Rahm Emanuel will be remembered as a Chicago mayor who adored rich people and hated everyone else.

He has all but handed the keys to the city to corporate heads, tech start-ups, and wealthy developers. He has relentlessly attacked public education and the public sector as a whole. He covered up a brutal police killing of a black teenager. Even mainstream retrospectives on his tenure — written in the wake of his surprise announcement yesterday that he will not be seeking a third term as mayor — tried to sound fair and balanced yet couldn’t help but coming off as a long list of giveaways to the wealthy while the city’s poor and working class suffer or are pushed out.

Emanuel is the bête noire of the principled segments of Chicago’s labor movement, community groups, and the Left. He is “Mayor 1%.” All roads of evildoing lead back to him. Which makes his impending departure difficult to wrap my mind around. In many ways, he defined my adult political life in Chicago.