Karl Rove is taking a beating in the press, as evidenced today by Bloomberg and Politico articles that feature numerous critics both on and off the record. This new quirk in our political culture got me thinking about the left’s own internal fight during the height of the Bush administration.
If there is a Democratic corollary to Karl Rove’s predicament today, it is Rahm Emanuel during his term as the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) from 2005 to 2007. Emanuel butted heads with Howard Dean, the progressive movement, and the blogosphere as he sought to find candidates who could help the Democrats win back control of the House of Representatives. The same phenomenon went on to a lesser extent with Chuck Schumer’s efforts to win back control of the Senate. In some cases, the field was cleared of competitive candidates. In other cases, resources were thrown at less progressive candidates, many of whom were anti-choice. Many of us howled in outrage at these tactics, which seemed heavy-handed, cynical, and heedless of party principle. But they did work. We won back the House and the Senate, and tamed the Bush administration in their last two years in office. A follow-on effort by Chris Von Hollen and Schumer in 2008, gave us bigger majorities and the ability to pass an aggressive agenda once Barack Obama became president.
Looking back at it, though, this corollary breaks down rather quickly. To refresh my memory about what kind of internecine fights we were having at that time, I went and re-read an interview from my Open Seat Initiative that I did in 2008. The one I chose was with Martin Heinrich, who was then running for a seat in the House (NM-01). Luckily for us, he won that race and then ran for and won a seat in the Senate last year. I focused my questions on FISA, torture, the Bankruptcy Bill, the Military Commissions Act and “other issues where Bad Democrats have let us down,” including the Patriot Act, string-free money for the Iraq War, abortion rights, and funding for stem-cell research.
In other words, there were big disagreements between progressives, New Democrats, and Blue Dogs. But those disagreements were about policy: national security policy, civil liberties policy, women’s rights, coddling the banks and screwing the consumer, science vs. religiosity, etc.
What Karl Rove is trying to deal with is significantly different. He’s trying to deal with candidates who have to deny that they are a witch or who mock their opponent for wearing high-heels or who talk about Second Amendment remedies for political differences or whose staff handcuffs journalists trying to cover the campaign or who think evolution came from Satan or who think God wants rape babies or who think women can’t get pregnant when they are raped or who want to build an alligator-filled moat along the border with Mexico or who think Muslims are coming here to have anchor babies who will grow up to create sleeper cells.
We didn’t prefer Christine Cegalis to Tammy Duckworth because we thought Duckworth was crazy. We supported John Yarmuth in Kentucky, Zack Space in Ohio, Jerry McNerney in California and Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire, not because we thought they were more electable, necessarily, but because we thought they were more progressive than Rahm’s preferred candidate, while still being electable. We didn’t judge their progressivism by how many unhinged and vituperative comments that could make, but by our perception of their positions on the issues I listed above.
The Netroots also supported a lot of candidates who we knew were fairly conservative, although some only revealed themselves once they were safely in office (Larry Kissell, we’re looking at you). We were willing to fight for progressives in the primaries and still be pragmatic about the general election. In retrospect, our differences with Emanuel and Schumer were fairly limited and on nothing like the scale of the schism between the Tea Party and the Republican Establishment.
While the Tea Party has a lot of crossover with the Ron/Rand Paul movement, Karl Rove isn’t trying to defeat Paulistas. He just wants to prevent crazy candidates from winning primaries and then losing elections to Democrats that a sane candidate might have won.
Totally different scenario. What kind of policy differences are there on the right at the moment? Whether to gut the military or compromise with the president? Whether to accept federal Medicaid funding in the states? The split in the GOP isn’t very evident. It’s mostly a little bit of sane being inundated by a lot of insane.
All we were worried about was cowardice, not mental health.
