The Thumpin'
How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution
Doubleday
New York, 2007
Often this job went to a distinguished senior statesman. Emanuel, on the other hand, was new to Congress, having just been elected to his second term. But he was known as a political assassin, willing to launch relentless, nasty attacks on his opponents, and Pelosi believed that was what the Democrats needed when she appointed Emanuel chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC...
No one expected the Democrats to actually win control of the House. The obstacles to knocking off sitting congressmen were simply too great. At best, if the Democrats were lucky, they might retake a handful of the fifteen seats they needed for the majority, and perhaps set the stage for finishing the job in 2008.
Into that difficult landscape stepped Emanuel. In a world where congressmen referred to each other as "my distinguished colleague" or "my good friend from Illinois," Emanuel often was unable to get through a single sentence without several obscenities.
Rahm Emanuel often seems to serve as an all-purpose villain for many in the netroots. It is simultaneously understandable - he engaged in some high-profile sniping at netroots favorite Howard Dean during the 2006 elections - and puzzling - he was, after all, the chief strategist for Democratic efforts to regain the House of Representatives in the year those efforts succeeded spectacularly.
Chicago Tribune journalist Naftali Bendavid was given extensive access to Emanuel and DCCC staff leading up to the 2006 elections on the grounds that he not publish anything until after Election Day. The result is a truly engrossing behind-the-scenes look at a part of the national effort that often remains behind the scenes. Despite this different perspective, though, reading it carried me back to the intensity and excitement of last fall (only this time knowing there would be a happy ending).
The book traces out the campaign from the very beginning, starting with candidate recruitment. Emanuel's goal was to recruit fifty strong challengers to Republican incumbents - far more challengers than he had any expectation of winning. To do this, he harangued possible candidates endlessly, arranging for them to be wooed by Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and a multitude of others. At the same time, he tried to pressure aging Republicans into retiring by making clear what difficult races they would be facing. The Democrats as a party had to respond repeatedly to new Republican scandals - to Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley - deciding each time how much to risk injecting themselves into a story they wanted to see remain focused on Republican wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Emanuel criss-crossed the country raising money and doing publicity for candidates, losing fourteen pounds and gaining gray hair.
Any blog discussion of Rahm Emanuel has to address the fairly significant amount of Rahm-hatred readers will bring to the discussion, so I'll do so head-on. Bendavid is blunt about Emanuel's abrasiveness, but at the same time, his sympathy is with his primary subject. Rahm Emanuel is the hero of this book - some people will find that impossible to swallow.
Blogospheric dislike of Emanuel is somewhat curious given that similar criticisms are leveled against both; in particular, both bloggers and Emanuel are often accused of being blunt or even rude, caring more about winning than about policy or ideology, and to that end supporting some candidates who do not meet traditional liberal litmus tests if that is what is required to win a Republican-leaning district. Some may see Emanuel as too-frequently going one step too far, especially in abandoning progressive politics, but I would argue that this dislike should not be posed, as it often is, as a blogs vs. Emanuel issue. Rather, it is an extension of the constantly ongoing, highly ideological, and often blunt or rude debate within and among blogs. The argument is no less real, but the binary oppositions between the people and the party, insiders and outsiders, netroots and inside-the-Beltway types so often invoked in describing it miss the size of the field on which the argument is carried out.
The Thumpin' spends relatively little time on the conflict between Emanuel and Howard Dean over whether to turn all available resources to targeted House races or to invest in the 50 state strategy. One succinct explanation offered is that
Part of the conflict was institutional - Emanuel was narrowly focused on House races, while Dean's job was to think about the whole party, senators to state legislators. It was hardly surprising that Emanuel wanted more than Dean was willing to give.
Ultimately, though, Bendavid does endorse Emanuel's tactics and execution over Dean's:
Dean's focus on rebuilding the party was undoubtedly admirable, and few Democrats disagreed with the goal. And Dean's DNC had contributed to the victory. But at times during the campaign, Dean had seemed curiously indifferent to the opportunities before him, saying it would take years to see results of his fifty-state strategy. So his more zealous supporters' quick claim to credit after the election did not ring true.
Like Emanuel or the blogs, The Thumpin' can be accused of a focus more on winning than on ideology. In the former two cases, I would argue that that view misses a significant part of what's going on - a fundamental agreement on why winning is ideologically important - and claim it as a feature, not a bug. Bendavid's book might have been improved by taking the question of ideology more seriously, questioning some of Emanuel's candidate choices and the rationales behind those choices. For instance:
Emanuel's efforts were more than just an attempt to attract the best-qualified candidates. Integral to his own style was a sort of macho strut, and that was reflected in his recruiting. Despite the incongruous fact that Emanuel for years studied ballet, he projected a masculine assertiveness - with his missing finger, his browbeating style, his cursing, his stint helping Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. Emanuel and John Lapp, his top aide at the outset of the campaign, delighted in finding candidates who fit the manly mold - military veterans, police officers, pilots.
Such choices ideally should be examined, and serious thought given to their long-term ramifications. But that's exactly why it's important to have strong figures in the different institutional positions Bendavid lays out for Emanuel and Dean - to have both the long-term, multi-level strength of the party and the importance of winning in the short term represented by competent, forceful advocates.
Whatever your view of Emanuel or his strategies, the book is very much worth reading. However much credit you give him for the House majority Democrats gained in 2006, if you care about a House majority, it's worth knowing what Rahm Emanuel did to help achieve it.