociferous and most of them justified, you heard lots of people exclaim—sometimes in an apologetic, confessional way—"You know, I love Mayor Daley!")

Why does no one like Emanuel?

The old rhetoric professor Jerry Tarver used to talk about a colleague who was "so pompous that he could say 'good morning,' and it seemed as if he was taking credit for it."

That's not quite it with Rahm. It's not that he carries himself with too much self-love. It's that he regards the rest of us with … well, he seems to talk to his constituents as if he's caught a pair of senseless and not very clean eight-year-old boys fighting in the dirt, and pulled us apart by our hair. Now it's time for a lecture. He's trying to be as patient as he can …
We know the job is frustrating, Rahm, but you begged and begged and begged and begged us for it. And you bought it. And so now you own it. And you can't manage to appear grateful and happy and game, at least some of the time?

No, you're too fed up with the dumb-ass citizenry and its endless naive questions.

Well, we know how you feel, because we're parents too.

So we don't like being talked to like kids.

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