The Nature of Rahm Emanuel

Rahm with one of his ConservaDem failures in Florida

We've been warning you about Emanuel here at DWT for a lot of years. And Eric Massa is no fan either. His frank, no-holds-bared description of the devious and corrupt bully, here (on WKPQ yesterday), jibes very well with what I've heard from countless other members of Congress. Make sure you click on the link and watch it.

He has more than a dirty mouth. Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive, and if he doesn't like that, he can come after me personally. Let me tell you a story about Rahm Emanuel. I was a congressman in my first eight weeks; I was in the congressional gym, I went down and I worked out and I went into the showers ... I'm sitting there showering, naked as a jaybird and here comes Rahm Emanuel not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking a finger in my chest yelling at me because I wasn't going to vote for the president's budget. Do you know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man? ...What the hell is he doing in the congressional gym? He goes there to intimidate Members of Congress... I didn't hit him but we had words and he hates my guts. He hated my since Day One and now he wins..."

Speaking of "Day One," this is a pretty creepy docudrama Massa and Emanuel made when Massa was first running in 2006. You can certainly see water and oil mixing here!



Mark Schmitt is the executive editor of the American Prospect and he thought today would be a good day to come to Emanuel's defense as progressives are urging Obama to get rid of this malignancy on his presidency before it's too late. In his eagerness to defend the worst calamity that has fallen on the Democrats in since the murder of JFK, Schmitt glosses over "the transparently planted defenses of Emanuel, notably Dana Milbank's in the Washington Post, [that] are littered with disparagements of his intramural rivals, and even of the president, that are disconcerting coming from someone whose primary obligation is to maintain order."

Schmidtt dismisses the arguments that people who participated in the 2006 election have made that Democrats did so well not because of Emanuel but despite him. Schmidtt, while acknowledging Emanuel's "transparently planted defenses," which we call self-hype, is somehow blind to the fact that the Emanuel story-- like the now thoroughly disparaged fairy tale he used to perpetrate about how he lost his middle finger single-handedly fighting a Syrian tank on the Golan Heights (when in fact he was making potholders and embroidering yarmulkes in a camp for rich American Jews far from any battlefield and lost his finger after it became infected and neglected following a battle with a pastrami at a summer job at an Arby's)-- was simply part of the myth he was creating about himself that lame "reporters" were eager to pass along without any kind of verification.

Schmidtt makes the case that Emanuel wasn't responsible for drafting a bunch of conservatives-- including an actual Republican he got to change his registration a few weeks before filing-- which poisoned the Democratic House caucus. Schmidtt is wrong. He never even mentions the case of Tim Mahoney, the worst of Emanuel's recruits (yes, the rich Republican he persuaded to run as a Democrat), for whom he and Hoyer axed union member and progressive anti-war Democratic activist Dave Lutrin in the Florida district Emanuel knew would flip to blue because he knew-- and didn't report (which seems very strange to begin with)-- that Mark Foley, the Republican incumbent, was molesting young male pages. Rahm's other big recruiting "score" in 2006, North Carolina reactionary Heath Shuler (who lives in the Family C Street cult compound) is white-washed as a populist by Schmidtt who never bothers to mention that the Blue Dog caucus whip has only voted with the Democrats 32.86% on the tough, closely contested House roll calls since Obama was elected. When Rahm talked him into running as a Democrat in North Carolina, he was leaning towards running as a Republican in Tennessee. His current roommates are Zach Wamp and Jim DeMint and he's one of the 20 Blue Dogs Boehner knows he can most count on the cross the aisle when he's most needed by the GOP. Schmidtt's "populist" is a xenophobic fanatic who worked with Emanuel to torpedo comprehensive immigration reform.

I was talking with a Member of Congress last week who was working for the DCCC and wanted to know which endangered Democrats Blue America was planning to help out in November. We went over the Frontline list and he agreed with me that almost none of them are worth re-electing because they're either unredeemably Republican and/or unredeemably stupid. At one point he said "This is like a list of the least worthy Democrats in Congress." He did try pushing Steve Driehaus (D-OH), Tom Perriello (D-VA), Betsy Markey (Blue Dog-CO), Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), Bill Foster (D-IL) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) but seemed satisfied that we were probably going to try raising money for Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH), Gary Peters (D-MI), Mark Schauer (D-MI), Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH). Schmidtt:

[T]he candidates Emanuel backed actually weren't, on the whole, all that conservative. Some are, like North Carolina's Heath Shuler, a social conservative/economic populist in a conservative rural district, or the three victors in Indiana. But the archetypal Emanuel candidate in 2006 was Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, not just a veteran but an admiral, who now represents the left in his primary challenge to party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter. According to my analysis of the Voteview database, the best political-science ranking of members of Congress by ideology [he's looking at the wrong data base and ought to try learning how to use ProgressivePunch], only 12 of the 41 Democrats elected in 2006 number among the most conservative 20 percent of all House Democrats in the current Congress-- which is to say that they are not dramatically more conservative than the caucus as a whole, even though they come from more marginal districts.

Schmidtt closes his post by extolling the virtues of Emanuel backing Harry Mitchell (Blue Dog-AZ) who has an even worse voting record than Shuler, scoring a breathtaking 20.0% on those same close-call contested votes in the 111th Congress. In fact, the only Democrats to cross the aisle more frequently on these kinds of votes than Mitchell were 3 arch-conservative Confederates, Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS), Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS) and Parker Griffith (Blue Dog-AL, who has now officially joined the GOP). Mitchell is exactly tied with Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL). Congratulations Rahm Emanuel and thanks for the brilliant insight, American Prospect.