During the online “Overtime” segment of Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel discussed the poor approval ratings of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and stated that other Democratic mayors aren’t doing well and the focus needs to be on safety, education, and good finance, but “We’ve gone through five years where people became way too permissive as a culture…which is why everything’s locked up at Walgreens and CVS. And that is a disaster.”
Host Bill Maher asked, “I read that the current Mayor of Chicago has an approval rating of 6.6%. … What’s going on in Chicago?”
Emanuel answered, “Look, this is — we were talking about this a little earlier, you have also the mayor of New York not doing well, obviously, other things also here in Los Angeles, not doing well, the mayor here. Look, — and then you’ve got mayors, like the mayor of San Francisco and other cities that are doing well. So, I would say, look, there is a general rule. I had this when I was mayor: Safe streets, strong schools, stable finances, focus on those three things and your city’s going to be fine. We’ve gone through five years where people became way too permissive as a culture, they were all — which is why everything’s locked up at Walgreens and CVS. And that is a disaster. And I’ll say this about our schools, I don’t want to hear another word about the locker room, I don’t want to hear another word about the bathroom. You better start focusing on the classroom. We had the worst reading scores for 8th graders in 30 years, and nobody, not a governor, not a mayor, not a president, not a secretary of education is talking about it.”
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