Splinter: Rahm Emanuel's Run for President Is Proof that Centrist Dems Are Beyond Cooked
There is absolutely nothing I can write in the following paragraphs that’s more insulting to the Third Way centrist Democrat types than the fact that they returned from the political wilderness and their best idea in 2026 is Rahm fucking Emanuel. They are cooked. Flambéed. Extra well done. The kind of steak Trump likes to eat with his mountain of ketchup. The Very Serious zeitgeist is seriously pushing Rahm 2028. This is not a joke. This is the best this coalition can do; an anti-charismatic and corrupt Clinton relic who helped cover up the murder of a teenage boy and would get negative 100% of the vote in South Carolina in 2028. Pathetic doesn’t even scratch the surface of this scheme. Cue the Always Sunny music.
The Gang Tries to Take Down the Left
I know a certain kind of vote blue no matter who commenter will condemn this blog as yet again the dreaded left trying to ruin an otherwise perfect Democratic coalition (reminder: Splinter endorsed a vote for Kamala Harris in 2024), but this war is coming from the center. That’s not me asserting it, that’s me quoting these schmucks whose only talent is alienating every person under the retirement age. “We will be the chief opponent of the left in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary” said Third Way president Jon Cowan earlier this year as he launched this assault on a large part of the Democratic coalition. Gallup polling released in January found that 59% of Democrats describe themselves as liberal or very liberal, versus just 32% identifying as moderate. While Independents obviously identify as moderate the most at 47%, a sizeable chunk at 24% define themselves as liberal or very liberal. The world that Third Way campaigns for simply does not exist.
This is where I must take a second to explain what Third Way is to normal folks who understandably haven’t heard of this organization decided to losing winnable elections and proving that establishment Democratic centrism has one idea and one idea only (find the exact midpoint of the constantly shifting American political spectrum every two years and say that is where your deeply held values lie, then expect voters to not think that you are completely full of shit).
Third Way’s senior vice president admitted in 2013 that the majority of the think tank’s funding comes from Wall Street, and on their own website, they say they are a “national think tank and advocacy organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas.” What are those policies and ideas? They’ll get back to you about that every election cycle once their overpaid consultants figure out what to tell people they believe, but boy howdy do they have a plan to tell you what ideas are bad. This may come as a shock to some, but most of those ideas involve taking away power from the powerful people funding their think tank.
I must also note #notallcentrists here to concentrate my fire on this machine politics Third Way centrism whose only goal is to make 1996 great again, because Trump has shifted a lot of genuine conservatives to the center and places like The Bulwark are proving that there is room for another kind of centrist Democratic politics that doesn’t revolve around tucking your tail between your legs and compromising before a political negotiation has even begun. We are living in a strange world where us on the left have far more in common with Bill Kristol than most of Democratic leadership, especially in the Senate.
Third Way types have spent their time in the wilderness since the great Democratic humiliation of 2024 demanding that the party find its own Joe Rogan, and now these centrist believe-in-nothings are attacking the closest thing the entire Democratic Party has to a Joe Rogan. Hasan Piker is one of the most vocal anti-Israel critics in media today, and he is one of the most popular political streamers on Twitch, so of course Third Way is writing op-eds condemning Democrats who appear on his show, claiming that Piker is an antisemite. Democrats like this who supported Israel’s genocide when Biden was in office now find themselves on the wrong side of a 92-8 issue within their own party and 75-25 with Independents, and instead of following the popularist illogic so many of them preach and for once in their political lives, demonstrate that they actually do believe in something, they are fighting the tides of history so they can stay in AIPAC’s good graces. More Independents sympathize with Palestinians (41%) than Israelis (30%), while 65% of Democrats are sympathetic to Palestinians versus just 17% for Israelis. This donor-driven push to rehab Israel’s image is not popular with anyone outside the Republican Party, which I guess is a good example of what popularism is in practice.
This assault on an Israel critic as an antisemite is a losing message among American Jews too. A majority, 61%, of American Jews say that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza and about 4 in 10 say Israel is guilty of a genocide. However, when you dig into the partisan breakdown of this polling, gentiles learn what us Jews have known for thousands of years: there is a big gap between conservative and liberal Jews. A Saddam Hussen election-level 85% of Republican Jews approve of Israel’s actions, compared to just 31% of Jewish Democrats. Also as any Jew could tell you, there is a growing generational gap on this subject, as half of Jews aged 18 to 34 use the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. Third Way wants you to believe that there is some silent majority of U.S. Jews out there who approve of Israel’s historical crime, and there possibly is, as the same poll shows that Jews are roughly evenly split on the war itself (46% for and 48% against), but basic math will tell you that the vast majority of Jews moving that number towards even are going to vote for JD Vance’s antisemitic groyper army over any Third Way approved Democrat in 2028.
This Hasan Piker attack that is a page straight out of the Biden genocide denial playbook to cast the entire left as antisemitic will not work, and it will only further make those participating in it seem wildly out of touch with a party base that is done backing Israel’s apartheid state without question. A majority of American Jews don’t even support this shit, and yet, Jews like me who don’t support this shit have to listen to non-Jews like Democratic Senator Cory Booker lecture me about how Piker is supposedly as bad as Nick Fuentes.
Booker didn’t explicitly make this connection when he caved to Third Way’s demand and said he would not go on Piker’s show (centrist Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin who is Jewish also said she would not go on his show), but the architect of the war they signed up to fight in, Third Way co-founder Matt Bennett, is explicitly trying to make the connection between Piker and a right-wing figure who makes explicit genocidal remarks. “Piker is close to—but not over—the Nick Fuentes line, where going on his show itself is indefensible,” said Bennett to Politico. That is a fucking ridiculous comparison to make that is preposterous on its face to anyone who has listened to both.
This is very clearly Third Way’s opening salvo in their war on the left, and yet, I find it quite interesting how all these non-Jews lecturing me about antisemitism haven’t condemned Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo to the same degree as Piker’s Israel criticism, which does not exactly assuage my fears that the chosen candidate of the Pod Save bros is an establishment wolf in lefty sheep’s clothing. The only quote about Platner from any of these folks condemning Piker that I can find is Matt Bennett saying, “We do believe that Platner has not remotely done enough to explain why he had a Nazi tattoo for 20 years.” No word on whether he thinks the Pod Save bros are antisemites for hosting him though.
This all stinks to high heaven, and as a Jew I am beyond fucking sick of hearing non-Jews, especially those with Palestinian blood on their hands like Cory Booker, tell me what antisemitism is. Hasan Piker has said a lot of stupid and offensive things, like anyone who does several hours of live streaming every day would, but he’s not an antisemite. I don’t think Platner is antisemitic either, just a doofus. I feel far more offended as a Jew by Democrats who are still asserting that critiquing Israel’s apartheid state is akin to antisemitism. It is the acceptable kind of antisemitism that has taken root in the mainstream media and Democratic Party as a cover for Israel’s genocide, and as long as I live I will never forgive—or vote for—anyone who participated in this cynical exercise to use my people’s historic pain to shield a Zionist monster from the repercussions of its genocidal mania.
The Losing Losers’ Plan that Never Changes
Per their “comeback retreat” in February 2025, Third Way wants to “Build a moderate Democratic infrastructure, including media, talent pipelines, and communications networks,” while “push[ing] back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging.” They are also gung-ho about “ban[ning] far-left candidate questionnaires and refuse to participate in forums that create ideological purity tests.” The story from these soulless ghouls goes that Kamala Harris expressed support for trans people on an ACLU questionnaire, and that Trump commercial that blanketed the airwaves saying “Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you” decided the entire election. Except we know it didn’t, and 2024 isn’t really a whole lot more complex than inflation took out incumbents everywhere around the world and roughly 19 million 2020 Biden voters didn’t show up in 2024. Anyone who says that increased support for trans people swung the 2024 election is a willing mark for the dumbest kind of GOP propaganda.
This story the center tells about 2024 is utterly incoherent, ahistorical and entirely self-serving—because it acts like 2020 never happened. It is presented as manifestly evident that Democrats embracing more liberal positions is electoral poison because of 2024, but they want to talk about 2020 about as much as Donald Trump does. These people are snakes, empty suits not to be trusted. They are only here to sow division on behalf of the major capital that has driven us to this widespread collapse of the American government. Third Way types will tell you with a straight face that they know how to establish a generation of Democratic rule in America if only us pesky lefties would just get out of the way and vote blue no matter who (something many of us lefties begrudgingly do anyway and then get yelled at for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about it). Meanwhile, they don’t want to talk about races like Sean Patrick Maloney’s in NY-17, or how the Democratic Party has recently left candidates hanging out to dry in winnable races.
Maloney was chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), as well as a Third Way approved New Democrat Coalition member. After his district was reshaped in 2022, rather than stay home, Maloney forced himself into a neighboring district, displacing freshman Mondaire Jones who lost a primary in New York City. You know who Republican Mike Lawler is and his whole insane deal because Maloney subsequently lost to Lawler in a district that Biden carried by 10 points during the 2020 election. Maloney became the first active DCCC chair to lose a general election in over 40 years, all while this caucus claims to be the paragon of competence. The biggest problem with this generation of Democratic centrists isn’t their ideology, or lack thereof, it’s that they suck at politics to a degree that few people ever have in American history.
In 2022, Jamie McLeod-Skinner took down one of the “Unbreakable Nine” blocking Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in Oregon’s 5th district, Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. The DCCC pulled the $2 million in ads it had funded off the air in the final weeks, and McLeod-Skinner lost to his Republican opponent by just 1,820 votes. Nancy Pelosi’s House Majority PAC triaged the race entirely, while Republicans poured $8 million into a winning campaign. “This seat could have made the majority, but the national Democratic PACs walked away and left Jamie to twist in the wind,” said Working Families Party national campaign director Joe Dinkin. Thanks to the narrow failures across the spectrum in 2022, Democrats were forced to spend the last two years of Biden’s presidency with a GOP House majority that could have been a minority with four more Democratic victories.
Democrats only lost the House by a total of 6,675 votes in 2022, and there are thin margins across the country that Third Way types say their so-called ideology is specifically set up to win, yet they didn’t. Third Way types will point to their 2020 memo claiming that their supposed “mainstream” candidates out-performed “left-wing” candidates by six points, but it’s quite interesting how that memo elides the fact that the entire founding advisory board of their new Shield PAC lost in 2020 (former U.S. Reps. Anthony Brindisi (D-NY), Joe Cunningham (D-SC), Kendra Horn (D-OK), Ben McAdams (D-UT), and Xochitl Torres Small (D-NM)). Instead of owning up to their mistakes, this group of losers who lost during an election when the Democrats won a governing trifecta wrote an op-ed in the coloring book for adults announcing this new venture now that they were voted out of work, alleging that “Republican lies helped defeat us in 2020. We’re going to shield House Democrats in 2022.” Like Trump, establishment Democrats can never fail, they can only be failed.
If we go back another election cycle that was also favorable for Democrats in 2018, Third Way’s own scorecard showed that their candidates only won 46% of the time in that cycle. The famed Blue Dog Democratic caucus comprised of centrists opposed to Democratic agendas reached its peak with 65 members in 2008 (hmmmmm). Today that number is 10. No one actually likes this shit!
There is simply no evidence in Donald Trump’s America proving that these Very Serious centrist Dems have the secret sauce to win elections. And yet, here they are in 2026 alleging that these Wall Street Dems are the one true saviors of the lost Democratic Party, claiming that the number one “takeaway on why Democrats are not trusted by the working class on the economy” is because of the “vilification of wealth.” Seriously, Third Way wrote that down after seemingly half the country celebrated the cold-blooded murder of a healthcare CEO. Click on the link and see for yourself.
These are not serious people, and you don’t need to treat them like one just because they claim to be Very Serious.
There are plenty of critiques to be made about the left’s inability to build a coalition larger than a third of the Democratic Party, but at least our demands are affirmative: Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. We want to build new institutions, and we think the status quo should be replaced with one that reflects the realities of 2026 and not 1776. Third Way’s politics center around saying everything that everyone to their left believes is bad, because they do want the indefensible status quo that the vast majority of Americans hate. Their financiers and their lemmings benefit from this system of extraction. Third Way is not here to build new things, they’re here to destroy any idea hostile to the status quo, and that’s why the best they can do at this point in the American collapse their donors have aided is Rahm fucking Emanuel.
Rahm Fucking Emanuel!
Rahm Emanuel was director of the finance committee for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, served in that administration, was Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, then left to be the 55th Mayor of Chicago. After his extremely fraught term was finished and his approval rating at 27% made Trump’s current polling look rosy, instead of drifting into obscurity like he would in a healthy democracy that believes in consequences for one’s actions, Joe Biden appointed Emanuel to be ambassador to Japan. He is one of the preeminent cockroaches in the Democratic Party, and he is perhaps the perfect example of everything that ails the establishment. He is corrupt, cynical, opening his campaign by punching left, and is delusional enough to believe that a charisma vacuum could be president just because donors think he’s neat.
Emanuel helped write NAFTA, the trade agreement Trump used as a cudgel to weave his way to the White House. He was one of the architects of the 1990s welfare reform that spiked extreme poverty, as well as the 1994 crime bill that Joe Biden was so proud of until his people convinced him it was electoral and moral poison. Emanuel was head of the DCCC in the 2000s, and he oversaw the expansion of the Blue Dog coalition before he left to be the fox in the Obama White House’s hen house. All of that alone makes his extreme discount Clinton shtick extremely out of place in the modern Democratic Party (fun fact: we are as close to 2050 as Clinton’s first election was to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination), but Emanuel’s tenure as Chicago mayor really reveals the depravity of what the establishment is willing to tolerate.
“What is so hard to understand about this?” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after Emanuel was appointed as Biden’s ambassador to Japan in 2021. “Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.”
He did cover up evidence of a murder. The timeline is clear. On October 20th, 2014, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times—13 times while the teenager laid on the ground. On April 8th, 2015, The Daily Beast reported that the city council approved a $5 million settlement to McDonald’s family, the day after Emanuel won the runoff for reelection. Emanuel resisted revealing the video of the murder because he said it would jeopardize ongoing federal investigations, despite the fact that the Illinois Attorney General’s office ruled that Wall Street Journal reporter Zusha Elinson’s FOIA request for the footage was legitimate and should be released. The horrific video only came out after a judge ordered Emanuel to release it.
And this is the big centrist Dem idea to “have an effect on the dialogue” as famed Bill Clinton advisor James Carville said about Emanuel. It might be the case that the only establishment Dem who truly believes Rahm Emanuel can be president is Rahm Emanuel, but it is quite telling that the powers that be see him as someone who can push the discourse towards the center. A reheated Clinton acolyte who has long been a major advocate for capital who is most famous for covering up the murder of a teenage boy is being presented to us by the Very Serious Dems and their allies in media as “shameless in a good way,” per one Democratic adviser to a 2028 contender. He is even getting glowing profiles in Politico where the simple task of mixing a salad together is painted as some revelatory act that reveals deeper cutthroat truths about a man who only knows how to fail upwards.
jesus christ man you’re supposed to at least pretend the subject of your profile didn’t write the lede himself
— Andy Craig (@andycraig.bsky.social) March 29, 2026 at 2:33 PM
What this kind of centrist Dem and their Wall Street backers in Third Way don’t want you to know is that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, in large part because he bucked the establishment trend of telling the left to go fuck themselves and be aghast when lefty turnout isn’t what they had hoped. Biden understood how us lefties prioritize policy, and his olive branch of the Warren/Sanders policy team won him an avalanche of goodwill and the largest youth vote turnout in history, and he actually enacted a lot of their recommendations into the Inflation Reduction Act. So much of Biden’s term rightfully is characterized by his support for Israel’s genocide after October 7th and his subsequent cognitive failures in public, but before everything went to hell, there was actually a solid alliance between the Biden White House and the left. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman were attacked relentlessly for supposedly not supporting Biden’s agenda, but their votes against the IRA were made because they wanted the entire bill to pass and did not want to give in to the classic D.C. gambit of splitting a bill up and only passing what donors say can pass and leaving other aspects of it to die on the vine.
Centrists like Joe Manchin and the aforementioned six Third Way 2020 losers were opposed to Biden’s entire agenda, and progressives were in support of it. This is a simple fact of history you can prove with these people’s votes in Congress in 2021 and 2022. Third Way types are the real wreckers inside the Democratic Party, as they have long pissed on Democrats and called it rain. Their one neat Clinton trick doesn’t work anymore, and Rahm Emanuel 2028 is proof that without it, they’re all out of ideas.