CHICAGO — We had just sat down in our booth at Pizzeria Portofino, an upscale restaurant on the riverfront he revitalized as mayor, when I asked Rahm Emanuel how he was doing.
“I don’t have prostate cancer,” he quipped.
There it was. Sharp, funny, a little nasty, a little glib—and aimed directly at the proverbial elephant in the room. Classic Rahm Emanuel.
I had come to Chicago because I wanted to know who was going to lead the Democratic Party out of its doldrums, and there were rumors—more than rumors—that Emanuel wanted to be that guy.
And he wasn’t exactly denying it.
It had been the most tumultuous weekend for Democrats since the discovery of the blue dress. Less than 24 hours before, former President Joe Biden had disclosed he had stage 4 prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bones. Two days before, an audio tape of Biden’s interview with former special counsel Robert Hur had been leaked to Axios; it made Hur’s conclusion that Biden was “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” seem generous. Meanwhile, Washington was still digesting the news, in a just-published book, that Biden’s closest aides—with a great deal of help from the White House press corps—had gone to great lengths to cover up the president’s mental decline.