Letting the dogs out, Chicago-style

November 7th, 2008

The girls will have their puppy; and O will get a pit bull … without lipstick. That’s a mercy — and I think Rahm Emanuel, sharp dresser that he is, won’t require any Dem money to outfit himself for his new position as Obama’s Chief of Staff.

Emanuel is not a favorite of mine — he’s a moderate, a triangulator and, in short, a Clintonista; he got a hearty endorsement from Hillary today. No shock there. He’s ruthless, he’s clever and he’s effective. In short, a heavy hitter … from Chicago, yet.

There are two major movements in the Dem party, reflecting two schools of thought — Howard Dean leads the Democratic Leadership Council and Rahm Emanuel heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Dean is responsible for the ‘Fifty State Solution,’ he poured money and support into each state, grooming Dem’s and putting boots on the ground; the populists love him.

Emanuel is a skilled tactician: he pinpointed states in which to pour resources, perceiving them as larger scores, hence — bigger wins. He cut the throat of lesser players, for the philosophical ‘greater good;’ the progressives, and certainly the Republicans, dislike him intensely.

From one of the [mostly unflattering] articles delivered today, comes an exchange which tells us about Rahm’s style:

Rahm Emanuel is the opposite of someone like Howard Dean. After Dean lost his bid to be the Democratic nominee in 2004, he undertook another, far more unusual campaign – he campaigned to be the chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). What’s unusual about this is that the DNC chair is usually chosen by party insiders in Washington, who present their choice to the state parties as a fait accompli. Dean fought for the votes of the state party leaders, and when it was clear he had enough support, the other candidates withdrew, and Dean won the chairmanship (much to the chagrin of Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, incidentally).

What Dean did next is stunning: he set out to devolve the DNC’s power to its state party organizations. He believed that the best decisions are made by people who are close to the issues that matter to voters. He also believed that Democrats need to compete in every county across the country. His emphasis on rebuilding (or, in some cases, building) viable state Democratic party organizations laid the groundwork for Obama’s successful use of Dean’s “fifty-state strategy” in this election.

Here’s what Rahm Emanuel said to Howard Dean about Dean’s strategy:

“You’re nowhere, Howard. Your field plan is not a field plan. That’s fucking bullshit … I know your field plan - it doesn’t exist. I’ve gone around the country with these races. I’ve seen your people. There is no plan, Howard.”

Rahm is a hawk, a Dem insider and competitive in stunning ways; his two [quite accomplished] brothers and he have spent their lives besting one another; they appear to carry a kind of Type A, DNA-inspired, OCD of the soul. Rahm’s had his eye on the Speaker of the House position for years and has climbed close enough to it to taste it.

This is a man who has been in the White House before, under Clinton, and had to think through his personal ambitions before nodding to Obama’s request. I don’t know whether his acceptance was a side-road to those ambitions, or an embrace of public service. Maybe there’s a little of both in there — I’ll give him benefit of the doubt. Still, he was #4 in the House — now he’ll be #2 in the White House. He did just fine, one way or the other.

Rahm Emanuel: mover, shaker, pit bull. I think you can tell … he’s not my progressive hero, and you’ve heard me trounce him before.

BUT … major but on this one … if I were the first post-racial, pro-unity president — inheriting not only the weight of the nation but the world … and coming on the heels of eight disastrous years that brought us closer to a karmic future that echoes Atlantis slipping none too gently below the waves — who would I want guarding the door to the Oval Office?

Who would I want running a tight ship around me? Who would I want policing the clamoring Democrats who have waited almost a decade to pursue their agenda, or the Republicans who will be hissing and mewling like a basket of kittens pulled off the tit? Who could I trust to take my Marching Orders to the crowd outside the stronghold and tack the declarations to the door, with a scowl and grunt?

I’d want an enforcer; Obama, who had quietly warned us that he was tougher than he appeared, selected one. Harkavy, over at Village Voice, nails it when he says that the Emanuel selection is Obama’s Luca Brasi.

Remember back when Obama was just another candidate, and began to talk about bringing everyone … EVERYONE … to the table? We snorted, we scoffed — we thought him naive. We were Progressive Warriors and we knew our enemies would never respond to reason. Sooooo … now Barack’s the 44th President-elect, he’s readying the table and he needs somebody to drag the unwilling forward and tie them in their chair until they succumb to the calm and cool tone of his conversation.

I’m not going to throw myself on my progressive sword just yet; there’s something so logical and deliberate in this move that I feel inclined to stand back and watch awhile. Barack Obama is not a man who doesn’t think things through — he’s not George Bush, awaiting only good news from his aids and ideological instruction from his staff. And he’s not the kind of guy who would pick a second that could push him around, either.

I’m going to trust that Obama knows what he’s doing with his cabinet picks and staff selections … and wait for him to prove me wrong. I have a hunch this will take shape in surprising ways.

For those of us that are already screaming “Centrist!” I say — let’s put a sock in it. We’ve done political war for eight years — let’s figure out what we’ve got before we try to skewer it. Let’s sit at the table being prepared … and listen to the calm cool voice.

And let’s remember, as well — O isn’t even in the White House yet; so it’s Dubby that still has control of an impatient international snarl, an economy that has lost us 1.2 million jobs this year and a DOW that keeps winding backwards like a cheap watch. Not surprisingly, George is AWOL for all this … again. Some things NEVER change.

The handful of articles today are informative, the link well worth a peek. If you want the oh-shit-oh-dear reads, go here and here.

Jude

All about Emanuel
Chicago Sun-Times
[DO open this one!]

Obama installs Rahm to boot up Congress
Harkavy, Village Voice
November 7, 2008

Obama’s got his Luca Brasi, so what’s the problem?

The president-elect’s choice of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff sparked criticism of “partisanship.”

As we slide deeper into a recession, Emanuel had better be partisan if he wants to get anything done as Obama’s hit man. Emanuel is a shrewd — though entirely predictable — choice for Obama.

Though I hate to quote party flacks, Paul Begala has the best description. As the New York Post says this morning, Begala has described Emanuel as “cross between a hemorrhoid and a toothache”:

Over the last 15 years, the hot-tempered Chicago congressman has been one of the Democratic Party’s most formidable brawlers, a political force of nature known for tabletop tirades and unabashed fund-raising.

At least Emanuel’s not a direct-mail, ideological dirty trickster like George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

And unlike Bush’s putative chiefs of staff (Andy Card and Josh Bolten), Emanuel comes to the job as an experienced and powerful congressman. Think of a Luca Brasi who’s also a smart bagman. Think of a hemorrhoid that can also twist your arms.

The criticism from Republicans doesn’t mean anything; they’re merely the disloyal opposition. Partisanship? It’s the Democrats in Congress who have more to fear as Emanuel works to keep them in line with Obama’s agenda.

OK, so Don Corleone’s Luca Brasi wound up sleeping with the fishes pretty early on. Expect Obama’s enforcer to last longer and to produce plenty of sleepless nights among Capitol Hill’s Democrats.

Just be glad that you’re not cowering in your office dreading that next phone call from Rahm Emanuel. Obama may be as cool as the other side of the pillow, but Emanuel is no comforter. ++

Rahm Emanuel: You Can’t Take a Knife to a Gun Fight.
Live from Chicago, It’s BuzzFlash.com!
Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash
Fri, 11/07/2008

MARK KARLIN’S EDITOR’S BLOG:
Another BuzzFlash Perspective on Our Homestate Illinois Politics.

As the oldest and largest news and commentary progressive website (since May of 2000) between the coasts — and headquartered in Chicago — our readers know that we have a lot of insights into the new Obama administration, especially since he appears headed toward taking a lot of our local Democratic Party talent with him.

So it’s only natural that we have a take on Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff. We have interacted with him as activists and journalists — just as we have with most Democratic politicians in Illinois.

First of all, a minor personal anecdote. When Rahm was running in a hotly contested Democratic Primary for the 5th Congressional District in Illinois, I was on his call list for fund raising — and as just about everyone knows, Rahm is a fabled fund raiser. In fact, his prowess at getting people to give large sums of money to Dem politicians like Mayor Daley and Bill Clinton is what propelled him to prominence.

Anyway, it’s about 5 in the afternoon in 2002 and I get a call, and it’s Rahm. He gives me a hurried spiel about how he’s running in the primary for the seat in the 5th and he needs a large war chest (I actually favored the woman he was running against, Nancy Kaszak, by the way), and would I contribute some ungodly sum of money. Internally, I was laughing because it was like getting the chance to hear a famed operator in action. Rahm lavished praise on me for what I had done for gun control (something his former boss, Bill Clinton, had also publicly thanked me for) and so forth. Sensing an opportunity for horse trading (even though I didn’t and don’t have anything more than a few dollars to donate to any politician), I offered to donate to his campaign (although he didn’t realize we were talking maybe $25 or so — he would have hung up if he knew), if he would secure me an interview with Bill Clinton for BuzzFlash.

Emanuel asked me how to spell out the name of BuzzFlash, which I did, and made another pitch for a donation to his primary campaign. He said he would look at the website and get back to me. He never did.

I suppose our ongoing bashing of the Democratic Leadership Council and centrist Democrats didn’t endear us to Rahm. Although he is known for a legendary moment during the Clinton campaign when he vowed to get back at political enemies by stabbing a knife into a cut of steak, Emanuel’s “take no prisoners” approach is on behalf of a decidedly limited frame of a Democratic Party whose playing field is defined by the Republicans.

Emanuel is a brilliant “enforcer,” but narrow-minded when it comes to the brilliant re-framing that Barack Obama has been making his trademark. Rahm is definitely not the vision guy. He’s a field marshal, but not a general.

Like most progressives, BuzzFlash sided with the 50-state strategy of Howard Dean in 2006, which Emanuel and Chuck Schumer did everything they could to undercut. We remember reporting at the time that Emanuel was barely on speaking terms with Dean because Rahm thought that the 50-state approach was unrealistic and a waste of time and financial resources.

Well, fast forward to 2008, and Howard Dean’s vision — as carried out on the presidential level by the campaign staff of Barack Obama — was vindicated. The limited cautious political focus of Emanuel and Schumer would have been a disaster for the Obama campaign, and for the Senate gains in both the 2006 and 2008 cycle.

Ironically, although Emanuel will become the gatekeeper to the presidency, he was “officially” neutral in the Democratic presidential primary. He is a deeply loyal guy, and his heart was with Hillary Clinton, but he couldn’t declare for her because all the Democratic elected officials of any importance in Illinois were backing Obama, including our senior Senator and Assistant Majority Leader, Dick Durbin (who was Obama’s chief mentor and booster when he first announced). So Rahm kept an unusually low profile during the primaries, because he also knew Obama and needed to hedge his bets.

There’s much more we will have to say about Rahm as the Obama administration unfolds. For instance, the Fifth Congressional District is the reconfigured seat of the legendary Chicago Pol Dan Rostenkowski (brought down by Newt Gingrich) and our current Governor Rod Blagojevich, whom I discussed yesterday.

Many progressives see Emanuel’s appointment as an ominous sign that Obama is going to be the third Clinton Administration (since other Clinton insiders are rumored to be favored for positions in the administration).

But we are a bit more optimistic about it.

We don’t think that Obama chose Emanuel for his DLC ideology. A chief of staff is the person who gets the job done on behalf of the president (and Biden is not going to be pulling the strings like a Cheney; power will be restored to the presidency in an Obama Administration), not the formulator of policy.

Given that context, Emanuel may very well prove an effective choice in dealing with a Congress that is too often tied up in knots by the Republicans. Remember that Emanuel will be carrying out Obama’s policies, and Rahm won’t be bringing a steak knife to the fights ahead; he’ll be shooting a bazooka.

That may be unpalatable to a lot of progressives, but the last person you want dealing with the remainders of the rabid right wing is a Quaker (although, yes, we are great admirers of the Quaker outlook). You need some muscle to shake up Capitol Hill, someone to blow a few knee caps off.

Rahm Emanuel can do that, with glee and a glint in his eye.

Yes, you can look at Emanuel’s appointment as a setback for progressive ideals, or you can look at it as an indication that Obama is prepared to do battle.

Personally, I’m hoping it’s the latter. ++

Let battle commence
The appointment of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff shows, above all, that Barack Obama is prepared to fight
Linda Hirshman, Guardian UK
Thursday November 6 2008

In one of its first moves, the Obama transition announced today that Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, would be the new president’s chief of staff. In addition to the Saturday Night Live payoff of an Emanuel White House – the foul-mouthed ex-ballet dancer who routinely ends his phone calls with “Fuck you, I love you,” makes fellow Chicagoan David Mamet sound like Emily Dickinson – the political significance of the selection is stunning.

Emanuel is the shining example of the take-no-prisoners Chicago Democratic machine, the winning-is-everything organisation that morphed into the Obama campaign. When Emanuel was appointed to run the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the comeback election of 2006, his Republican counterpart remarked nervously that the Democrats were actually going to try to win some elections for a change. You betcha.

The Emanuel appointment reveals much about the direction of the Obama administration. Since the candidacy was built on opacity, ambiguity and generality, this first appointment is disproportionately informative. It shows that Obama is prepared to fight.

This was not obvious. Unlike the Gettysburg Address rhetoric Obama intoned on Tuesday night, the cold exit poll numbers do not reveal that the election of 2008 was a new Gettysburg, as in the battle that changed America. After eight years of the worse governance since James Buchanan, the Democratic candidate increased his percentage of the white vote over Kerry’s 2004 performance by a measly 2%, from 41% to 43%. Although the youth vote turned heavily democratic, there was no youth vote surge at all: the youth vote went from 17% in 2004 to 18% in 2008.

The largest factor in the Obama victory was, surprise, the increase in the African American vote, from 11% to 13%, an almost 20% increase in the black vote over 2004, and the increase in the Democratic percentage of the increased black vote from 88% in 2004 to 95% in 2008, for a whopping three-point payoff in the electoral tally overall, with the Democrat taking over 12% of the popular vote from the black voters, versus just over 9% in 2004. An additional point over 2004 from Hispanics, a point from Asians and others, and Obama turned Kerry’s defeat into victory. But to say it’s the Democratic resurrection seems a little overheated. So it would not be surprising if Obama followed a very cautious path. Especially after all the Lincoln-esque rhetoric of reconciliation the other night.

If Obama wanted caution, he had three paths to take: he could go very easy on the substantive agenda and on the rhetoric, minding Clinton’s fatal move into gays in the military, and simply contenting himself with appointing judges and bureaucrats not obviously from Ferdinand Marcos’s kleptocracy. He could go easy on substance while using his extraordinary rhetorical gifts to change people’s minds about fundamental political matters like race and distributive justice, as he was pushed to do in the campaign. Or he could try to push an ambitious progressive agenda masked by centrist rhetoric and hope that the example of well-functioning progressive programmes will change people’s foundational beliefs about their government, like FDR’s rural electrification did in the old Democratic South.

The selection of Rahm Emanuel means that at least Obama is not going to take the path of least aggression. Taking an operation, the DCCC, which had mostly just handed a small amount of discretionary money to a handful of locally selected candidates, Emanuel created a political machine in the 2006 elections that was in many ways the real precursor of the famed Obama campaign. Emanuel found candidates no one had even heard of, called them every day on his cell phone, guided them in every detail of their campaigns, sent skilled people to help them plan their campaigns hounded them to raise their own campaign funds and cut them off mercilessly if they did not. The story of Emanuel and the campaign of 2006 is the subject of a book by Naftali Bendavid suitably entitled The Thumpin. It is almost unthinkable that Emanuel would have agreed to set aside his ambition to become speaker of the House of Representatives to preside over a staff that just picks bureaucrats who pass a smell test.

His appointment all but announces that Obama will try to pass some real progressive legislation in the first year. When the subject of Emanuel’s possible appointment came up on MSNBC on Wednesday morning, conservative and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough completely lost his composure and began shouting about how that would be the declaration of partisan warfare. As Scarborough recited chapter and verse of Emanuel’s offenses against the Republican party from the 2006 campaign, for five full minutes, no one else on his programme, “Morning Joe,” could get in a word.

Although Emanuel reportedly has many personal friends on the other side of the aisle, it is worth noting that he has only nine fingers. He lost one when it became gangrenous after an accident and he would not stop his high school activities long enough to have it properly looked after. ++

Emanuel’s Ex-Boss: Rahm Is The Perfect SOB For The Job
Huffington Post
November 7, 2008

Rahm Emanuel’s boss in the Clinton White House praised his selection as Barack Obama’s chief of staff, saying the congressman was enough of a son-of-a-bitch to get things done, keep the White House disciplined, and make tough decisions.

“He was just very well organized,” said Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff and Emanuel’s ex-boss. “He knows the White House inside and out and now, obviously knows Capitol Hill. So he has all the qualities you basically need to be a great chief of staff. Part of the job description is you have to be an SOB to be a chief of staff, you have to have somebody who makes the tough decisions… There are decisions the president ought not to make that the chief of staff has to. My sense is Rahm will do that.”

Panetta, speaking at a forum at the Brookings Institute, dismissed the notion that Emanuel was too partisan a figure to forge political consensus on policy proposals. But his defense could have the counterproductive effect of stirring the concerns of progressive Democrats who have accused Emanuel of lacking ideal ideological firmness.

“Of course he is going to be partisan on Capitol Hill,” said Panetta. “Rahm Emanuel is basically a centrist. He is someone who really does understand where the party needs to be in dealing with the center. And to that extent I think he will be a very good chief of staff for the senator.”

Fellow speaker Ken Duberstein, who served as chief of staff for Ronald Reagan, echoed many of Panetta’s points. Arguing, again, that Emanuel had passed the SOB threshold, he added that the Congressman was “exceptionally well qualified for the job.”

“He will run a White House staff that is very disciplined,” said Duberstein, “but his challenge will be with the president’s outreach and building coalitions on the Hill, saying no to the president elect’s most important constituencies and keeping the White House on a schedule.”

Then, stepping a bit on GOP messaging against Emanuel, Duberstein offered the following testimonial: “As partisan as Rahm may have been on the Hill, he is all about governing. And remember, any time Rahm opens up his mouth, know the voice they will be hearing is the voice of the president elect, not Rahm.” ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.” ~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves