Dear Commons Community,

Questions are being raised as to the tenure of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.  The news just keeps getting worse for him especially with regards to race, policing, and other issues in the Windy City.  As reported in the New York Times:

“GQ, the men’s magazine, just named Mayor Rahm Emanuel to its list of “The Worst People of 2015.” In Springfield, the Illinois capital, a fellow Democrat is pressing for a measure to permit Mr. Emanuel’s recall from office. And in Chicago, demonstrators bearing thousands of signatures last week demanded Mr. Emanuel’s resignation, then blocked traffic on Christmas Eve along the city’s glittering North Michigan Avenue shopping district, chanting, “Rahm’s got to go in 2016!”

Since the release last month of video showing a white Chicago police officer firing 16 shots into a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, Mr. Emanuel has been a mayor under siege. A debate over race and policing has swept through many cities this year, but its arrival here has pointed an especially bright spotlight on City Hall. And the fatal shooting of two people by the police [this past] Saturday morning, one of them a 19-year-old man with possible mental health problems and the other a 55-year-old bystander, intensified the scrutiny. Mr. Emanuel, who is vacationing in Cuba, issued statements saying that the city was grieving, that the public deserved answers, and that officers’ training for handling mental health crises must be re-examined.”

On public education, Emanuel has clashed with schoolteachers and:

“…set off the city’s first teachers’ strike in a quarter-century, drew special anger in 2013 for overseeing the closing of nearly 50 public schools, many of them in black and Latino neighborhoods.”

Emanuel needs to seriously rethink his viability as mayor and figure out what he needs to do to save his position.

Tony