Katherine Harris has just lost her third campaign manager and an additional round of staffers, and the reverberations this time around are the ugliest yet for a Senate run that wasn't too pretty to begin with.
Glenn Hodas tells the Miami Herald that he stepped down as Harris' campaign manager because he no longer has the "energy" to deal with her "tantrums," her "micromanaging to the Nth degree" and her refusal to take advice from her campaign staff.
That's bad, but it's pretty much exactly what we'd heard already from others who have jumped the Harris ship. What's new: the Herald's report that in the early days of her campaign, Harris fended off a possible challenge by former Florida Rep. and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough by telling potential donors that if Scarborough ran, he'd face questions about Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old aide who was found dead in his office in 2001. Former campaign manager Jim Dornan tells the Herald that he heard Harris tell more than one potential donor: "I don't know what he's thinking when he's got this whole issue of a dead intern on his hands."
Dornan says the Scarborough story "encapsulates everything wrong" with Harris as a candidate. "She reacted without thinking. She made stuff up. She called people she had no business calling. And when confronted with the insanity of her -- I use this term lightly -- 'strategy,' she denied it and tried to blame someone else.''
Of course, this is the same Jim Dornan who called Harris a "great candidate" when he left her campaign last November. Why the change? It could have something to do with the fact that Harris' campaign has become something more like a suicide mission. A recent poll had Harris trailing Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by a margin of 59 to 26 percent, and the latest round of bad news isn't going to help matters much. As Ed Rollins, another GOP veteran who has come and gone from the Harris campaign, tells the Associated Press: "There's no good ending here."
As his campaign manager has described it, John McCain is now looking at a "narrow-victory scenario." "The fact that we're in the race at all," added Steve Schmidt, "is a miracle. Because the environment is so bad and the head wind is so strong."
But talk of miracles and head winds aside, I think John McCain really does have a decent shot at winning, and that's not just because I'm a longtime Republican political operative. Despite what the polls seem to be saying, a closer look at the numbers shows that a Democratic victory is not a foregone conclusion. Why? Because if history is any guide, Barack Obama, as an African-American candidate for political office, needs to be polling consistently above 50 percent to win. And in crucial battleground states, he isn't.
Much has been written about the so-called Bradley Effect, in which voters lie to pollsters about whether they're willing to vote for a black candidate. The Bradley Effect is meant to explain why, for example, Doug Wilder had a healthy 9-point lead up to Election Day in the 1989 Virginia governor's race, and a similar lead in exit polling, only to squeak through to victory by one-half of 1 percent. But I'm not talking about voters telling pollsters they're going to support Candidate A when they're really going to vote for Candidate B. There are two other ways in which voters can mislead pollsters about their intentions. One is to decline to participate in a poll. (More than one expert has suggested that conservatives are more likely to decline than liberals, meaning there could be many uncounted McCain voters.) The other is when pollsters participate in a poll but withhold information. Specifically, they say they're undecided when they really aren't. It's the latter phenomenon in particular, I think, that gives John McCain a chance at winning enough swing states to reach the White House.
There's an old rule in politics that an incumbent candidate is always in danger when he dips under 50 percent, even if he is leading his opponent in the polls. It's all about the undecideds. In a race with an incumbent candidate and a challenger, on Election Day the undecideds tend to break for the challenger, at rates as high as 4 to 1. If an incumbent is polling at, say, 47 to 45 percent with 8 percent undecided, there's a good chance he's going to wind up losing 49 to 51. As it's sometimes expressed, if you're an incumbent, what you see is what you get.
The same pattern seems to be true for African-American candidates in much of the country. If you're a black candidate running against a white candidate, what you see is what you get. And it doesn't matter whether you're an incumbent or a challenger. If you're not polling above 50 percent, you should be worried. As of this writing, Barack Obama is not polling consistently above 50 percent in a number of electoral-vote-rich swing states, including Ohio and Florida. He should be worried.
I'm not going to revisit contests from decades past, like Harvey Gantt vs. Jesse Helms for a Senate seat in North Carolina, or even Tom Bradley vs. George Deukmejian for the governorship of California. Let's just look at the numbers from the final days of four races in four very different states in 2006. Voter behavior may have changed in the 18 years since black Democrat Gantt lost by 5 points despite being even in the polls, but I doubt it has changed as much in the past two years. Just to make it more interesting, none of these contests involved an incumbent trying to keep his job. All were battles for open seats. Two races involved black Republicans, two involved black Democrats.
Before we begin, I should say I'm not going to advance any theories for why voters do what they do, or why they may mislead pollsters. MIT professor Adam Berinsky thinks that some survey respondents, when asked racially charged questions, answer "I don't know" to conceal opinions they think are unpopular. Me, I'm only going to talk about math.
In Ohio in 2006, black Republican Ken Blackwell ran against white Democrat Ted Strickland for governor. On Nov. 6, the day before the election, Survey USA released a poll showing Strickland with 55 percent, Blackwell with 38 percent, two independents with a combined 3 percent and 4 percent undecided. On Election Day the actual results were Strickland 60.4 percent, Blackwell 36.8 percent and a combined 2.8 percent for the independents. For Blackwell, what he got was just a little less than what he saw.
In Maryland, black Republican Michael Steele and white Democrat Ben Cardin were vying for the Senate seat long held by Democrat Paul Sarbanes. During the week before balloting, the polls were fairly static. Steele wobbled between 43 and 47 percent in surveys from four different companies. Cardin's total ranged from 47 to 49 percent. Depending on methodology, undecideds accounted for 2 to 7 percent of the sample. The day before the election, a final poll from Survey USA put Cardin at 49 percent and Steele at 47. On Nov. 7, Cardin won with 54.2 percent of the vote. Steele got only 44.2. For Steele, like Blackwell, what he got was less than what he saw. Apparently, Cardin got virtually all the undecideds.
How about Tennessee, where black Democrat Harold Ford was up against white Republican Bob Corker for Republican Bill Frist's old U.S. Senate seat? Harold Ford did slightly better than Steele and Blackwell. The day before the election, he was within a point of Corker, 47 to 48 with 5 percent undecided, according to OnPoint Polling. On Nov. 7, Corker got 50.7 percent of the vote, Ford got 48 and an assortment of independents took 1.3 percent. Ford was able to pick up one out of every five undecided voters.
In deep blue Massachusetts, white Republican Kerry Healey lost badly to black Democrat Deval Patrick in the race to succeed Mitt Romney as governor. But Healey, who had been Romney's lieutenant governor, outperformed her polling. In the three weeks prior to the election Healey peaked at 31 percent in five polls that allowed respondents to choose "undecided." In those same five polls, Patrick averaged 53.4 percent. The number of undecideds ranged from 4 to 11 percent. On Election Day, Healey got 35.33 percent of the vote. Patrick got 55.64. Healey had added more than 4 points to her pre-election poll total, twice as big as Patrick's increase.
A skeptic could point out that Healey may have been drawing more heavily than Patrick from the relatively large pool of survey respondents who claimed they would be supporting an independent. But a Republican, like me, might point out that there does appear to be a pattern in these four races from just two years ago. And, in the case of Ohio, there was another poll with a different methodology and different results that seemed to confirm that pattern. The University of Cincinnati conducted a poll the day before the gubernatorial election that did not include undecideds. Respondents who initially answered "I don't know" were pushed to reveal which way they were leaning. All respondents were assigned to a candidate.
The results showed Strickland at 59 percent and Blackwell at 37 percent and the independents at 4 percent. That's exactly what each candidate got on Election Day. Now recall that the Survey USA poll of the same race, which did allow respondents to answer "undecided" and was conducted the very same day, showed Strickland's support at 55 percent. It suggests that on Nov. 6, 2006, all the "undecideds" in Ohio, 4 percent of the vote, were really supporters of the white candidate, Ted Strickland.
As you look at the polling data in the homestretch of this election, pay close attention whenever you see any numbers, be they statewide or national, where Sen. Obama is below 50 percent. So long as there are more than a handful of voters describing themselves as undecided, I will maintain that Sen. McCain is very much in the race. Even if Sen. Obama were to open a larger lead, my basis for analyzing things would remain the same. Are there enough undecided voters in crucial states to bridge whatever gap exists in the head-to-head? If so, don't be shocked if on Election Day, Sen. McCain is your winner.
Can economic populism return the white South to the Democratic Party?
Bob Moser thinks so. In his newly published and smartly written book, "Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority," Moser argues that the conventional wisdom that took hold in the mid-1990s -- namely, that Bill Clinton-led, Democratic Leadership Council-inspired centrism had saved the Democratic Party nationally, and at least partially in the South as well -- was in fact the force that drove wary working-class white Southerners into the arms of the Republicans for good.
Moser, a North Carolina native who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., relays the story of a conversation he had at the 2000 Democratic National Convention with a female Democrat from his home state who laughed when he told her he was looking to talk to liberals in the Tar Heel State delegation. "The state had historically been the South's most progressive," writes Moser, saddened and dismayed by the woman's laughter. "But after eight years of Bill Clinton and his pro-corporate, anti-New Deal, Republican-Lite DLC having assumed near-complete control of the national party, were there any liberals still active enough to be delegates?"
In the years following that fateful 2000 presidential election, economic populism has come into vogue on the left. In fact, some liberals have elevated it to the status of panacea for the Democratic Party, and it has been cited as the key thread that weaves together the elections of politicians ranging from Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer to Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown to Virginia Sen. Jim Webb.
However, leaving aside a few Southerners like Webb (more on the rookie senator in a moment), economic populism tends to be more useful politically in the post-globalization Rust Belt, or the new growth economies of the Far West, than in the South. Though the South is the nation's poorest region and millions of Southerners of all races are hurting financially, the conclusion reached by many demographic analysts, myself included, is that the deep-seated social conservatism and widespread resistance to race-blind redistribution in the South serve as powerful bulwarks against the curative effects of economic populism.
Bob Moser is a rare specimen. It is hard enough to find Southern white Democrats today, but fewer are that subspecies of Southern white Democrats who, like him, are also avowed liberals. Because there is no tougher part of the country to lay down markers as an economic populist and social liberal, it took courage for Moser to write his book while advancing this argument. Though it would have drawn mostly yawns, the safer bet would have been to rehash the old centrism-based arguments for retaking the South.
But is Moser right?
Unfortunately, the prescriptions Moser offers in "Blue Dixie" are closer to overstated hopes, often based on anecdotal evidence contradicted by broader patterns or wholesale data. If economic populism were an untapped electoral reservoir in the South, Southern state budgets would not be among the lowest per capita in the country, unions would not be weaker than in any other region, and working-class white Southerners would already be joined at the hip with working-class black Southerners as the backbone of the most Democratic region in America. But these are not Southern political realities, and wishing them so will not make them so.
What is indisputable is that in 2006, with economic populism on the rise, the Democrats had a great cycle nationally -- but not in the South. As I explain in the afterword to the paperback edition of my own book, "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South," 85 percent of all new-seat gains in Senate, House, gubernatorial and state legislative races in 2006 came outside the 11 states of the former Confederacy. Exit polls showed Democrats carrying every region but the South. In the long history of the Democratic Party, national fortunes were almost always pegged to the party's Southern fortunes, with good Southern years also being good national years (recently: 1986 congressional, 1992 presidential) and bad years regionally also being bad nationally (1980 presidential, 1994 congressional). But in 2006, the link between the Democrats' Southern fortunes and national fortunes was severed.
That said, if the South were in fact primed for and desperately in need of an infusion of economic populism, why weren't electoral gains at the very least uniform across the country? Indeed, given the greater poverty of the South and the already-higher share of Democrats outside the South, shouldn't the party's new economic populism have produced in 2006 better-than-average gains in the South relative to other regions?
All of which brings us to the success story of one Southern politician Moser adduces as Exhibit A in the case for a newly emergent blue Dixie: Jim Webb. Virginia's rookie senator has become a one-man wellspring for Southern Democratic revivalists trying to extrapolate from Webb's victory regionwide conclusions about how to win back the South.
Yes, Webb won against George Allen. But consider how favorable the conditions were. He is a native-stock Scots-Irishman. He is a former Republican. He is an ex-Marine who not only fought in Vietnam but has a son who served in Iraq. And Webb's wife is Asian, which matters more than you might think, given that the key Northern Virginia suburban counties that ring Washington, D.C., are about 15 percent Asian now.
Those are just Webb's biographical assets. The state's demography and the national political environment in 2006 were also extremely favorable. Those Northern Virginia suburbs have made Virginia one of the fastest-changing states in the South, and one with the highest median income of any former Confederate state. The 2006 midterm cycle was the best for Democrats since at least 1974, and maybe going back to 1954. Rarely is a party blessed at once with a candidate biography so favorable and a demographic-electoral tailwind so strong. As if all of this were somehow not enough, Webb was the beneficiary of one of the greatest media-electoral windfalls of modern American history: the infamous "macaca" moment. (Though I can't prove the counterfactual, I firmly believe that despite all the other advantages, sans macaca, Webb still loses. Remember: This race was too close to call on election night.)
The point is that Webb-Allen contests are rare in the South, and are sometimes lost even when they do fall into Democrats' laps. It is sobering to remember that even while Webb was winning in Northern Virginia he was losing badly among native white Southerners downstate. Even if Moser joined forces with fellow Southern revivalists like Donna Brazile, Don Fowler and Steve Jarding to recruit 500 Jim Webbs for Southern campaigns at all levels of government -- which would surely help -- it is beyond their powers to produce Democratic tsunamis every two years, not to mention 500 separate macaca moments, one each for those 500 recruits.
Moser's book has much to recommend it. Stylistically, Moser delivers solid prose and shows a keen eye for the lesson-filled vignette. Substantively, he warns against the perils of what he calls "Dixiephobia," deconstructs some outdated myths about Southern exceptionalism, offers a compelling case that Democrats had better be careful not to take for granted their support from African-Americans in the region, and literally provides some cautionary tales about the dangers of rising nativist sentiment in response to the South's growing immigrant population.
But the crux of the book is his prescription for a heavy dose of economic populism. That worked well in the South before LBJ's Great Society precisely because the New Deal's redistributive policies benefited whites almost exclusively. After the civil rights movement and Great Society, however, redistribution had to be racially inclusive, and economic populism just doesn't sell as well now that "populism" means all of the people. Were the South not the most racially polarized region in America, that wouldn't matter. But as the 2004 National Election Study shows, it remains so. The golden era of the pre-Great Society, solid Democratic South can never be reconstituted.
Moser knows that, but insists that Dixie can at least get back some of its blue hue. He may be right about that in the long term, but doing so in the near future will take more than strong populist messaging or authentic, Webb-like candidates. (This November, if Barack Obama wins any Southern state except Virginia it will be because he was swept into office in an electoral landslide.) At minimum, at least two preconditions must be in place: a fundamental shift in the social attitudes of Southerners and a racial détente between working-class whites and blacks. Barring that, calls for economic-populism-inspired revivals will only leave Southern Democrats blue in the face.
Paging Clinton haters!
Thursday, Broadsheet discussed a Republican political operative who is using an acronym to sling the C-word at Hillary Clinton. Citizens United Not Timid, aka CUNT, is a political action committee dedicated to "educating the public about what Hillary Clinton really is," by selling T-shirts with a red, white and blue female crotch logo. Classy.
Yet, there are other creative ways to tar Clinton with the C-word via T-shirt. Today, we offer this photo of a special rebus puzzle T-shirt for country music fans who hate Hillary. Let's keep the misogynist Hillary hate-wear coming! Send pics or links to broadsheet@salon.com.
"Is everybody gay?"
That was the cry of the lovelorn schoolteacher in the classic 1997 film "In and Out," after her diffident fiancé reveals his true orientation (and dumps her for Tom Selleck). Ten years later, more than a few discombobulated Republicans must be muttering the same question, despite the fervent denial of Sen. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig that he is, indeed, gay. As one embarrassing episode follows another, with almost predictable regularity, perhaps it is time for Republicans and conservatives to ask themselves an obvious question: What makes the Republican Party -- and the conservative movement more generally -- so attractive to closeted homosexual men?
Somewhere in the textbooks of psychosexual pathology there may be a straightforward answer, so to speak. Does the party draw closeted men because they can hide behind Republican homophobia? Or does the party promote homophobia as a political ruse while closeted men run the show? Whatever the answer, the result is routine humiliation and personal destruction. Even worse, the party's culture of concealment encourages right-wing gay-bashing, such as Tucker Carlson's grotesque boast that he and another adolescent thug beat up a gay man who "bothered" him in a bathroom years ago.
Telling such manly tales may relieve the insecurities of Republicans who must contemplate the ever-mounting archive of homosexual history in their party's ample closet. But only Republicans who are truly in denial can ignore the long parade now led by the reluctant Craig -- a conga line of right-leaning queens that dates all the way back to the late Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy's infamous henchman and an intimate friend of the Reagans'. Perhaps, like Cohn, today's closeted Republicans believe that they aren't really gay at all, except for a few minutes in bed (or in the men's room).
No matter how Cohn deluded himself about his sexuality, however, he was among the founders of modern conservatism, along with late fundraiser and activist Marvin Liebman, who finally came out and denounced the homophobia of the right several years before his death. Both of them lived to witness the conservative resurgence of the Reagan era, led by the likes of Terry Dolan, who operated the National Conservative Political Action Committee from deep within his lifelong closet, attacking "the growing homosexual movement" until not long before he died of AIDS, and Arthur Finkelstein, the renowned Republican political consultant who worked for the NCPAC and dozens of Republican senators, often emphasizing their opposition to gay rights and in particular to gay marriage -- at least until three years ago, when Finkelstein married his male partner in their home state of Massachusetts.
Hypocritical as Finkelstein may be in his mercenary way, at least he is no longer living a lie, having been outed more than a decade ago in the pages of Boston Magazine. Over the past few years, the frequency of outing on the Republican side of the aisle has intensified.
On the first day of the party's New York convention in 2004, the closet doors were flung open again when Rep. Ed Schrock, a Republican from Pat Robertson's home district in Virginia, was forced to drop his bid for reelection. The outing Web site BlogActive.com exposed the secret homosexual life of the 63-year-old retired career Navy officer, Vietnam veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Hiding in the next Republican closet to be aired out was Jim West, then mayor of Spokane, Wash., an important politician in the Northwest with a strong reputation for opposing gay rights and advocating the removal of gay teachers from schools and daycare centers. In 2005, the Spokane Spokesman-Review revealed that West had been leading a double life, trolling for male sexual partners on the Internet and allegedly abusing two teenage boys who came under his care as a Boy Scout leader. These gamy stories led to West's ouster as mayor by the end of the year. (He died of cancer several months later.)
Then in 2006 came the stunning Mark Foley scandal, which featured the curious "Don't ask, don't tell" behavior of the Republican congressional leadership when confronted with evidence that the Florida representative was pursuing teenage male pages. The Republicans seemed to hope that they could conceal Foley's creepy behavior toward the boys in their care until after the midterm elections. Thanks to Lane Hudson, the gay rights activist who disclosed Foley's misconduct to the media, that scheme backfired badly. The reverberations amplified perceptions of the Republican Congress as decadent and self-serving, leading to the midterm debacle that returned control of Capitol Hill to the Democrats.
The November 2006 election results had scarcely been confirmed when a former male prostitute named Mike Jones convincingly accused right-wing evangelical preacher Ted Haggard of joining him in narcotics-fueled sex romps. Following the familiar cycle of denial and confession, Haggard stepped down as the head of his Colorado Springs, Colo., church and as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a position he had not hesitated to use on behalf of Republican candidates, notably including George W. Bush. Until his downfall, Haggard had participated in a weekly telephone conference with Bush and other evangelical leaders. The White House and his former comrades on the religious right sought to downplay Haggard's influence after his confession to "sexual immorality."
Around that same time, Michael Rogers of BlogActive.com -- the gay blogger who outed Schrock in 2004 -- posted the first allegations concerning Larry Craig's misbehavior in men's rooms around the country. Having learned about Craig many months earlier from men who reported their encounters with him, Rogers had been warning as early as January 2006 that he was planning to out a senator. His initial reports on Craig attracted the attention of the Idaho media, which nevertheless held back the story until the senator's arrest in a Minnesota men's room and misdemeanor plea became public.
The Craig scandal overshadowed still another embarrassing saga from the closets of the red states. During the first week of August, Glenn Murphy, a Republican county chairman from Indiana, mysteriously stepped down as president of the Young Republican National Federation. In a letter to the nation's Young Republican leaders, he claimed that he was obliged to resign because of a pending major business opportunity. That explanation seemed unlikely in light of news concerning an investigation of Murphy for sexually molesting another man after a party. That young gentleman, a guest in a house where Murphy was staying, awoke the next morning to find the chairman's mouth on his genitalia.
Murphy's star may no longer rise, but his tale is a portent for the future. So long as Republicans promote homophobia, the party's closets will be crowded.
Michael Arcuri, D-N.Y. -- Nay
Bruce Braley, D-Iowa -- Nay
Kathy Castor, D-Fla. -- Nay
Yvette Clark, D-N.Y. -- Nay
Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. -- Nay
Joe Courtney, D-Conn. -- Nay
Keith Ellison, D-Minn. -- Nay
John Hall, D-N.Y. -- Nay
Phil Hare, D-Ill. -- Nay
Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii -- Nay
Paul Hodes, D-N.H. -- Nay
Henry Johnson, D-Ga. -- Nay
Ron Klein, D-Fla. -- Nay
David Loebsack, D-Iowa -- Nay
Jerry McNerney, D-Calif. -- Nay
Christopher Murphy, D-Conn. -- Nay
Patrick Murphy, D-Pa. -- Nay
Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo. -- Nay
John Sarbanes, D-Md. -- Nay
Carol Shea-Porter, D-N.H. -- Nay
Betty Sutton, D-Ohio -- Nay
Peter Welch, D-Vt. -- Nay
John Yarmuth, D-Ky. -- Nay
Jason Altmire, D-Pa. -- Aye
Nancy Boyda, D-Kan. -- Aye
Christopher Carney, D-Pa. -- Aye
Joe Donnelly, D-Ind. -- Aye
Brad Elsworth, D-Ind. -- Aye
Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. -- Aye
Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. -- Aye
Baron Hill, D-Ind. -- Aye
Steve Kagen, D-Wis. -- Aye
Nicholas Lampson, D-Texas -- Aye
Tim Mahoney, D-Fla. -- Aye
Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz. -- Aye
Ciro Rodriguez, D-Texas -- Aye
Heath Shuler, D-N.C. -- Aye
Zackary Space, D-Ohio -- Aye
Timothy Walz, D-Minn. -- Aye
Charles Wilson, D-Ohio -- Aye
Election Night 2002 was a gloomy watch for Democrats. Their party, led by a pair of innocuous Midwestern Main Streeters, Richard Gephardt and Thomas Daschle, lost control of the Senate and lost seats in the House, sinking to its lowest ebb since the Roaring '20s. Smug right-wing pundits predicted the Democrats were on their way to joining the Whigs in the ashcan of American political parties.
It was a different story in Illinois. The Democrats won everything. They took the governorship for the first time in 30 years. They captured the state Senate. This despite running a ticket made up of ward bosses' children and in-laws. I remember sitting on my couch in Chicago and thinking, "If the Democrats want to turn it around, they need to take some lessons from the machine around here. Chicago Democrats have no scruples. They treat political offices as feudal inheritances. They shake down contributors like a corrupt pope selling indulgences. They're sleazy, they're arrogant but they WIN."
That night, on the northwest side, Rahm Emanuel was elected to Congress. A former Clinton whiz kid who'd gotten his start as a fundraiser for Mayor Richard M. Daley, Emanuel was connected -- in the three years after leaving the White House (where he'd helped push through NAFTA), he earned $16 million putting together Wall Street mergers. He was also zealously partisan. He had once owned a consulting business devoted to finding skeletons in Republican closets. At a Clinton victory dinner in Little Rock in 1992, Emanuel celebrated by reciting a hoped-for necrology of Democrats who had "fucked" the president-elect. After every name, he stabbed a steak knife into a table and screamed, "Dead man!"
It's hard to imagine Tom Daschle carrying on like that. His strongest epithet was "I'm very disappointed." As it turned out, Emanuel was just the kind of shameless asshole the Democrats needed to win back power. As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he raised millions of dollars by browbeating donors and candidates with cellphone calls that invariably ended, "Fuck you. I love you." Emanuel was so effective that not only did his party win back Congress, he was able to get a Chicago Tribune reporter to write a book giving him most of the credit. Naftali Bendavid, the Tribune's deputy Washington bureau chief, was given "insider access" to Emanuel's operation, expecting to write a newspaper article. When the Democrats triumphed, he expanded it into "The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution." It's a 218-page celebration of Rahm, as interesting for its look at how he has built his political persona as how he managed the Democrats' campaign. Emanuel comes off as one of the most colorful, driven and profane Washington characters since Lyndon Johnson. "The Jewish LBJ," political scientist Larry Sabato calls him, not only for his ambition but also for his reputation as an amoral political animal focused only on power.
Freed from the constraints of his stuffy newspaper, Bendavid is able to ratchet up the parental guidance rating from G to R, which is essential to any well-rounded profile of Emanuel. As they said about Buddy Hackett in Vegas, Emanuel works blue. "Fuck" is one of the most versatile words in English, but he seems to have discovered new grammatical and linguistic uses for it. Washington is "Fucknutsville." A Republican congressman is a "knucklefuck." As with his liberal politics, he seems to have inherited his gift for invective from his mother, who is quoted as playfully calling him a "little shithead." The Emanuels -- who hail from the upper-middle-class suburb of Wilmette -- are an intense, competitive family. Emanuel's father and brother are surgeons, another brother is a Hollywood agent who inspired the Ari Gold character on "Entourage." Too tightly wound to stop at politics, Emanuel also races in triathlons.
In early 2005, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi asked Emanuel to head the party's congressional campaign, attracted by his fundraising skills and his reputation as "tireless, aggressive and pushy." Emanuel's first job was recruiting candidates. Believing that Congress would be won or lost in a handful of swing districts, he sought out moderate and conservative Democrats. It was more important that they shared their hometown's values than the values of the national party. In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, he found Heath Shuler, a former Washington Redskins quarterback who cut ads about his devotion to family, church and prayer. In southern Indiana, it was Brad Ellsworth, an antiabortion, anti-gun control sheriff.
Maybe because Emanuel is a wealthy suburban kid who studied ballet at Sarah Lawrence College, he was sensitive to the Democrats' image as an effeminate party. "Emanuel ... delighted in finding candidates who fit the manly mold -- military veterans, police officers, pilots," Bendavid writes. Many liberal bloggers, meanwhile, saw Emanuel as a triangulating sellout, an unprincipled hack making a reflexive, outdated and misguided rush for the center. They were committed to winning too, but they also wanted to draw a sharp distinction between Democrats and Republicans. Livid at Emanuel's statement that the party would take a position on Iraq "at the right time," they "lashed out at the DCCC for representing a muddle-headed centrism that would never rescue the Democrats or reignite the sweeping populism the country badly needed," Bendavid writes.
Blogger David Sirota spoke for an Internet wing that felt Emanuel "seemed to think that having no ideology, no convictions, is a winning formula ... Even if you do win under that scenario ... you have created an extremely tenuous majority." (Even after the election, the Nation's Web site insisted that many Democrats had won "despite the Illinois congressman," and the party would have captured more seats with an antiwar, anti-free trade platform.)
Bendavid may write for the Tribune, but he seems more familiar with Washington campaign headquarters than Chicago ward offices. If he'd worked a local beat, he could have provided a little more insight into how Emanuel's Chicago background, and not necessarily his years as a Clintonian triangulator, had shaped his politics. In Illinois, politics is not about ideology. Politics is about winning elections so you can give jobs to your family and contracts to your friends. Practical to the core, Illinoisans hate extremists who want to gum up the government with arguments over immigration or the Ten Commandments. The religious right is regularly trounced in Republican primaries, and the activist left is confined to a few neighborhoods of shabby three-flats on the Chicago lakefront. The state's last Republican governor, George Ryan, won by running to the left of his Democratic opponent on gay rights and abortion. In an environment like that, you learn to look for the center.
The netroots also mistrusted Emanuel because of his clash with Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, a lefty-blog favorite. Dean was spending the DNC's cash on his "50-state strategy" to build up the party in Republican enclaves like Wyoming and Idaho. It was a long-term plan that even he admitted might not come to fruition for several presidential elections (though after the election bloggers would point to a blue wave in state legislatures as an early sign of success). As Emanuel saw it, he had to win now, and that meant pouring money into districts where Democrats were competitive.
Emanuel had witnessed this struggle in Illinois, too: it was the party regulars versus the goo-goos. Emanuel, the Daley protégé, is a regular who believes money and a disciplined organization win elections. He seemed to see Dean as a goo-goo, a good-government reformer with a base of liberal idealists who are more educated and individualistic than your average Democratic machine foot soldier, but less reliable when you need someone to hand out palm cards on Election Day. The machine has been paving over goo-goos since the 19th century. As a beery alderman once put it, "Chicago ain't ready for reform."
When Emanuel and Sen. Charles Schumer of New York met with Dean to ask him to shift money to congressional races, Emanuel mocked the former Vermont governor as a political lightweight from a tiny, rural, homogenous state. "No disrespect, but some of us are arrogant enough, we come from Chicago, we think we know what it means to knock on a door," Bendavid quotes Emanuel as telling Dean. Emanuel "slammed his hand on the table," then continued his tirade: "Look, Chuck comes from Brooklyn. I come from Chicago. It ain't Burlington, Vermont. Now, we understand that Burlington knows a lot about grassroots politics and we know nothing. I know your field plan -- it doesn't exist. I've gone around the country with these races. I've seen your people. There's no plan, Howard."
According to Bendavid, Emanuel left the room vowing not to be seen with Dean if the Democrats lost on Election Day. When Dean eventually offered $20,000 a race, Emanuel told him to fuck off. (Not literally -- although it's plausible.) Eventually, Dean ponied up a $12 million nationwide get-out-the-vote drive.
In other respects, though, Emanuel did have a 50-state strategy. He wanted to nationalize the election in the same way the Republicans had in 1994, with their Contract with America. Emanuel's message: "The Republicans were entrenched, tired, incompetent, corrupt." When his opponents did everything they could to validate his charge, Emanuel looked as much like history's darling as its maker. Bendavid acknowledges that his subject "was not responsible for the major factors behind the Republican rout. He had not affected the course of the Iraq war, persuaded the Republicans to botch the Hurricane Katrina recovery, or created the GOP corruption scandals. Emanuel's job had been to position the Democrats so that if a political tidal wave did emerge, the party would reap the benefit."
On the other hand, no politician can be faulted for being in the right place at the right time. When Emanuel took the job, he never expected to win, but he knew a president's party usually loses seats in the sixth year of his term, and he figured if he could pick up 10 or 12, he'd be rewarded with a leadership position, a step toward his goal of becoming speaker of the House. (He is now chairman of the Democratic Caucus, the fourth-ranking post in the House.) If he makes it, C-SPAN may have to institute a seven-second delay. On Election Night, 10 minutes after CNN called the House for the Democrats, Emanuel climbed up on a table in DCCC headquarters and addressed his cheering, victory-starved staff, celebrating the party's biggest win since 1992. He wanted to wrap up the campaign with a message for the Republicans.
"Since my kids are gone, I can say it," he shouted. "They can go fuck themselves!"
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