Obama Should Flush Jim Messina And Rahm Emanuel Down The Toilet

The tall douchebag talking to Emanuel is Messina

Last night in the midst of all the election returns a breathless post by the least reliable of all the Inside the Beltway "reporters," Politico's Ben Smith, someone who personal experience has shown me is more than willing to make up his own facts to move forward an agenda, roiled the blogosphere. According to Smith, "a senior White House official" called him as the returns were rolling in "with a very pointed message for the administration's sometime allies in organized labor, who invested heavily in beating Blanche Lincoln, Obama's candidate, in Arkansas."

"Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."

Presumably this would be Rahm or the equally sleazy and undisciplined Jim Messina, though not likely to be White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard, a longtime labor activist with SEIU and a more sober personality than either Emanuel or Messina.

After it hit the wires, a friend of mine at the AFL-CIO exploded:

The major labor federation AFL-CIO took sharp objection tonight to a White House official's assessment that they'd "flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet" in the "pointless exercise" of supporting the failed bid of Bill Halter to unseat Sen. Blanche Lincoln.

"If that's their take on this, then they severely misread how the electorate feels and how we're running our political program. When we say we're only going to support elected officials who support our issues," said AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale. "When they say we should have targeted our money among some key house races among Blue Dog Democrats-- that ain't happening." 

"Labor isn't an arm of the Democratic Party," Vale said. "It exists to support working families. And that's what we said tonight, and that's what we're gong to keep saying."

We don't always agree with labor unions on their political choices; they're far too tolerant of Blue Dogs who work against the interests of their own members. The Georgia state AFL-CIO, for example-- for whatever reason-- just endorsed reactionary John Barrow. But the principles Eddie Vale expressed are very similar to the feelings at Blue America.

Blanche is very unlikely to win in November, and most Democratic observers felt Bill Halter would have made a much better general election candidate, so Messina or Emanuel is probably certifiably insane. Neither is capable of serving Obama well. Markos' tweets and summation this morning brought up some interesting points they ought to consider before they claim labor flushed anything down the toilet.

• The GOP establishment tries to nominate electable candidates, and gets sabotaged by the teabaggers. We're trying to nominate electable candidates, and we get sabotaged by the Democratic Party establishment. We won in Pennsylvania, lost in Arkansas. You can't win them all. But make no mistake-- we made the politically smart move.

• Unfortunately, the smart political move lost. So say hello to Sen. John Boozman, the next senator from the great state of Arkansas. It's the political reality. No need to sugarcoat it.

• How much do you think the Chamber of Commerce and its corporatist allies will spend on behalf of Blanche Lincoln through the fall? Zero. Suddenly, you're going to see Lincoln quite friendless.

• Those evil "out of state" unions and progressive groups sure won't lift a finger to help her. The only question is how much the DSCC wastes on the losing effort.

• I've long since quit being impressed by moral victories. In this case, we forced Blanche to dramatically improve the financial reform bill, and it may be too late to strip out her derivatives reform language. And we delivered the kind of pain that no other incumbent wants to suffer. So congressional Democrats have two options -- they can either shape up and be spared primary pain (I'd be happy focusing solely on Joe Lieberman in 2012), or they can be Blanched.

As I explained earlier, this is a time to fight harder and smarter. Before we get to the Republican conservatives, we still have a handful of Blue Dog conservatives, particularly Jim Matheson (UT), John Barrow (GA) and Dan Boren (OK). And you can find the courageous progressives who are duking it out with them here, at the Blue America BadDogs page.