Dan Morain is a former L.A. Times reporter and Sacramento Bee editorial page editor. His forthcoming book is about the mental healthcare system. A longer version of this article originally appeared on Morain’s Substack page.
Between stops in the early presidential primary state of Nevada and the source of campaign money that is Los Angeles, Rahm Emanuel made a quick visit to the California Community Colleges’ Futures Summit in Santa Clara on Sept. 9 to talk about, you guessed it, community colleges. I had the task of moderating.
We had never met but I knew his resume: Clinton White House political director, three-term member of Congress, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Obama White House chief of staff, two-term Chicago mayor, Biden’s ambassador to Japan, and a high school job at an Arby’s where the middle finger of his right hand had a nasty run-in with a meat slicer.
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Backstage, I asked him what became of the digit, though I knew the gist of the story: As he cleaned a meat slicer at an Arby’s, the blade cut his finger through to the bone.
Not wanting to miss his high school graduation and various parties, Emanuel, the son of a Chicago area physician, bandaged it himself. It turned gangrenous, and he landed in the hospital with a fever that spiked to 105.
“It was actually a transformational moment,” he said. He went from screw-up to achiever, as he told high schoolers when he was mayor.
In 2005, then-Sen. Barack Obama roasted Emanuel by saying that without the middle finger, his notoriously profane friend — Emanuel kept it PG during our talk — was practically mute.
Golden State staff
Emanuel can discuss all manner of foreign and domestic policy. On this day, that included community colleges, a worthy topic in California where more than 2 million people, including 1 million full-time equivalent students, attend the state’s 116 community colleges. That’s roughly 25% of all community college students nationally.
A student can study rodeo at Feather River College, robotics at El Camino College, camera operation at Santa Monica College, or get the basics out of the way or climb back on the track to a four-year university, my path decades ago when I attended the College of San Mateo, free of charge. The $46 per unit cost remains the lowest in the nation, though many students attend for free.
As Chicago’s mayor, Emanuel created the Star scholarship, which guarantees free community college for any local high school student who graduates with a B average or better. To get a high school diploma under another Emanuel initiative that remains in place, Chicago seniors must produce letters of acceptance from a community college, a four-year-college, a vocational school or a branch of the armed services. His goal was to get them to think beyond their 18th birthday.
“I am agnostic,” he said, about their choices. “You want to become an electrician? I want you to be the best electrician. You want to go into the Air Force or the Marine Corps? You want to go to a community college? You want to be an engineer? That’s up to you. What is your passion? But you are not quitting at 17, and we are not quitting on you at 17.”
Dan Morain
In various venues, he has talked about bringing jobs back to the U.S., specifically shipbuilding, a notion Gov. Gavin Newsom has embraced as part of a redevelopment project at Mare Island in Vallejo. Emanuel has said the lack of well-trained workers limits the nation’s ability to build advanced submarines, and community colleges can help solve that.
“Our lack of people in the trades is actually a national security crisis,” he said.
Such comments suggest that a vision for community colleges might have relevance for, say, a candidate seeking the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.
“Just as a hypothetical,” he said. Yes, I said, purely hypothetical.
Emanuel flipped the question in the direction of President Trump. The federal government plans to spend $38 billion on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. He would take $8 billion of that to modernize the curriculum and facilities at the nation’s 1,200 community colleges and technical schools. There’d be strings. For example, schools receiving the money would need to have industry input with curriculum and provide training that would qualify students for jobs in those industries.
I shifted the conversation to AI. What role might educators and organized labor have in shaping the use of artificial intelligence in classrooms?
“I gotta deviate for one second,” he said.
“Have you ever seen an industry that says, ‘Please regulate us,’ and we have a White House where nobody’s home…. He spends 80% of his time on the ballroom, the arch, and the helio pad.
“This November, I’m sorry, the president’s going to get adult supervision.”
For an old politics reporter, that line was red meat, so I asked for his prediction.
The former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who gets much credit for Democrats gaining 30 seats in 2006, pointed out the president is underwater and there is a midterm “law of physics.”
Independents break two-to-one against the party in power. Democratic voters have vastly outnumbered Republicans in this year’s primary elections. Democrats have won all statewide elections since November 2024.
Emanuel is confident Democrats will take control of the House and is “small c and o, cautiously optimistic” about the Senate. He believes Democratic gubernatorial candidates will win in Michigan, Wisconsin and maybe in Iowa and Ohio, and will flip state legislatures or whittle away at Republican majorities in those states and others, “which is going to set up 2028, 2030, 2032.”
Back to AI.
“For the students, it is actually not helping them, because the most important thing you’re going to need in the AI-influenced world is the ability of critical thinking. AI is actually dumbing us down from that capacity.”
He added: “We shouldn’t be naive about this. It is going to have a destructive impact on existing jobs, and jobs that pay good incomes, and we are not as a society set up for that transition. And I do think the 1,200 community colleges and technical schools are that transition belt.”
A final big-picture question had to do with how he might redesign higher education for the economy we might have in 10 or 20 years.
“Oh, you want me to do that in two minutes?” He blasted away at Trump for denigrating higher education but also said educators need to make institutions of higher education more relevant.
Before we took the stage, Emanuel had a question for me: Will the billionaire tax, Proposition 40 on the November ballot, pass?
I told him I doubt it, though billionaires are doing everything in their power to see that it does win. That took him aback. Having just finished Gil Duran’s new book “Nerd Reich,” I explained that every time Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and the other billionaires open their mouths and their wallets, they add to its support.
Mariel Garza
A question for the rest of us: What chance does Emanuel have of getting the 2028 Democratic nomination?
My view is that serious presidential aspirants start with a 10% chance of success. Odds are against any one of them winning. But with lots of luck, skill, talent, extraordinarily hard work and more luck, one will catch on. As someone who was inspired by community college, I like that this potential candidate is taking the time to talk about the future of such institutions.
What do you think? Golden State is a public forum. Send your responses for possible publication to forum@golden-state.org.
