QOTD: Rahmbo
by digby
Demanding that people love you never works. Neither does demanding respect. In fact, if you're reduced to doing that you'll almost certainly fail to get it.
They say old Rahm Emanuel came out last night—or maybe it was the real one hiding in plain sight all the time: a sneering, aggressive pol who went “nose-to-nose” with a mental-health advocate demanding, “You’re gonna respect me!”
The alleged exchange took place off-camera between Chicago’s mayor and Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a member of Mental Health Movement, a group that has been fighting the mayor over the closure of six mental health clinics across the city. Behind a door that separated the mayor from a roomful of constituents at a campaign stop in the Wicker Park neighborhood, Ginsberg-Jaeckle says, he got Rahmbo’d.
“This is the Real Rahm,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote on Facebook. “Calm and collected in public, raging angry and self-defensive behind closed doors.”
[...]
Debbie Delgado, another member of the group, interrupted Emanuel, prompting the behind-closed-doors altercation.
“She told of losing her son to gun violence,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote. “She told [Emanuel] how her other son was holding him as he died. She told about how the city's Northwest Mental Health Clinic in Logan Square saved their lives, helped her and her son deal with the PTSD and depression. Then she asked why he took that clinic away from her.”
Rahm said he would speak with the pair, and Ginsberg-Jaeckle said they then left the room for a private conversation. That’s when Emanuel allegedly shouted: “You’re gonna respect me!”
Hey it works for Chris Christie. I have relatives who cheer at the sight of a politician bullying his constituents. So perhaps his will work for him. But it's actually kind of pathetic.