Emanuel gets book deal, will write on political vacuum being filled by cities

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has talked often — particularly since the election of President Donald Trump — about the declining power of the federal government and the political vacuum being filled by major cities.

Now that he’s chosen political retirement over the uphill battle for a third-term, Emanuel is planning to write a book on one of his favorite subjects.

New York mega-publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced Tuesday it will publish a book in 2020 by the man who will soon be the former mayor of Chicago titled, “The Nation City: Why Mayors Run the World.”

The mayor’s office did not immediately disclose the advance Emanuel will be paid to write it. Emanuel and his wife, Amy Rule, plan to donate “a percentage of the proceeds” to the BAM and WOW youth mentoring programs he has championed that serve thousands of disadvantaged young people in Chicago.

“In the ’60’s, mayors would go to Washington to say, `Save us.’ Today, 50 years later, we go to Washington to say, `Let us save you.’ That’s a big change,” Emanuel said Tuesday.

“So much instability in the economy and so much instability in politics nationally. Companies, people are looking for a place of stability. And that’s where local government plays a role.”

A press release issued by the publisher described the yet-to-be-written book as attempting to demonstrate what Emanuel has called a fundamental shift in political empowerment — not only across the nation, but around the world.

While federal governments have “historically led change,” major cities have now become “the places where things are getting done, reforms are being addressed and grand projects are being realized.”

That’s certainly true of the ongoing reform of the Chicago Police Department in the wake of the police shooting of Laquan McDonald. A U.S. Justice Department investigation triggered by that shooting culminated in federal court oversight outlined in a consent decree that awaits a judge’s approval.

The claim about “grand projects” is less certain. The mayor’s $8.7 billion O’Hare International Airport expansion project is likely to survive, no matter who is elected mayor.

But visionary billionaire Elon Musk’s plan to build a “Tesla-in-a-tunnel” transit line to whisk travelers between downtown and O’Hare in 12 minutes has been described by mayoral challenger Paul Vallas and others as “fool’s gold” that will “collapse of its own weight.”

Vallas has flatly predicted that the $1 billion project would never get built because of concerns ranging from environmental impacts, regulatory approvals and financing costs to Musk’s unproven, low-cost, high-speed tunneling technology — and what tunnelers may find underground.

He also pointed to how preoccupied the Tesla CEO now is with more recent troubles of his own making caused, in part, by Musk’s erratic behavior.

A similarly uncertain fate awaits Emanuel’s long-promised, $2.3 billion plan to extend the CTA Red Line from its south terminus at 95th Street all the way to 130th.

Weeks before pulling out of the mayor’s race, Emanuel declared the Red Line South project to be “one of the top, if not the top public transportation priority for me.”

“We’re the only state in the Midwest that has not passed an infrastructure bill in the last decade. I’ve communicated to the leadership that if they pass — and I’m advocating they pass — a transportation bill, that Red Line South be the top priority,” the mayor said then.

Emanuel said Tuesday he’s been “talking about and thinking about” the book for the last two years and “got serious about it” roughly eight months ago. It’s about a fundamental shift in power that is somewhat difficult to see, but will become apparent 10 or 15 years from now, he said.

“Cities are emerging as taking on more and more responsibilities. Whether that’s on climate change, immigration, making technology accessible to wider and wider parts of the population, rather than being exclusive,” the mayor told reporters.

“And let’s also say politically. You look at Washington today, it looks like Disneyland on the Potomac. It looks like a big wrestling cage match. This is a government that is located closest to where people live their lives and…is most intimate to the way they go about their lives. That’s why it’s a stable political force and also something people can relate to.”

Long known for his pragmatic, results-oriented style of government, Emanuel’s book will articulate a vision for what his publisher calls a “new localist liberalism for Democrats in the 21st Century, built around urban areas.”

Never mind that he has struggled to shed his own image as “Mayor 1 percent.”