Ever Wonder Why Pelosi Pushes A Woman Theme So Heavily-- A Counterbalance To Rahm's Ugly Sexism

overcompensating tiny ballet dancer, Rahm Emanuel

No one has a worse record of candidate recruitment than Steve Israel-- although when you consider that almost all of Rahm Emanuel's recruited candidates were subsequently defeated for reelection or forced to resign rather than face certain defeat, you can see a clear bridge between the two machiavellian clownish DCCC chairs. Emanuel, a classic runt-bully type, was always good at p.r. and effortlessly played the always lazy, naive and credulous Beltway press. Even before he became DCCC chair he had made sure he was known as Rahmbo and that he lost a finger fighting off a Syrian tank on the Golan Heights (instead of slicing pastrami at an Arby's; his time in Israel was spent making pot-holders and lanyards at a camp for the children of rich American Jews). He's always over-compensating for a painful sense of inferiority-- an untreated and very severe psychological problem that has proven catastrophic for the Democratic Party.

When it was published, there wasn't much interest in the literary equivalent of a blow job from Wall Street Journal hack reporter Naftali Bendavid, The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution, pure Emanuel p.r. In it Bendavid write about Emanuel's laughable "macho strut." (He once pulled his silly routine on me in a bar down the street from the DCCC building.) Here's for the p.r. masquerading as a book that Emanuel had Bendavid write to glorify him:

Despite the incongruous fact that Emanuel for years studied ballet, he projected a masculine assertiveness-- with his missing finger, his browbeating style, his cursing, his stint helping Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. Emanuel and John Lapp, his top aide at the outset of the campaign, delighted at finding candidates who fit the manly mold-- military veterans, police officers, pilots. Among their most prized recruits was Brad Ellsworth, an Indiana sheriff, and there were many others. Emanuel bragged repeatedly about how many military veterans he'd recruited. "That's the stuff I love-- tough, macho Democrats taking on the Republicans," Lapp said. Emanuel at one point described a Vietnam veteran he was trying to recruit, whom he did not name, by saying, "I don't know if he's going to win, but I'll tell you this: I don't want to cross the motherfucker. I think he would take out a knife and kill you. I think he would kill you." He seemed to view this as an asset.

Some saw this as a pose or worse. David Sirota, a liberal blogger, had had enough when he read an October w5 Rolling Stone article quoting Democratic consultant Paul Begala saying of his friend Emanuel, "He's got this big old pair of brass balls and you can just hear 'em clanking' when he walks down the halls of Congress. Sirota posted his reaction on the Huffington Post Web log: "We have a name for talk like this: It's called B.S. Because here's what Emanuel never seems to answer: How is someone 'tough' if they are so wimpy as to refuse to push their party to take clear contrasting positions on the most important issues facing America?" That's what real toughness would be, Sirota argued-- confronting the Republicans forcefully on Iraq, health care, union organizing.

But Emanuel was fighting a weak, femininine image that had long haunted the Democratic Party, in part from its ties to women and gays, in part from its perceived weakness on national defense. Republicans often promoted their strength, while Democrats promoted their caretaking. Television host Chris Matthews had famously called the Republican Party "the daddy party" and the Democrats "the mommy party." Republicans had effectively portrayed candidates from Michael Dukakis to Walter Mondale as effeminate. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, George Bush presented himself as a tough guy, a rancher, a cowboy; Gore and Kerry-- both of whom served in Vietnam while Bush avoided the draft-- were ported as effete. Gore was derided when an internal campaign memo came to light advising him to wear "earth tones." Kerry was painted as a French-speaking sissy who favored such dubious soprts as sailboarding. These undertones of gender had been part of the parties' images at least since the Cold War, and at a time when voters were feeling fearful of terrorism, it was crucial for the Democrats to combat this perception. Emanuel and Lapp were determined to do so, not only in the candidates they recruited but in their own personalities. They presented themselves as men of action, like characters from an Ernest Hemingway novel. "There's so much in politics where people move too slow. It's never that [with us]," Lapp said. "If we make a mistake, its going to be because we moved too fast. Like if we recruit too heavily and get the wrong guy. It's not going to be an omission or hesitation."

To get the right candidate, Emanuel was more than willing to fight with other Democrats. He was looking for a candidate in a tough district in North Carolina, for example, and Congressman Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat, pleaded with Emanuel to back a protégé of his. But Emanuel thought the man was too liberal for the district and refused to support him, leading to shouting matches between Emanuel and Miller. Instead, Emanuel recruited a more conservative attorney named Tim Dunn, who had served with the Marines in Iraq.

I recollect this race well in NC-08, then a swing district represented by weak Republican multimillionaire Robin Hayes. Progressives and grassroots activists were determined to not allow Emanuel to insert his right-wing candidate and backed purported progressive school teacher Larry Kissell, who beat Dunn 53.48- 16.89% in a 4-way primary, which Rick Glazier, a progressive state legislator-- who won another term just 3 weeks ago, by the way-- did not take part in. The general election was the closested in the country and Kissell lost by 329 votes, challenged Hayes to a rematch in 2008 and beat him 55-45%. Kissell then made the classic mistake of listening to his enemies at the DCCC who remade him as an unconvincing transactional Blue Dog-- which alienated his entire base-- and led to his defeat in 2012 by GOP nut-job Richard Hudson. Had Glazier been the candidate the DCCC backed, instead of Emanuel's macho buffoon (who all the other Fayetteville lawyers considered the dumbest guy in town), Glazier would probably still be in the seat today. What made Glazier "too liberal" was that he introduced a bill to allow North Carolina drivers licenses to be issued without regard to immigration status. Dunn's ridiculous campaign sounded great to pathetic clowns like Emanuel and Lapp but it didn't survive his first appearance before a Democratic audience in the district. He said he opposed abortion rights because it encouraged promiscuity and said any contracts between gay partners that replicated some of the legal attributes of marriage should be void as against public policy.

There were rumors at the time that after Dunn realized he had no chance to win the primary and dropped out (still on the ballot), Rahm called Glazier, as a better alternative to Kissell and his unruly mob of populist supporters who Emanuel detested, and Glazier refused to take his calls.

Today Rahm is busy wrecking the city of Chicago on behalf of his bankster cronies. We urge you to consider the progressive candidate running against him there, Jesus Chuy Garcia.