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.
I don’t recall progressive Democrats looking for a story to fund a PAC to provide them their next grift.
Rove is trying to recover from the same irrelevance that did Dick Morris and Sarah Palin in. Out of the limelight, the grift quickly dies.
Well, Rahm chose a similar but ultimately more fruitful career path.
Yep, Penny Pritzker funds a pretty good grift.
Any word on whether or not she’s getting Commerce?
Just the rumor. Was it from Politico, the White House’s go-to publication for trial balloons?
I think this takes Rahm too much at face value. In strongly condemning the primary challenge to Blanche Lincoln, he was defending the doomed candidate against an electorally better choice. That was not just practical politics; it was ideological. It was about keeping control of the party away from progressives. One could see this as part of a longer game against left-wing tea party equivalent, but the difference is that most progressive policies, honestly presented, have popular support, and most tea party policies do not. At most, people tend to like small government rhetoric until it gets down to specifics. There are exceptions: the death penalty is popular. But even the biggest recent loser among big fights that progressives have picked – gay marriage – becoming a political winner. Saying you oppose raising taxes on the rich, or the public option, or not cutting entitlements for electoral reasons is nonsense.
That shit is complicated.
Progressives piss and moan about the DSCC spending all their money on people like Ben Nelson. Well, guess what? Dems in deep red states need the most help. Plus, sitting senators pay dues. They have every right to expect the party apparatus to prefer them over some primary challenger. If you are chief of staff to the president, you don’t want to be picking fights with senators from your own party.
So, when you talk about face value, it’s not like Emanuel could be pro-Halter. Of course, he could have kept his mouth shut.
Dems in deep-red states need the most help because the national Dems have not bothered to build a sustainable infrastructure in those states.
The bit about the incumbents funding the DSCC is the crux of the problem. Incumbents are going to try to clear the field for other incumbents lest they not get the field cleared for them.
The striking thing about both Lincoln and Nelson–and Kent Conrad too is that they are now out. It’s almost like the Blue Dog types have a death wish for the Democratic Party and won’t do the necessary field work to move opinion leftward enough to keep them in office. Republicans don’t seem to be saddled with that shyness. Just look at how fast McCrory and the state legislature in NC are working to institutionalize a mess.
Dems in deep red states. Yes, they do exist. Some are transplants like my daughter. Some are nonwhite. Some, I’d bet a very few, are Southern whites born and bred but with a brain and a conscience (like you? ). Others had the potential but were brainwashed by their culture. It’s hard to break free of your childhood culture even if you are a natural rebel.
It’s even harder to break free if there is no supportive infrastructure that allows you to network locally.
One of the gifts of the blogosphere is that lots of people realized that (1) they were not alone and (2) together they had some degree of power.
Culture in red states is not monolithic even after thirty years of the culture wars that try to make it so. There are complex cultural traditions in all states,
In reflection, what did it for me was the cognitive dissonance between the American mythology and the Southern reality that was exposed by the Civil Rights movement–and the fact that there was an infrastructure of white Southern preachers who were involved with the civil rights movement as a matter of conscience.
Well, Rahm did threaten to turn against any Democrats who voted against the big Afghanistan appropriation, so
“must support incumbents” seems a very selectively-enforced rule.
“The advent of super-PACs has been at the expense of the two-party system,” said Terry Holt, a Republican adviser to House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. “In the current context, where the party isn’t as strong and big-donor influence can go its own way, you just have fewer ways for the party to stay broad.”
This is such a great illustration of unexpected outcomes and how it applies to politics. When the Supremes came out with their Citizens United ruling, the last thing they expected was to screw their big-monied friends. The whole point was to give those guys the keys to the kingdom. Instead, they gave a bunch of flat-headed imbeciles spears and pitchfolks with which to attack the castle.
Chonology does not equal cause. Yes, Rahm was doing all his center-right shit and yes later the Dems won Congress. But a lot of other things were happening concurrently, including the 50 state movement of Howard Dean and the general fallout of all of Bush’s horrible policies. There was a published analysis at the time (sorry, can’t find link) that more progressive candidates who Emmanual opposed but still won the primaries tended to do better in the general elections that his selections.
But while Emmanual may have genuinely thought running Republican Lite ™ candidates was the way to victory, it also happened to fit in entirely with his own ideology. I’m never sure what Lieberdems like Emmanual are trying to accomplish, any more than I am sure what the few remaining moderate log cabin Republicans are trying to accomplish.
There was a very small sample size. In the end, there was a lot of heat around only a handful of disputed primaries. We were pissed about how Bob Casey was forced down our throats, but he crushed Santorum so how angry could we stay?
What’s true is that most of the progressives who beat Emanuel candidates went on to win. That doesn’t mean that we would have won all the ones that Emanuel won, and his candidates did almost as well.
The whole thing was never as ideological as we tried to make it. Shit, I remember when people threw a tantrum because Schumer went with Sherrod Brown over Paul Hackett. I couldn’t figure that out. Sherrod Brown is pretty close to the best progressive in the Senate, and it should have been obvious that he would be to anyone who knew his record in the House.
Over the long term, the problem Rove is now trying to solve, he created himself. (With a lot of help, of course.) And I don’t think he’s going to be able to solve it either. Bwaaaa ha ha ha ha!!!!
It would seem that the same could not be said for Emanuel.
But could it? Did Emanuel create his problem himself? — Maybe so, but in a very different sense.
It’s funny how the whole emo-prog phenomenon seemed to emerge with the advent of Obama. I thought, round about 2004-2007, that Howard Dean and his 50-state strategy was the greatest thing to happen to the Democratic Party since the 1960s. In retrospect, I am sure of it. He saved the party from the DLC, the Clintons, and the likes of James Carville, Paul Begala, Dick Morris and Terry McAuliffe. Dean and his supporters were not emo-prog. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as emo-prog in those days.
It was Paul Begala that said famously (in January 2007) “I don’t need some asshole from Vermont telling me what to do”. He was referring to the 50-state strategy.
The blogger that runs one of the most pro-Obama, anti-emoprog blogs today, The People’s View, goes by the handle of “Deaniac”.
Somehow when Obama came along, Emanuel started acting like a prick to Dean, Dean started acting like s prick to Emanuel and Obama, and not long after, both largely vanished from public view.
Dean’s 50-state solution indirectly created the possibility for Obama’s victory. In saying that I don’t mean to downplay Obama or his campaign people, of course. But what exactly was Rahm’s beef? To this day, I’m not even sure if the problem Emanuel solved existed outside his own mind and that of his supporters.
The reorganization of red-state Democratic parties that Tarheel Dem is talking about would have happened if Dean had continued as chairman of the DNC.
Dean was never far out in left field. Nor was Obama.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that Emanuel was fighting Dean for control of the party, mainly for control’s sake. There was an ideological component, but it was not great. Emanuel may have worried that if Dean started, the crazies would eventually take over, but Dean and his followers were not at all crazy. In the end, I suppose Emanuel was just protecting the establishment, or rather, taking it over from the DLC, but there was no serious crazy factor to speak of.
Rove is now fighting the Tea Party for control of the Party, but also for the very survival of the party. He’s fighting a movement, such as could not even exist in the Democratic Party, that on the one hand is grassroots but could not exist without the support of a bunch of wildcat Republican tycoons.
Let them break each other’s bones.
Thanks for reminding me.
I enjoyed reading those! I had not yet discovered the Tribune in 2007 and maybe not even by the time of the last post.
I was a Dean supporter even before he announced, because I remember strongly hoping that he would. After Dean got destroyed by the media, I supported Edwards for no other reason than that I wasn’t excited by any of them, so I just went with the flow. After Edwards fizzled I got fairly enthusiastic about Dodd. Only after Dodd went nowhere in the primaries did I start paying attention to Obama.
There were some questions in my comment, mainly about Emanuel vs Dean. What do you think? I’m not at all disappointed in Obama, I am disappointed, and still puzzled, that Dean couldn’t have been part of it.
you inspired my most recent post.
Rahm’s polling numbers are in the toilet. No one could have predicted.
That’s another thing I never understood about Emanuel. Why did he want to be mayor of Chicago?
Lately I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that Chicago has in the last several years become (and could have been predicted to become) the nation’s financial center.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/business/global/ice-deal-for-nyse-creates-global-powerhouse.html?p
agewanted=all&_r=0
Rahm’a strategy may have worked, but the netroots strategy generally worked better. Anyhow you’re right that the point was about policies and backbone.