During the online “Overtime” segment of Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel argued that Democrats are too focused on passing rules and “we have made it impossible to function as a city or as a state” and Democrats should look at government regulations and say, “everything is on the table, nothing is safe.” But haven’t.
Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria stated that the image people have of Democrats is “lots of taxes, lots of regulation, but nothing gets done.”
And “Democrats have to own this and realize the answer to everything is not more taxes, more regulation. People are fed up with that and they feel that it isn’t working.”
Emanuel responded, “The Democrats — look, as somebody who produced the best graduation growth in the country…and we changed our high schools…the point isn’t the rules. The point is the results. And the party has gotten way too focused on what the rules are. And I do agree with you on this, we have made it impossible to function as a city or as a state and have been so — take an example of this…here in, obviously, in L.A., it took a fire and a natural disaster to make you realize, you know what, that rule’s not that important. In Pennsylvania, a bridge collapsed, all of a sudden, we go, oh, that environmental rule is just not important, we’ve got to build a bridge, that’s much more important.”
He continued, “And I think the Democratic Party should take a look at — and say, we’re going to be honest like we did in 1994 with reinventing government, everything is on the table, nothing is safe. … And that doesn’t happen. And that’s a fair criticism.”
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