Rahmblin' Man

Anyone who read this blog during the 2006 midterms (i.e. my Mom) knows how many, uh, suggestions I had for the way Rahm Emanuel should do his job as DCCC chair. But I tried not to lose sight of the fact that Rahm and I are still on the same team, even if we don't see eye to eye all the time. That's why I was so happy to see the text of his recent speech to the Brookings Institute.

Rahm's speech was about the over-politicization of government that the Administration has engineered. As anyone who has read this blog lately knows, I've been interested in the purposeful destruction of the Enlightenment principles of liberalism that have shaped our government since at least 1789. So it would seem that Rahm and I have some real common ground here.

Some choice quotes from the speech:

[T]he U.S. Attorney scandal will be to public corruption what Hurricane Katrina was to incompetence in the Bush Administration.
...
Instead of promoting solutions to our nation's broad challenges, the Bush Administration used all the levers of power to promote their party and its narrow interests.
...
The Attorney General could offer no coherent explanation for the [US Attorney] fiasco, because to do so would unveil the guiding principle at the core of this White House—insinuating partisan politics into every aspect of government and bringing politics into what used to be a political-free zone—the Justice Department.
...
The corporations don't have to lobby the government, because they are the government.

Unfortunately, just when it looks like Rahm might have gotten himself re-invited to my birthday party, he ends up not going far enough. After mentioning examples of politicization such as cronyism in Iraq reconstruction contracting, outsourcing Walter Reed hospital operations, quashing climate change data, revelations from former White House insiders O'Neill and DiIulio about the lack of policy interest, the student loan scandal, the recent GSA/Hatch Act controversy, and the RNC email controversy, his analysis basically peters out. He concludes that political appointees are a good thing but that these particular ones are too political.

It's not that he's wrong, it's just that he undersells the danger the Administration poses. The corruption we've seen isn't some freak occurrence of corruption, it is a purposeful occurrence of an active effort to destroy our way of government. It's not a culture of corruption, it's an ethos of corruption.

Mark Schmitt, in a review of the new Rahm book The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution, emphasizes the essence of the Rahm situation. As he says, it is probably an exaggeration to claim that the Democrats won in spite of Rahm rather than because of him. After all, he did raise a lot of money, and he did seem to understand some things. To wit,

And that is what makes Emanuel a little different from, say, former Democratic National Committee chair Terry MacAuliffe: he understands that politics has to be
about something, and more than just a vague statement of values.

However, the need to drag Rahm kicking and screaming into talking about the war and contesting more seats still haunt his record. Plus, he's kind of a jerk. As Schmitt explains,

[A]s a twenty-five-year-old working on Senator Paul Simon’s first campaign, Emanuel was known as “the nuclear fund-raiser,” and colleagues would gather to eavesdrop on him loudly accusing elderly Jewish donors of betraying the state of Israel if they failed to max out, in their grandchildren’s names as well as their own, to Simon’s campaign. Apparently the strategy worked.

Together, all this evidence highlights the Rahm dilemma: you like having someone feisty on your team who won't take no for an answer, who knows it takes more than statements of values to win. You just wish he could take it to the next level, where he would understand the bigger philosophy instead of just the list of violations or the intimidation of elderly donors.