Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel leaves office Monday after two terms, and America might begin seeing a lot more of him after that. He’s already been shopping around for a cable news gig, meeting with executives at CNN and MSNBC, and is represented by his brother Ari’s talent agency. He’s been making the rounds of cable shows, dispensing advice about how Democrats need to focus on winning over Donald Trump’s base. He’s been taking up regular space in The Atlantic, Washington’s resting spot for chin-stroking thoughtfulness. He’s even advised party leaders to “drive what I call a triangulation“ — using the term for the discredited strategy under which the Clinton administration (and a younger Rahm Emanuel) pursued punitive welfare reform and mandatory minimum sentences in order to win over Republican voters. He also famously advised grassroots party activists to “take a chill pill” following Trump’s election, while Emanuel unsuccessfully tried to find common ground with the new administration on infrastructure spending and on limiting police oversight in Chicago. Emanuel appears to be “developing a new side gig: warning Democrats about the dangers of 21st Century progressivism,” criticizing newly-elected U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and “hoping there’s a demand for one last defender of the neoliberalism that defined his career — a voice to warn his party against the perils of socialism,” according to Chicago Magazine. This, despite the fact that six socialists were elected to the City Council in Chicago’s recent election. Emanuel has a set of talking points to claim a variety of accomplishments for his mayoralty, and he’s even writing a book on “why mayors rule the world” — though one local pundit says the book “sounds more like a revisionist memoir about an egomaniac’s eight years in office building his personal brand and the fancy part of town while letting down struggling Chicagoans.” Long known for his skill at attracting favorable media coverage, Emanuel seems to be doing quite well on that count. East and West Coast TV hosts from Fareed Zakaria to Bill Maher fawn over his tough-guy image and supposed strategic brilliance, but they never offer any reality checks. So let’s do one. A national audience deserves to know what those of us in Chicago have already figured out: Emanuel’s mayoral administration is littered with failures and false claims, and the recent elections in Chicago represents a complete repudiation of the Emanuel years. The new mayor, Lori Lightfoot, was one of Emanuel’s foremost critics on police reform. Alderman Patrick O’Connor, Emanuel’s City Council floor leader, a 40-year incumbent, was one of several top mayoral allies who were defeated — in O’Connor’s case, by a young Latino Democratic socialist. Meanwhile, Emanuel’s finance committee chair is now facing federal corruption charges, and his zoning committee chair disappeared in December when word leaked that he wore a wire for the feds after coming under investigation himself. And on a significant range of issues, Chicagoans are turning away from Emanuel’s initiatives.

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Mental Health Crisis The biggest controversy of Emanuel’s first year in office was his closing of half the city’s public mental health clinics, most of them on the South Side. While patients were supposed to be referred to the remaining six clinics, hundreds fell through the cracks. For months, protestors from the Mental Health Movement disrupted Emanuel’s public appearances; they sat outside the mayor’s office and occupied one of the clinics slated for closing. They probably succeeded in preventing Emanuel from closing the rest of the clinics in subsequent years. But the first round of closings went through, and a study published a few years later by the Collaborative for Community Wellness found that Chicago’s Southwest Side had 0.17 licensed mental health clinicians per 1,000 residents, compared to 4.45 per 1,000 in the wealthy Near North Side. As shootings skyrocketed in Chicago neighborhoods, the need for mental health services to reduce and prevent violence as well as assist survivors of trauma became a frequent refrain. Seven years after the closings, a few months after Emanuel announced he wouldn’t seek reelection, the City Council voted unanimously to establish a Public Mental Health Clinic Service Expansion Task Force to identify gaps in the city’s mental health services and “explore re-opening of mental health clinics.” Environmental Crisis In an austerity push during his first year in office, Emanuel eliminated the city’s Department of Environment. In typical Emanuel-style messaging — which is often just a little too clever — he said the point was to make environmental sustainability the goal of every department. But the result has been a de-emphasis on environmental issues. Chicago’s recycling rate has remained abysmally low. In February, an analysis by the Better Government Association and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University revealed that the city now has half the number of environmental inspectors that it had eight years ago, and the number of annual inspections, not surprisingly, also fell by more than half.

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“Hazardous material inspections fell by more than 90 percent between 2010 and 2018; air quality inspections plunged almost 70 percent; and solid waste inspections dropped by more than 60 percent,” BGA and Medill reported. The Emanuel administration issued less than one-third the number of environmental citations than the city did in the preceding seven years. Then came a devastating environmental scandal. Emanuel had begun a series of increases to homeowners’ water and sewer fees — they’ve essentially doubled in subsequent years, with thousands of homeowners facing water shutoffs — to finance replacement of the city’s aging water mains. In 2013, the EPA warned that the work could increase lead levels in tap water by disturbing service lines to homes. (Due to the plumbers union’s clout with the Democratic machine, Chicago required that service lines connecting homes to the city’s water pipes be made of lead until the mid-1980s, decades after other cities had banned the toxic metal.) For five years, the Emanuel administration insisted that lead levels in annual tests were safe. But in 2018, the Chicago Tribune revealed that lead levels were above federal health standards in 30 percent of homes where homeowners had requested tests after work was done. Emanuel rejected demands that the city assist homeowners financially in replacing service lines, as other cities have done. And when aldermen sought hearings on whether the city was violating federal law by allowing unsafe levels of lead in its water, Emanuel’s floor leader O’Connor blocked them. Lightfoot and key aldermen now support reestablishing a separate environment department. Education Crisis It was on education that Emanuel tried — and failed — to make his bones as a tough, competent city manager and as a New Democrat willing to stand up to labor. It’s also an area where, judging from a recent article by Emanuel in The Atlantic, he now hopes to frame some kind of legacy as an “education mayor.” On some major points in that article, he appears to be counting on the ignorance of non-Chicago readers. He discusses recognizing the importance of principal leadership as some kind of revelation. That’s rich, knowing that Chicago Public Schools’ biggest scandal during his administration ­— the one that sent CPS’s chief to federal prison — involved a principal training program that principals denounced as low-quality, pre-packaged, and generally irrelevant. CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, nicknamed “B3″ by Emanuel, was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison after pleading guilty to steering the $20 million no-bid contract through in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks. (Byrd-Bennett’s successor, a longtime friend of Emanuel’s, would go on to resign after getting caught lying to ethics investigators.) Meanwhile, the head of the principals association says budgeting changes at CPS have handcuffed principals. Similarly, Emanuel boasts of increased graduation rates without referring to local reporting showing that one factor in their rise was the introduction of alternative schools run by for-profit contractors, which operate as diploma mills for the most difficult students. They are often storefronts in strip malls, where students spend a few hours a day at “computer learning stations” compiling credits to meet graduation requirements that are lower than those in district-run schools. Also missing from his account is an investigation that showed graduation rates were artificially inflated by listing thousands of dropouts as “transfers.”

Members of the Kelly High School marching band drum line lead a protest on July 11, 2013, against funding and staff cuts to their neighborhood schools in Chicago. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

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Left/Top: People react outside of City Hall on Oct. 5, 2018, after a jury convicted former police Officer Jason Van Dyke of second-degree murder in the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald. Right/Bottom: Jason Van Dyke and his attorney Daniel Herbert during Van Dyke's sentencing hearing in Chicago on Jan. 18, 2019.Photos: Matt Marton/AP; Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune via AP