City Dwellers Don't Vote GOP Anymore Because The GOP Message Is Aimed Towards Cave Dwellers

The final NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll showed Hillary with a 4 point lead over Trump-- 44-40%. It doesn't mean much at this point, when over 30 million people have already voted. And polling shows she's even more head among that group. But in the NBC poll, conducted after the FBI tried to swing the election to Trump, showed some interesting demographic trends worth noting.

Clinton is ahead of Trump among women (53 percent to 38 percent), African Americans (86 percent to 7 percent), Latinos (65 percent to 20 percent) and those ages 18-34 (55 percent to 32 percent).

Trump, meanwhile, leads among men (47 percent to 42 percent), seniors (49 percent to 42 percent) and whites (53 percent to 38 percent).

But there's a significant difference among whites: Those without college degrees are breaking for Trump by a 2-to-1 margin, 60 percent to 30 percent.

Yet among whites with college degrees, Clinton is ahead by 10 points, 51 percent to 41 percent.

Clinton leads among those who are early voters, 53 percent to 39 percent, while Trump is up among those who will wait to vote on Election Day, 48 percent to 41 percent.

Republicans are claiming there are enough angry, uneducated white males ready to come bounding out of their caves on Tuesday to guarantee the election to Trump. But Trump is already way ahead in the states with caves full of angry, uneducated white males. Hillary isn't contesting Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Wyoming or Kentucky. And Greg Sargent pointed out in the Washington Post Thursday that even if all the cave dwellers find their way to the polls, the missing non-white voters will, at the very least, balance them out. They might as well stay in their caves and pick body-lice off each other. Trump's hateful, bigoted rhetoric isn't going to save him; quite the contrary.

A tremendous amount of attention has been lavished on understanding the motives and predilections of these voters. They are variously described as non-college whites, blue collar whites, white nationalists who thrill to Trump’s America First rhetoric, Rust Belt whites who have been losers in the globalizing economy, whites who hate both parties and the establishment, whites who believe immigration threatens their place in the labor market, whites who are suffering anxiety over cultural and/or demographic change, and so forth.

...[T]here hasn’t been a massive surge in new registration among white voters; and second, it’s not clear that Trump has a decisive advantage among the missing white voters in any case.

The “missing voters” are actually broken down into two categories in Cohn’s study. He looked at approximately 1500 voters in the three swing states who did not vote in 2012, but are all now registered-- either they registered before 2012 and didn’t vote, or they have registered since then.

Cohn concluded that white voters in those two categories support Trump in smaller numbers than the white voters who voted in 2012 do, meaning they are not necessarily a natural target for Trump, after all. And, crucially, it is Clinton who actually leads among all the voters (white and nonwhite) who did not vote in 2012:

This is in part because of nonwhite voters. Of the voters who were registered in 2012 but didn’t vote (among whom Clinton leads by 42-33), there are more nonwhites than whites. And the voters who are newly registered (among whom Clinton leads by 47-33) are disproportionately young and nonwhite, many of them Latinos.

Now, the big question remains: Which of these voters who did not turn out in 2012 will actually do so this time, and what impact will that have?

We won’t have a sense of the answer to this until after Election Day, obviously. But the Associated Press reports that analysts in both parties are seeing signs in Florida’s early vote that Democrats are getting people who haven’t voted before to do so now in greater numbers than Republicans are. Meanwhile, the Latino share of the early vote is up (Democrats are struggling with flagging African American enthusiasm, but that may still get turned around, and Latinos may help mitigate that).

We don’t know why all of this is the case, but it’s plausible that Trump’s candidacy might have something to do with it. And in very close outcomes in these battlegrounds, marginal shifts in the composition of the electorate could matter.

The big potential flaw in Trump’s whole “missing whites” strategy has always been that the measures he’s apparently thought would help get those voters out-- in particular, the relentless xenophobia and racist campaign-- risked driving up turnout among nonwhites. It would be quite the ironic outcome if Trump’s “missing whites” strategy ended up making “missing nonwhites” matter to the outcome more than they otherwise would have if another Republican had been the nominee. Particularly if it helps deliver a Trump loss.

UPDATE: Since this piece ran, turnout has been exploding in the early voting among Latinos in several key battlegrounds, and crucially, many are first time voters, i.e., the missing nonwhite vote... Or, as Senator Lindsey Graham neatly put it: “So Trump deserves the award for Hispanic turnout. He did more to get them out than any Democrat has ever done.”

And that brings us to last week's most-talked about NY Times essay, written by Emily Badger and Quoctring Bui-- Why Republicans Don't Even Try To Win Cities Anymore. First take a look at these dozen urban congressional districts' performances in 2012. This is the percentage Romney got in each district:

• NY-15 (South Bronx)- 3%
• NY-13 (Harlem)- 5%
• PA-02 (Philly)- 9%
• CA-13 (Berkley, Oakland)- 9%
• NY-05 (Queens)- 10%
• NY-08 (Bedford-Stuyvesant)- 10%
• NY-07 (Brooklyn, Lower East Side)- 10%
• IL-07 (Downtown Chicago)- 12%
• FL-24 (South Broward, North Miami-Dade)- 12%
• NJ-10 (Newark)- 12%
• CA-12 (San Francisco)- 13%
• CA-37 (South L.A.)- 13%

Tuesday, if polls and early voting stats are to be believed,Trump will likely do worse in every single one of them. "Even as much else about this election feels unprecedented, write Badger and Bui, "America’s urban-rural divide will be as strong as ever, continuing a decadeslong process in which the two parties have sorted themselves ever more clearly by population density."

Trump has elevated a strategy that is risky to the Republican Party in the long run. Not only have recent Republican candidates neglected cities, but they’ve also run against them, casting urban America as the foil to heartland voters. Rick Santorum and Sarah Palin caricatured coastal cities as unmoored from the “real America.” Ted Cruz derided “New York values,” as if those values, whichever ones he meant, were alien. Mr. Trump has pre-emptively annulled the votes of Chicago, St. Louis and Philadelphia, cities where he warns the election will be rigged against him.

“It’s unimaginably distressing, even by eight years ago, let alone 16 years ago,” said Stephen Goldsmith, a former Republican mayor of Indianapolis and an adviser to George W. Bush in the 2000 campaign. “We had an opportunity to reach broadly across the country to have an inspiring voice of opportunity, and there’s a set of coherent Republican policies that would amplify that opportunity. We’re doing the opposite. We’re insulting folks who could vote for us.”

The history of how the G.O.P. got here is partly about the ideological realignment of the two parties, and the disappearance of liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits, a senator from New York State, and John Lindsay, a mayor of New York City (a Republican who left the party, he said, when it left him). The party even moved away from conservative Republicans like Jack Kemp, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the George H.W. Bush administration, who spoke often about urban opportunity. But this history is also about the physical realignment of voters, as the rise of suburbia enabled Democrats and Republicans to move, literally, farther apart.

In 1966, white voters in Chicago who’d long supported the city’s Democratic machine began to bolt for the Republican Party. They were alarmed by urban riots, by civil rights legislation in Congress and-- much closer to home-- by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign in Chicago that year for “open housing.”

Pamphlets soon began to appear on the stoops of the city’s middle-class bungalows: “Your Home is your castle — Keep it that way by Voting STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN.” This was the summer, the historian Rick Perlstein writes in his book Nixonland, when the party of Lincoln changed its mind.

Those newly converted Republicans in Chicago voted in 1968 for Richard Nixon. “But these were the people,” Mr. Perlstein said in an interview, “who largely would have left the city within 10 years.”

Those Chicago voters embody both trends-- party realignment and white flight-- that have remade political geography since then. In the 1950s, in presidential election results compiled by the Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, a county’s population density was a poor predictor of how its residents voted. Today, the pattern is remarkably consistent: The denser the county, the more overwhelmingly its residents vote Democratic.

“This story could be written in one word,” Mr. Perlstein said of that historical arc. “The one word would be ‘race.’ ”

In the early days of white flight, two federal policies-- the construction of the interstate highway system and mortgage guarantees for the new suburbs-- pulled whites out of cities even as they were getting pushed by racial tension, desegregation and school busing.

“The people who go to the suburbs are not a random selection,” said Jessica Trounstine, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced. They were the middle and upper class. They became homeowners. They prized neighborhoods of single-family houses. Those characteristics today all correlate with leaning Republican. “These population shifts happen for reasons that are external to politics,” Ms. Trounstine said, “but politics is embedded in who goes.”

Metropolitan areas with more highway construction became more polarized over time between Democratic cities and Republican suburbs, according to research by Clayton Nall, a Stanford political scientist. Where highways were built, they helped sort people. Where they led, suburbs became more reliably Republican. They created entirely new places, Mr. Nall argues, with new politics.

...In many ways, it was becoming clearer over this time what each party stood for, whether on race or cultural cleavages or transportation or poverty. The basic party infrastructure Republicans would need to win in cities, at any level, disintegrated. Even the average congressional district held by Republicans today has a quarter of the population density it did in 1950.

As they have had less to say to cities, Republicans have come to talk, instead, about them.

“They have it in their interest to appeal to suburban voters who are looking back to the city through their rearview mirrors with a mix of disgust and romance for an imagined past,” said Thomas Sugrue, a New York University historian.

In party platforms, the G.O.P. eventually tiptoed to an almost anti-urban stance. In 1988, the platform called for “special attention to urban residents” in the census to ensure their full federal representation. In 2000, the party still nodded toward support for transit. By 2012, it accused the Obama administration of “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.”

Cities today come up in the platform when they’re scolded for their immigration stands as “sanctuary cities.” They’re mentioned for their “soaring” murder rates and the funds they siphon to mass transit that should be spent on highways instead. And that’s about it.

The approaching election will look no different. Hillary Clinton’s strongest base of support-- where adults surveyed by Gallup are most likely to say they hold favorable views of her-- is in the densest counties. Mr. Trump fares the best in the sparsest places.

Beneath this election’s dark plotlines about temperament, party infighting and accusations of sexual assault, that underlying pattern bodes badly for the G.O.P.

“What happens if you abandon the places where most people live?” said Mr. Perlstein, the historian. After its 2012 defeat, the Republican Party wrung its hands over the need to face demographic change in a country that’s becoming majority-minority. But geography poses a problem, too: Once-white suburbs are growing more diverse; poverty is spreading there; and central cities that Republicans relinquished are now the country’s economic engines.

The anti-city strategy holds up today only because Democrats, with their tight clusters of urban support, are at a structural disadvantage in Congress.

“One of the most important implications of all this is that ignoring cities can be a winning strategy in House races,” Mr. Rodden said. “The mix of positions that the Republicans have taken has served them really well in winning the House. But it’s not working out so well in presidential elections.”

The seemingly cynical solution is to count on low turnout among urban voters. The alternative is to compete for them.

“If you compete in cities, you don’t have to win in them,” said Thomas Ogorzalek, a political scientist at Northwestern. “If you go 70-30 in Chicago, instead of 90-10 like Trump is going to do, you can win Illinois. That’s not a bad strategy.”

And if Republicans are counting on Paul Ryan's slick Madison Avenue #BetterWay p.r. campaign to right that ship, they're going to be in for some very bitter years. Urban voters are smart and even in Ryan's own district, he does most poorly in urban areas like Janesville, Kenosha and Racine.

America Meets Its Darkness: A Look at HBO's Westworld

Maryann Price singing "I'm an Old Cowhand" with Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks. She knows all the songs that the cowboys know, 'bout the big corral where the dogies go, 'cause she learned them all on the radio, yippee-i-o-ki-ay. There are fake cowboy visitors in HBO's new series Westworld too, but they're not so nice.

by Gaius Publius

I'm a fan of science fiction, especially when it reflects and comments on the state of our national affairs — and our national affairs are definitely in a state. Which brings me to the new HBO series Westworld.

Westworld is derivative in some ways. It takes off from a pleasant mid-1970s film entertainment by Michael Crichton and starring Yul Brynner, also called Westworld, in which an android-populated theme park goes chaotic and androids starts killing the visitors. But this new version adds in much of the violence and dark tone from HBO's excellent, realistic Western drama Deadwood, plus a lot more brutal sexuality than the earlier film, similar to that in Game of Thrones and other recent productions.

Yes, the visitors to the original Westworld theme park could "encounter" the saloon girls at will, all of whom would be willing, and shoot up the android locals, but that part was downplayed in the film. As Rick Perlstein amply documents in Nixonland, America of the 1970s was starting to come to grips with its darker self, with the world of the My Lai massacre and police brutality, of brutal sexism and incentivized social conformity, and it dealt with that encounter by trying to turn away, by trying to re-enter the world of American myth that Ronald Reagan ultimately shepherded us to.

Just one example: The 1968 My Lai massacre was prosecuted, sort of, but what was done, there and elsewhere, was never absorbed, understood or metabolized as a wider problem within the American psyche — particularly the male American psyche, since the soldiers involved in all these massacres were indeed male. So the pushback, the effort to start the forgetting, began. As early as 1970 mainstream propagandists were working to blunt Vietnam era awarenesses and counter-cultural challenges with, for example, "folk" groups like entirely anodyne New Christy Minstrels, who were introduced at Super Bowl IV as "young Americans who demonstrate — with guitars."

Bottom line, in the 1970s the country was in the process of trying to sanitize itself, and there was an ongoing public "discussion," both explicit in public conversation and implicit in the media and public entertainment. The original Westwood was part of that effort, if unconsciously. As I said, a pleasant entertainment, and in fact a watchable film.

America Meets Its Darkness

America today is a much different place. The Reagan Revolution is over — Reagan, the agent who engineered our re-entry into American counter-factual myth — and the brutal facts of our darker nature are now coming home to stay, in the form of murderous counter-strikes from abroad and at home, and an economically induced opioid-and-suicide crisis that won't cease until our rulers cease the economic pressure that drives it.

Which they will never do. And which everyone knows they will never do, everyone at least who watched the determined effort to destroy the Sanders campaign by anyone with a stake in the status quo. Trump voters, those not driven mad by demons of race, have parallel fears.

In short, America is having dark dreams about itself, and those dreams are beginning to be represented even in mainstream entertainment, like the new Westworld.

Here's what Rolling Stone critic Rob Scheffield says about this series:

What 'Westworld' Says About America Right Now

HBO's big-budget reboot of the Seventies sci-fi movie is really about masculinity – and Rob Sheffield thinks it could not be more timely

In a better time for this country, Westworld would feel a lot more like science fiction. Instead, this HBO show is a bloody, pulpy, breast-intensive satire of the American male psychosis at its most demented. It's set in a futuristic theme park where guests pay thousands of dollars a day to live out their Wild West fantasies, which mostly involve shooting or torturing the robot "hosts" who populate the park. Saloons, whorehouses, six-shooters and Stetsons: all an excuse for the clientele to act on their most depraved urges. One of the human masterminds behind the park sums up the guests as "rich assholes who want to play cowboy." The robots bleed real-looking blood – buckets of it, in fact – but it's all fun and games as long as they don't really feel or remember anything, right? Like the replicant hunters in Blade Runner would say, they're just skin jobs.

Except what happens if these hosts develop their own consciousness – androids who dream of electric tumbleweeds?

In this Westworld, the androids who permanently inhabit the park are not the villains, but the victims of "rich assholes who want to play cowboy" — victims of wealthy visitors who see others in the world as toys for their entertainment (sound familiar?). And now those toys, previously unaware of their own low status in a world they thought was theirs, are starting to wake up.

How's that for a concept that perfectly captures the times?

More from Scheffield:

Evan Rachel Wood, by the way, is easily the best thing about Westworld – she's the spark of raw humanity who makes it all compelling. Her Dolores is a doe-eyed rancher's daughter who exists to be either rescued or abused, depending on the whims of the paying costumer. And since it's usually abused, she lives out the same loop over and over again, a loop that ends as her blood gets wiped away and her memory gets reset. But before the technicians send her back to work on the bunny ranch, they test her with one query: "Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?" As long as she keeps saying no, she qualifies as a good little robot sexpot. Except she's unmistakably showing signs of logging memories and figuring out what's going on, which means she's showing signs of becoming disturbingly human.

And something else, something that Scheffield isn't saying, is that Wood's character is learning to lie to the technicians about what she knows — a detail that gives the series an added dramatic punch.

You'll need to be clear about the premise before you begin to watch, though; the pilot is confusing. I think the film-makers were counting on the grit and gore to keep you tuning in until the tragedy of that world becomes clear. It's not immediately obvious, for example, who's not an android and who is, and I almost stopped watching. But if you're forearmed with enough information, you won't make that mistake.

"Minds destroyed by madness"

This isn't so much a movie review as a nation review. Like Allen Ginsberg, we are watching, not just the best minds of this generation, but also the worst "destroyed by madness," trapped in a world they can neither tolerate nor change. The Sanders-side electoral rebellion has failed, for whatever reason, and the Trump-side uprising, fueled by the radical mix of forces that drove that rage, will likely be snuffed there as well.

Where do the American people go from here? Do they endure till they die in the hole they live in, dreaming of "freedom" via thirty-second offroad truck commercials? Or do they do something else? What will Evan Rachel Wood do after the third or fourth brutal rape, somewhere in midseason, when she realizes she doesn't have to execute her programming and can execute ... something else? Will her reaction be sanctioned by law, or by the keepers of the world she can't escape? The dramatic possibilities, in the series at least, are endless and exciting.

I don't expect to say the same for the larger Westworld that created the smaller one, certainly not with the word "exciting" attached.

"But I saw you and you saw me, mostly"

Let's end, however, on a cheerier note, with the scat-singing of the above-mentioned Maryann Price, performing a song I call "But I Saw You and You Saw Me, Mostly," but which Dan Hicks called "Shorty Falls in Love" or here, "Another Night."

Ignore the odd laughter and applause — it's a rehearsal for the Flip Wilson comedy show on what may be a crowded practice set.

We sped around the world
To see what we could see,
But I saw you and you saw me mostly

Eyes for each other and not for the world. Maybe there's a lesson there.

GP
 

Rahm Emanuel: Dangerous Internal Enemy Of Our Country

I've been on Rahm-watch since 2005 and I can't imagine there's any chance he'd resign as mayor of Chicago unless it was part of a plea deal to keep him out of prison... and I don't see that happening either. As Michelle Hackman explained at Vox yesterday "[t]o the casual observer, it’s not totally clear how the furor surrounding a police video could possibly lead to the resignations of elected officials."

The video is certainly hard to watch, and people are rightly revolted that a mayor may have stifled its release for personal political gain. But in other places where similar videos have been released-- in New York City, where police were recorded holding Eric Garner in a lethal chokehold, or in South Carolina, where an officer shot an unarmed Walter Scott after a routine traffic stop-- the videos did not lead to demands that mayors resign.

But from the activists’ perspective, Emanuel’s offenses against the city’s minority communities stretch back far beyond the suppression of a video. "All this began with the Laquan case," said La Shawn Ford, a state representative who introduced a bill last week creating a process to recall Emanuel from office. "But that, that was just the tip of the iceberg."

...Right around the time Emanuel had entered office, a coalition of activists calling themselves "Stand Up! Chicago" had begun protest actions against symbols of extreme wealth: disrupting a meeting of the Mortgage Brokers Association and occupying a wing of one of Chicago’s most upscale hotels.

The protesters are aligned with a national progressive movement, the same ideological drive that swept Bill de Blasio and Eric Garcetti into office in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Emanuel fueled the movement in Chicago when, in 2011, he shut down that city’s Occupy protests, preventing them from creating encampments like the tent city erected in New York’s Zuccotti Park.

What’s interesting about this progressive element in Chicago is how closely tied it is to the city’s teachers union, which participated in actions at least a year earlier than the 2012 strike.

The close linkage means two things: First, that by the time Emanuel went after Chicago’s schools, teachers were already seasoned street activists.

And second, their close ties with the progressive movement meant that when Emanuel went after schools in poor neighborhoods, the union-- which already uses racially charged language to describe the city’s racial and economic divides-- had a preexisting relationship with minority communities to trumpet a racialized message.

...It was into this already fractious climate that the video of the Laquan McDonald shooting was released... It’s possible that more damning evidence against Emanuel will surface through the Justice Department’s investigation. As of now, though, it does not appear that Emanuel has actually violated any laws.

That hasn’t stopped protesters from demanding his resignation, even drowning out the mayor’s uncharacteristically emotional public apology about the shooting, which Emanuel said "happened on my watch."

Tiny dancer

To the protesters, his crime is one of flagrant abdication of morality, rather than any particular action that could spur his removal from office. Their anger, foisted into national prominence by the Black Lives Matter movement, has adopted the mayor as a symbol of white, corporate interests-- one that has further segregated the city through school closings and police brutality.

Activists and political observers alike think it’s unlikely the mayor will resign-- this is the man who once mailed a political opponent a dead fish, after all-- unless new evidence implicating his involvement in a cover-up surfaces. Rep. Ford’s recall bill was dead on arrival in the state legislature, where Emanuel allies populate the top ranks.

But from this vantage point, it’s hard to see the mayor’s way forward. More than three weeks after the video’s release, Chicago is still embroiled in protests, which continue to make daily headlines. For his part, Emanuel has been making few public appearances.

...A recent poll taken by the Chicago Observer found that 51 percent of Chicagoans want their mayor to resign, and only 18 percent approve of the job he’s doing-- a record low for Emanuel’s tenure.

In order to move forward, Emanuel will need to win back some of the trust he has forfeited, though activists can’t even name specific actions they would accept as peace offerings. Other political watchers say it’s possible Emanuel will just cruise through the worst of the protests until anger begins to fade.

And that brings us to The Sudden But Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel, a piece by celebrated American historian Rick Perlstein in the new New Yorker. He recalls Rahm's emergence as a "superstar" in 1991, but a "superstar," though Rahm's superstar status was always in the grubby pursuit of other people's money and an ability get away with the role of bully. Democrats now look at Rahm and get severe "buyer’s remorse." I was proud he included me as one of those who always knew and said "that this emperor never had any clothes on in the first place. Given the speed and intensity of his fall, perhaps it’s time to reconsider their case."

Start with the 1992 Presidential campaign. Emanuel persuaded Clinton to prioritize raising money. This, to put it lightly, caught up with him. And while Emanuel was never tied to the fund-raising chicanery involving forgotten names like James Riady, Yah-Lin Trie, and John Huang, it was that zeal for cash that provided Clinton’s Presidency its original taint of scandal. Obsessive fund-raising is also the foundation of Emanuel’s political operation in Chicago. When two reporters for the Chicago Reader filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Mayor’s private schedule in 2011 (unlike previous mayors, his public schedule was pretty much blank), they discovered that he almost never met with community leaders. He did, though, spend enormous blocs of time with the rich businessmen, including Republicans, who had showered him with cash.

There are moral complaints to be made about this, to be sure. But it has also failed Emanuel on political grounds: when he found himself in trouble, he was left without a broad base of political support, unlike the previous mayor, Richard M. Daley, who in similar straits fell back on his close relationships in all fifty city wards. When one of those rich Republicans donors-- Bruce Rauner, with whom Rahm has vacationed-- became Illinois’s governor last year, at least the scolds could comfort themselves that their mayor would enjoy privileged access to lobby for the city’s needs. But that hasn’t worked, either: instead, Rauner has given Rahm the cold shoulder.

But return to Washington in the early nineteen-nineties, when a grateful Clinton awarded his young charge a prominent White House role. There, Emanuel’s prodigious energy, along with his contempt for what he called “liberal theology,” rocketed him higher and higher into the Clinton stratosphere. “He gets things done,” Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, enthused late in 1996, when Emanuel usurped George Stephanopoulos as senior advisor for policy and strategy. Among his special projects was helping to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and the 1994 crime bill. He also tried to push Clinton to the right on immigration, advising the President, in a memo in November, 1996, to work to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” These all, in the fullness of time, turned out to be mistakes.

NAFTA, in alienating the Party’s working-class base, contributed to the Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives in 1994. As for the crime bill, which included a “three strikes” provision that mandated life terms for criminals convicted of violent crimes even if their other two offenses were nonviolent, Clinton himself has apologized for it, saying that the policy “made the problem worse.” The attempt to out-Republican the Republicans on immigration never took off. Republicans are the party solely associated with vindictive immigration policies, which leaves them in the long-term crisis they’re finding themselves in now-- identified as anathema by Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group. If Rahm had had his way, that never would have happened.

After Washington, Emanuel made eighteen million dollars in two and a half years as an investment banker. (His buddy Rauner helped get him his job.) He came back home—although diehards will insist that Emanuel isn’t really a Chicagoan, having grown up in suburban Wilmette—and won a congressional seat in 2004. His next step was chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in charge of recruiting House candidates. In 2006, he got credit when Democrats took back the lower chamber. One Democratic strategist from California who saw him working a room of worshipful admirers shortly afterward marvelled, “Inside the Beltway, Rahm is like … well, not Dylan or Madonna but maybe Britney or Paris.”

But that achievement disintegrates the more closely it’s examined. At the D-Trip, as the D.C.C.C. known, Emanuel aggressively recruited right-leaning candidates, frequently military veterans, including former Republicans. But many of his hand-picked choices fared poorly, losing in general elections. Some even lost in their primaries, to candidates backed by liberals-- many of whom won congressional seats resoundingly, even after the D.C.C.C. abandoned them.

The foundations were rotten and now we have massive GOP control

Victory, like defeat, can have a hundred fathers, and we can’t know what was ultimately responsible for the Democrats’ success that November. Anger at Republicans for the Iraq War (which Emanuel supported) certainly drove many voters’ decisions. What is indisputable is that the 2006 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the Party over time. One of his winners, the football star Heath Shuler, of North Carolina, would not even commit to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and was one of many Rahm recruits to vote against important Obama Administration priorities, like economic stimulus, banking reform, and health care. Many are no longer congressmen. Some Democrats now argue that, in the long run, 2006 might have weakened the Party more than it strengthened it. “Rahm’s recruitment strategy” was “catastrophic,” the retired record executive Howie Klein, who helps run a political action committee that funds liberal congressional challengers, said, and it contributed to the massive G.O.P. majorities we have now, the biggest since the nineteen-twenties.

Obviously, that conclusion wasn’t shared by Barack Obama in 2009, when he named Emanuel as his White House chief of staff. There, however, Emanuel’s signature strategy—committing Obama only to initiatives they knew in advance would succeed, in order to put “points on the board”—nearly waylaid the President’s most historic accomplishment: health-care reform. Emanuel wanted to scale it back almost to the vanishing point. It took a concerted effort by Speaker Pelosi to convince the President otherwise. This time, it was Emanuel who apologized: “Thank God for the country he didn’t listen to me,” he said after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, in 2012.

By then Emanuel had became the mayor of Chicago, elected with fifty-five per cent of the vote in the spring of 2011. Since then, there have been so many scandals in Emanuel’s administration which have failed to gain traction that it’s hard to single them out. One signature idea was lengthening Chicago’s school day by thirty per cent-- controversial because he proposed to compensate teachers only two per cent more for the extra work. The Chicago public schools’ inspector general was soon investigating allegations that a local pastor linked to Emanuel was arranging buses to pack public hearings with supporters of the idea, paying at least two “protesters” twenty-five to fifty dollars each.

The city also rolled out a new “smart card” system for customers to pay transit fares, a product of the San Diego-based defense contractor Cubic. The system, known as Ventra, worked about as well as Lucille Ball on a factory production line: some people would get on the bus for free, while others would be charged several times. The cards were supposed to double as debit cards for Chicago’s “unbanked” poor. But buried deep within the thousand-page contract with Cubic were nice little Easter eggs, like the seven-dollar fee for customers who didn’t use the card for eighteen months, and another five dollars tacked on for each dormant month after that.

...Now the sins of Emanuel are finally catching up with him. Lucky for him, however, the compounding police-shooting scandal has erased from the news a peccadillo from this past November: the Mayor’s press team was eavesdropping and recording reporters while they interviewed aldermen critical of the mayor. A spokesman responded to the press by saying that their only intent was also “to make sure reporters have what you need, which is exactly what you have here.” That made no sense. But then, so much of the legend of Rahm Emanuel’s brilliant career makes little sense. The bigger question, perhaps, is what this says about a political party and the political press that bought the legend in the first place.

Rick Perlstein Analyses the Chicago Runoff Election

by Gaius Publius

For those who want an up-to-date look at the state-of-play in Chicago's upcoming runoff election, there's no better analyst than Chicago's Rick Perlstein. Above is a conversation between Perlstein and RJ Eskow of The Zero Hour on what happened to Rahm and why we should be very optimistic about Chuy Garcia's chances of an upset. (Hint: Harold Washington.)

As you listen (warning: audio starts loud), be sure to note the reasons Garcia would make an excellent mayor, just on the merits. That runoff election, by the way, will be April 7 — not long off. If you wish to help out, click here to contribute.

Perlstein offers analysis regularly at In These Times, frequently as the cover article. Some in-city context from one of his latest pieces:

In Mayoral Runoff, Rahm Emanuel’s Corrupt Governance Has Finally Caught Up With Him

It’s become increasingly clear to Chicagoans that Rahm Emanuel is out for himself and his rich friends, not for us.

Perhaps what turned some voters against Rahm at the last minute—or motivated them to go to the polls in the first place on a cold Chicago day that started out in the single digits—was an Election Day exposé that appeared in the British paper the Guardian by investigate reporter Spencer Ackerman. “The Disappeared” revealed the existence of Homan Square, a forlorn “black site” that the Chicago Police operate on the West Side. ...

One victim was 15 years old; he was released without being charged with anything. Another, a 44-year-old named John Hubbard, never left—he died in custody. One of the “NATO 3” defendants, later acquitted on most charges of alleged terror plans during a 2012 Chicago protest, was shackled to a bench there for 17 hours.  It “struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it,” the Guardian reported. ...

But that's just the tip:

Indeed, the mayor faced a drumbeat of outstanding journalistic exposés all throughout the campaign.

Perlstein offers paragraph after readable paragraph of further instances. It's a stunning indictment, all forming part of this election story, all known to the voters. Perlstein ends, both in the video above (please do click; it's really listenable) and in the article, with great reason for hope:

In their way, these Emanuel [attack] messages, as misleading as they were, are heartening. This was Karl Rove’s trademark election strategy: attack, with brazen audacity, your opponents’ biggest, most taken-for-granted strength. In this case it was García and Fioretti’s unimpeachable probity, and the fact that they are out to help ordinary Chicagoans, not themselves.

This is not just a backhanded tribute to García’s integrity. It suggests a strategy for García to slay Goliath when he and Rahm go head-to-head in the April runoff.

This is turning into the most important progressive election in the post-2014 era. Obama tagged himself with Rahm support. So did immigration champion Rep. Luiz Gutiérrez, of all people. Not just a watershed election, but a touchstone election as well. (You can support the Chuy Garcia campaign effort here. Please do with my ex-Chicago-resident thanks!)

I wonder if the Clintons, either or both, will weigh in. After all, Rahm is their kind of guy, "free" market to the core, privatizer to his last retaliating breath.

[Click to enlarge.]

If they do, remember — it's not just a watershed election; it's a touchstone election as well. Everyone who touches it reveals who they are.

GP


UPDATE: Jesse Jackson

The latest polling shows Emanuel inching ahead of Chuy Garcia in the Chicago mayoral runoff. With 18% still undecided, Emanuel is showing 43.5% to Chuy's 38.0%. Working in Chuy's favor is the fact that "the Hispanic vote has consistently under-polled in Chicago Mayoral polls. Also, the undecided vote generally does not break for a known incumbent." But it is the African-American voters who will determine who wins and who loses April 7. As NBC Chicago explained; yesterday, endorsements are starting to come in that could be significant for moving African-American voters in Chuy's direction. Congressman Danny Davis just endorsed him yesterday.

Before the Feb. 24 election, Davis endorsed mayoral candidate Willie Wilson. The congressman's support in the runoff could be key to earning the African-American vote that both Garcia and Mayor Rahm Emanuel have been actively courting.

Both candidates are fighting for the 11 percent of the vote Wilson earned in the Feb. 24 race. A vote from Davis, who represents much of the predominantly African-American South Side, could help gain Garcia the votes he needs to beat Emanuel in the runoff election in April.

...Garcia picked up another big endorsement Saturday when a local Teamsters chapter announced its support for him. The union endorsed Emanuel in the 2011 race, but in their announcement Saturday they decried the mayor's serving "a select group of privileged insiders" and cast their vote for Garcia instead.

Probably the big news today is that Jesse Jackson is endorsing Chuy. Its something voters will pay attention to.

Nationally, progressives continue to rally around Chuy. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus endorsed him and Xavier Becerra, a member of the House Democratic leadership-- someone who knows Rahm and has worked closely with him-- is said to be about to do the same thing. Alan Grayson lent Chuy his ace national finance director, David Keith, and he's working in Chicago as Deputy Campaign manager. And one more big endorsement from someone who knows Rahm very well. Late this morning Howard Dean endorsed Chuy.

Did Rahm Emanuel Fail Chicago?

FIRST A LITTLE BREAKING NEWS

The local Chicago SEIUs just endorsed Chuy Garcia over Emanuel this afternoon. This is a huge big deal and the necessary step towards getting the international SEIU to get on board.

There have been quite a few times over the years that Blue America has run newspaper and broadcast ads in Spanish. There was only one time, however, that Blue America ran a series of ads in community newspapers in Korean, Polish, Urdu (as well as Spanish and English). It was 2007 and the occasion was an accountability moment for anti-immigrant knave Rahm Emanuel.

A few weeks before, Democratic Party insiders under the aegis of the DCCC held a training session in Chicago for a couple dozen of their favored candidates. Afterwards several of the participants, disgusted, let Blue America know that Rahm Emanuel delivered an ominous message demanding that they "move to the right" on immigration. Some of the Democratic candidates, like Emanuel puppets Bill Foster (IL) and Joan Fitz-Gerald (CO), had already started sounding very Republican on the issue, breaking Democratic solidarity and threatening unity by seeking short term advantage based on demagoguery against a vulnerable part of our coalition.

In effect, Emanuel had teamed up with xenophobic bigot Tom Tancredo through his North Carolina tool Heath Shuler. And yet Emanuel's North Side Chicago district was one of the nation's most immigrant-friendly districts. It always has been. And Emanuel never tired of telling the immigrant communities that he was their best friend. Many knew better than to believe him because his actions-- and his inactions-- spoke far louder than his words. Nearly 25% of Emanuel's former congressional district were of Hispanic descent and there are almost as many Polish-Americans in the district. Plenty of South Asians and Koreans had also made the district home.

Blue America teamed up with Illinois' largest immigrants' rights coalition, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, to help bring a little accountability into his life. The series of ads in the languages of the district were customized for the various communities. In the end, this didn't stop Emanuel from getting the House Democratic Caucus to throw immigration reform under the bus, preventing Congress from considering broad immigration legislation. At the time, Emanuel's office was the invisible hand behind Heath Shuler's anti-Hispanic HR 4088 which was all about more border guards, more high tech surveillance, mandatory verification for employees and and more enhanced law-enforcement capabilities for cracking down on illegal immigrants who are already in the country. After reading it, Chicago Congressman Luis Gutiérrez said, "We might as well put the Republicans in charge."

Last month Gutiérrez, a progressive on policy but a pathetic machine hack politically, endorsed Emanuel for mayor against Jesus "Chuy" Garcia. Disgracefully, Gutiérrez is a co-chair of Emanuel's Fat Cat reelection campaign. Hopefully, you read Chicago-based historian Rick Perlstein's post Friday about the epic battle between Mayor One Percent and the forces for a progressive Chicago. Perlstein's concern that the privatization, austerity, and authoritarian governance that have marked Emanuel's first term and have threatened the face of Chicago itself, is on the ballot in the April 7 runoff. 55% of voters-- in a very low turnout-- cast ballots against Emanuel. His $30 million war-chest didn't buy him reelection. Chuy's 34% came as a shock to the papers, the pundits, the pollsters, all of whom had been predicting Emanuel would figure above the 50% mark.

Now Blue America is trying to help Chuy and his team raise the contributions they need to compete against Emanuel's Big Money Machine. Perlstein has donated 20 autographed books-- a choice of Nixonland or his most recent The Invisible Bridge-- which will go to 20 random contributors-- regardless of amount-- on this page. Blue America is also giving away a rare, collectible RIAA-certified quadruple platinum award for the Barenaked Ladies breakthrough album, STUNT, which, to a great extent, crossed over from Canada to Chicago and then broke across the U.S., especially Chicago radio smashes One Week and Call And Answer. Winners for the books and the plaque will be randomly chosen tomorrow (Monday). Please contribute to Chuy's campaign... whatever you can, here on our 2015 Blue America page.

An OpEd in yesterday's Chicago Sun Times calls the runoff a "horse race" and outlines 3 voter groups the two candidates need to win over:

TEST #1:  THE BLACK VOTE

African-Americans carried Emanuel to victory four years ago on the conviction that he was “somebody that somebody sent.” That Somebody was the first black president of the United States.

This time around, pre-election bro-hugs notwithstanding, the ground has shifted under both Barack Obama and his former chief of staff, Emanuel.

The mayor got significantly fewer black votes this time around, though he still came in first ahead of Willie Wilson, followed by Garcia in black wards.

What will be Garcia’s counterclaim?

He’ll point to his early alliance with Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. And the fact that while in the Illinois state Senate in the 1990s, he and Senate colleague Miguel del Valle were the first two Hispanics to join the Black Caucus.

Endorsements will be interesting.

What will Willie Wilson, the African-American millionaire who came in 2nd in black wards, do? Whom will County Board President Toni Preckwinkle back? Their voices will be more important in April than President Obama’s was in February.

TEST #2: THE WHITE ETHNIC VOTE

The bungalow belt along Chicago’s Northwest and Southwest Sides is a complicated vote. The Emanuel forces believe citizens here worry more about their property tax bills, which the mayor has not raised, than income inequality arguments advanced by Garcia.

Whatever the focus, the wards in these parts of the city hold a high percentage of union members and government workers.

Pensions-- and whatever solution is deemed constitutional to solve their insolvency-- is a flame that burns brightly here.

The announcement on Friday of Moody’s downgrade of the city’s bonds is another piece of dreadful news. Garcia claims it is further evidence of the fiscal cliff the mayor has failed to pull us back from. But Emanuel points to a variety of ratings agencies that have said positive things about his efforts to rein in debt.

Neither Garcia nor Emanuel has been specific about painful revenue remedies that will, in the view of voters, squeeze blood from a turnip.

TEST #3: THE HISPANIC VOTE

This is Garcia’s base but it has not been a homogeneous vote. When Garcia was in the Legislature, it was the Hispanic Democratic Organization (HDO) in concert with Mayor Daley that set out to kill his re-election because he was not playing ball with the regulars.

Elected officials like city clerk Susana Mendoza and U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez were campaign co-chairs for the mayor in the February election. And remain supporters now. And Cook County Democratic Chairman Joe Berrios, who is also the assessor of Cook County, is no friend of Garcia’s but waged his own battles for control in aldermanic races. But their coattails are in serious doubt.

Will Hispanic voters turn out for Garcia as African-Americans did for Washington in 1983?

You’d have to think so.

This election is a horse race.

A fascinating story.

But the candidates both have a lot of evangelizing left to do.

This morning, writing for Salon, former White House advisor Bill Curry explored how Chuy forced Rahm, an anti-liberal union-hater, into a runoff. "What a week ago seemed a liberal fantasy, Rahm’s imminent demise," he wrote, "is suddenly a very real possibility."

A Garcia victory would be a historic watershed not just for Chicago or for Democrats but for all progressives. It wouldn’t just frighten the Wall Street Dems who now reign over their national party. It would alter the terms of debate even beyond the party and prove, to cynics and to ourselves, that the power of ideas is still greater than the power of money and that grass-roots politics is not dead.

It’s a race progressives know how to win. It’s a general election, but with an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate and likely low turnout it will function more like a primary. If progressives grasp its significance they’ll invest the energy and resources it takes to win. Many are already doing just that. But to those who need convincing, allow me to make the case. It comes down to just two points. The first is all about who Rahm Emanuel is, and who and what he represents.

Even in elective office Rahm strikes people less as a political leader than what he is: a lifelong political operative. He was once executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. For a while he specialized in “opposition research,” meaning campaigns hired him to dig up dirt on their opponents. But his forte was raising money, in large amounts, from people who had plenty of it.

By the time he was 30 he’d taken up permanent residence in the world of political high rollers he inhabits to this day. As Bill Clinton’s 1992 finance director he ran the biggest fundraising machine the Democratic Party had ever seen. While doing that job he was also on the Goldman Sachs payroll, a seeming violation of “black letter” campaign finance law that was never looked into.

...In Congress he hewed right on economic and fiscal policy and was a hawk on defense. As Obama’s chief of staff he purged Clinton-era liberals, which resulted in a team of economic advisers more conservative than that of any Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. Whether following their advice or his own instincts, Obama ditched ethics reform, aid to homeowners with bad mortgages, a minimum wage hike and the public option; a disastrous set of choices from which he never fully recovered.

Through it all Rahm cultivated his image as a ruthless operative. By the time he got to be mayor of Chicago he was the Keyser Soze of the Democratic Party, shrouded in legend, a guy who if you crossed him would slit your throat as you slept. It was a reputation he relished.

Rahm’s corporatist worldview, bruising personal style and stunted ethics made the city a testing ground for two major conservative agendas: corporate education reform and “privatization.” His education agenda led to a bitter teachers’ strike and the closing of 50 public schools, many serving the city’s poorest residents.

Those closings are often cited as flash points of the current revolt but there were others. During last July 4 weekend, 82 shootings resulting in 14 deaths focused national attention on the murder rate among Chicago’s young black men. The crisis cried out for creative, sustained civic dialogue but Rahm hadn’t the patience, empathy or eloquence to provide that kind of leadership.

The X factor is a deepening discontent over Rahm’s privatization schemes, recently laid out in a superb article by Rick Perlstein in In These Times. Here’s but one example plucked from a long, infuriating list:

In 2012 the transit authority commissioned a private contractor to issue transit cards that residents without bank accounts could use as prepaid debit cards. Buried in a 1,000-page agreement was an ugly array of hidden fees: $1.50 for ATM withdrawals; $2.95 to deposit money with a credit card; $2 to call a service rep; $10 for “research”; $6 to close an account. For designing a system to bilk the poor on such a grand scale, the company was paid $454 million.

Emanuel turned Chicago into a playland for people who, like him, mastered the art of spinning political influence into gold. If Garcia wins, it will reflect voters’ disaffection with a mayor who’s all bully and no pulpit, but also their revulsion to see such blatant profiteering at taxpayer expense. In an interview, United Working Families executive director Kristen Crowell said she was “astounded at voters’ rejection of corporate politics as a way of doing the city’s business.”

It is what Justice Kennedy in his willfully naive Citizens United opinion called “soft corruption”: not simple bribery but the subtler corruption of modern pay-for-play politics. Citing no proof-- there isn’t any-- Kennedy wrote that soft corruption does little harm to the state and is of no interest to voters. In fact it is a cancer devouring our democracy and voters care deeply about it.

Rahm isn’t just a poster boy for soft corruption; he holds a patent on it. On the Democratic side of the aisle he stands with Tony Coehlo, Chuck Schumer, maybe Terry McAuliffe and, sad to say, both Presidents Clinton and Obama. It’s why his election means so much to the nation and it’s why he may lose.

Believing you can dial every day for Wall Street dollars and still stand up for the middle class is like believing you can smoke crack every day and still be a good parent. Left unaddressed, the contradiction between what Democrats do to get elected and what they promise to do in office will destroy them. We need a whole new model, which brings us to who Jésus “Chuy” Garcia is and who and what he represents.

Like Rahm, Chuy has spent much of his life in politics. There the similarity ends. Rahm is a longtime ally of Chicago’s fabled Daley political machine, Chuy is a member of the party’s reform wing and was a protégé of the late Mayor Harold Washington, who ran against and beat future Mayor Richard M. Daley. In a real sense, this is but the latest battle in a 30 years’ war between the city’s reform and machine factions.

From the first, Garcia was a leader, not an operative. At 28 he got elected to the city council, where he served seven years before moving on to the state Senate. He served six years there before losing a primary to a Daley-backed opponent. When he left politics he turned not to high finance but to the nonprofit sector, becoming director of a community development corporation. Four years ago he reentered politics by winning election to the Cook County Board of Commissioners. In his staunch progressive record and subdued personal style he’s the anti-Rahm; a guy who proves he’s tough just by taking principled stands and then sticking to them.

Last Tuesday should never have happened. Rahm had a huge war chest, a vaunted machine, Wall Street and Hollywood connections and an endorsement from Chicago’s own Barack Obama. Rahm outspent Chuy 12-to-1. So what did he do wrong? Nothing really-- except, of course, for how he governed. The answer lies rather in who Garcia represents and in what they did right.

A month ago I wrote that progressives need a Tea Party of our own; not an Astro-turfed array of angry extremists but a grass-roots movement fueled by volunteerism and funded by small donors. Like the Tea Party, it would be independent, backing major party candidates who stay true to its values, and ousting ones who don’t. I said then the group closest to figuring it out was the Working Families Party. I wish I could say now I sensed how soon they’d do it.

The coalition taking Rahm to the mat works off the same model as the Working Families Party and even shares some of its DNA. It includes a dozen unions and community organizations, including the Chicago Teachers Union. Its basic tools are knocking on doors-- it hit 153,000 in round one-- and calling people up on the phone. Its members are rooted in their community and its message is rooted in its values. It may be about to topple one of the most powerful and least progressive Democrats in the nation. It is exactly seven months old.

The race confuses Washington. It’s a colorless town and for years Rahm was its most colorful figure, a source not just of news but of dark comic relief. Reporters imbibe the views of politicians who think the rules of the game immutable. This week even the astute E.J. Dionne compared Rahm to Bill de Blasio, “a hero to progressives,” calling it “mildly ironic” that “left of center voters” would give Rahm such a hard time.

Many progressives don’t get it either. If you put them all on Sodium Pentothal and asked if grass-roots politics can still beat big money, my hunch is they’d say no. Many pray the party will reform itself. Obama’s late awakening fans that flame. But if you want to know how likely that is, peruse the numbingly vacant report the DNC issued last week allegedly laying out its vision. Frederick Douglass said it best. Power concedes nothing without a demand.

On April 7 pay-to-play politics goes on trial in Chicago. The voters will be the judges. Crowell says holding Rahm accountable was a victory in itself, but she knows now it’s a fight they can win. For sure it’s an uphill climb, but then just last week it was impossible.

You can contribute to Chuy's campaign here. There's no such thing as a contribution that is too small.

UPDATE: First Poll: Dead Heat!

Chu is just getting started but the first poll is already showing a dead heat between himself and Mayor 1%.

A Chicago polling firm is calling the city’s runoff campaign between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia a “dead heat.”

New numbers from Ogden & Fry show Garcia, a member of the Cook County board of commissioners, within reach of the one-term Emanuel. And the firm warned that the Hispanic population under-polls, meaning that population is underrepresented in the data.

“They’re likely dead even,” pollster Tom Swiss said Sunday night... In the Saturday poll of 979 likely voters, Emanuel had 42.9 percent support to Garcia’s 38.5 percent.

Chicago-- Historian Rick Perlstein Speaks Up For His City

History is being made in Chicago.

Eighteen months ago, I wrote about how a hydra-headed protest movement against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s agenda of privatization, austerity, and authoritarian governance was changing the face of politics in the Windy City. Now, it’s close to achieving a miracle: ending Rahm Emanuel’s political career once and for all.

In the first round of Chicago’s mayoral election on February 24th, Rahm Emanuel came a shocking five points shy of the 50 percent he needed to win reelection outright-- performing three points shy of the final pre-election polls. Chicagoans, it seems have had it up to here with Rahm’s crusade to build a new, more durable Chicago machine-- this one, though, headquartered in places like Wall Street (where Emanuel worked as an investment banker), Abu Dhabi (the oil kingdom whose “sovereign wealth fund” owns a third of Chicago’s parking meter concession), and Philadelphia (home of the services corporation Aramark, which after being awarded the janitorial franchise left Chicago’s public schools crawling with vermin, and responded by firing a quarter of their workforce.)

It happened despite a Karl Rove-style campaign funded by $30 million in donations from corporate interests in return for favors from the city. It was a people-powered miracle. But we’re only halfway there.

On April 7-- in less than six weeks!-- Rahm faces off against the second place finisher, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, who is another people-powered miracle: a true reformer, compassionate, smart, and qualified. As an alderman he fought so hard against the machine that Mayor Richard M. Daley made kicking him off the city council a top political priority. The same thing happened when he served in Springfield as a state senator. Now, as a county commissioner, he helped balance Cook County’s mess of a budget while lowering taxers. Me, I love the guy. I’m backing his campaign to the hilt. I hope you will too. We really, really need you on this one. In the first round, Mayor 1% outspent Garcia by an almost twelve to one margin. And still he couldn’t get enough votes to win. Imagine how well he could do if the financial gap was closed a bit?

Here’s the deal. All Blue America donors to Chuy’s campaign will be entered in a random drawing. One lucky winner will get a very collectible, RIAA-certified quadruple platinum award for the Barenaked Ladies album, Stunt. Twenty other randomly chosen winners will get a personally signed copy of one of my books, either Nixonland, or my latest, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. (Winners will be chosen Monday so you have between now and then to donate to Chuy's campaign.)

And, of course, the satisfaction of helping deal a historic setback to everything that is awful in Democratic Party politics right now, in the person of the man who (1) was Bill Clinton’s point man in passing the North American Free Trade Act; (2) made $18 million in two and a half years as an influence peddler on Wall Street; (3) as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as a House member from Chicago (even though he grew up in the suburbs) presided over a crusade to kneecap the campaigns of progressive populists (4) as White House chief of staff, tried to convince President Obama not to pursue the Affordable Care Act; and as mayor-- well, hell, I could run these numbers clean up to thirty or forty.

He needs to go. We have a genuine chance to make it happen. Act now or forever hold your peace!!

In solidarity,

Rick Perlstein,
Digby
John Amato
Howie Klein

Bonus: Ever hear this version?

Kyle Smith-- New York Post Resident Crackpot

The caricature on the lower left is Grimm, who the Daily News just reported is announcing his resignation from Congress tomorrow or Wednesday

The NY Post's right-wing film critic is an entertaining, witty writer-- but a crackpot lamed and blinkered by his own sick, twisted ideology. He flies into rages when normal people point out that right-wing politics-- ultimately fascism-- can only be explained as pathology. Using the word "crazy" to explain "rightists" drives him insane. Last summer, he vomited it all up for his Post readers in a deranged screed attacking historian Rick Perlstein's newest book, The Invisible Bridge, which conservatives hate because of all the unvarnished, sacrilegious truth about Saint Ronnie-- and because wrote in a Rolling Stone column that "Loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP."

One of these words is not like the others (or maybe they’re all pretty much the same-- you make the call): Loon, nutjob, crank, wingnut, whackjob, cuckoo, crackpot, dingbat, wacko, conservative.

Can’t spot the outlier? You might be a liberal. Because even among the Very Serious and Highly Respected voices on the left, “conservative” and “crazy” are synonyms.

A recent example: A highly acclaimed book that examines the conservative movement in the 1970s, Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. The book is the kind of thing that liberals praise as an evenhanded portrait of the Right. You know, kinda like how Super Size Me was totally fair about McDonald’s.

One liberal dissenter, Sam Tanenhaus, writing in The Atlantic, describes the book as implying “contempt not just for Nixon but for the public that eventually elected him president twice, the second time in one of the biggest landslides in history. For Perlstein, the mere fact of a President Nixon is explicable only as pathology. . . . Perlstein describes the centrist Nixon as the sole author of ‘the fracturing of America,’ who feasted on middle-American fears . . . even as he turned the federal government into a private militia.”

...Yet Perlstein is a liberal’s idea of “balanced” and someone who “doesn’t condescend” (Frank Rich, in his New York Times Book Review rave).

What about the liberal writers who make no pretense whatsoever of understanding their ideological opposites? Here’s a partial list of the hundreds of conservatives who have been labeled “wingnut” by Salon.com alone: Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, columnist Jonah Goldberg, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (and his predecessor Eric Cantor), the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Chris Christie.

If these people and institutions are cuckoo, then conservatism itself is crazy. And that is exactly what liberals think. (Sometimes this tendency takes eccentric form, as when liberals argue that it’s “crazy” not to panic about climate change.)

Liberals hope to tag completely mainstream conservative thought as outside the boundaries of polite discourse, but the electorate keeps refusing to comply by, for instance, electing a Congress designed to serve as a stalwart check on progressivism for 16 of last 20 years. This is baffling to liberals. How can that many Americans be batspit insane?

Remember that liberals are the ones who are always claiming to have superior powers of empathy and tolerance-- and a more sophisticated sense of science, which has shown us that conservatives are actually the ones who are better at seeing things from the other guy’s point of view. An experiment by psychologist Jonathan Haidt (sometimes called “an ideological Turing test”) asked liberals and conservatives to put themselves in the other guy’s socks for the duration of a test and ask them: How would your ideological opponent answer?

Conservatives were far better at liberals at this game, though that should have been easy to guess. When a conservative goes to the movies, picks up nearly any newspaper or watches TV news on any channel but one, he gets the liberal point of view. Liberals, especially in a place like New York, can easily seal themselves off from principled conservative thinking and many choose to do so. A result is that they haven’t a clue how conservatives think.

Liberals also kid themselves that they’re better at arguing than conservatives, but calling your opponent crazy is an appeal to emotion, not reason. It’s also a lazy schoolyard taunt, and it fails an elementary rule of debate, the prohibition of ad hominem remarks.

Sunday Smith flipped out again-- this time because Stephen Sherrill only included 3 Democrats in his list for GQ of America's Craziest Politicians. Smith went on the warpath in a sad little Post column, desperately trying to equate right-wing demons Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Michelle Obama, Mark Udall, Kay Hagan, Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi with the actual psychopaths, like Ted Yoho, Joe Arpaio, Louie Gohmert, Steve King, Glenn Grothman, Gordon Klingenschmitt, Jody Hice, Ted Cruz, Paul LePage and Walker Walker, who Sherrill had some fun with.

Anyone who follows DWT even minimally, knows how much I detest corrupt Democratics like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Israel, but Smith's assertions of their "craziness" don't come close to any of what Sherrill was writing about. He whined, for example that Wasserman Schultz "compared Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to a wife-beater: 'Scott Walker has given women the back of his hand. I know that is stark. That is direct. But that is reality. What Republican tea party extremists like Scott Walker are doing is they are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back. It is not going to happen on our watch.' Wait, I’m confused, this abuse already happened, is happening but “it’s not going to happen?”

Sherrill explained that "Yes, this list is Republican-heavy, and while that may seem like standard liberal-media bias, the reality is that Democrats just aren't keeping pace right now in the crazy department. But to even the score, here's an incomplete list of crazy Dems from yesteryear: Rod Blagojevich, David Duke, at least one or two of the Kennedys, Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger, and Jim McGreevey." [Duke, a huckster and KKK Grand Wizard, was an elected Republican state Rep. from Metairie, Louisiana, who ran for president as both a Republican and a Democrat, but it's completely fatuous to call him a Democrat-- note from Howie.] Here are sone of Sherrill's descriptions even Smith should have been laughing at:

Rep. Ted Yoho [R-Fla.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Claimed he sees "one side of our government, or two-thirds of it, running one hundred miles an hour toward socialism" and that conservatives like him "are like Fred and Barney in the Flintstone-mobile, trying to stop that."

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

Explained his opposition to a proposed tanning-bed tax thusly: "I had an Indian doctor in our office the other day, very dark skin and two non-dark-skinned people, and I asked..., 'Have you ever been to a tanning booth?' And he goes, 'No, no need.' So therefore [the tax] is a racist tax, and I thought I might need to go get to a sun-tanning booth twice so that I can come out and say...I got taxed because of the color of my skin."

FUN FACT:

Is a large-animal veterinarian.

THINK OF HIM AS:

Joseph McCarthy, if he could deliver a calf.


Rep. Joe Barton [R-Tex.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Claimed carbon dioxide "is not a pollutant" because "I am creating it as I talk to you. It's in your Coca-Cola, your Dr Pepper, your Perrier water." Apologized to then BP CEO Tony Hayward after the White House urged BP to create a Gulf-oil-spill relief fund, saying it was "a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown."

FUN FACT:

Chairman emeritus of the House energy and commerce committee.

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

Walking back on his BP remark: "If anything I said this morning has been misconstrued to the opposite effect, I want to apologize for that misconstrued misconstruction."

IN HIS DEFENSE:

British petroleum companies deserve to be represented in Congress, too.

THINK OF HIM AS:

Oil.


Rep. Glenn Grothman [R-Wis.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Really hates Kwanzaa, claiming in a press release that "almost no black people today care about Kwanzaa—just white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people's throats in an effort to divide Americans." Also declared that giving state workers the day off on Martin Luther King Day "is an insult to all the other taxpayers" who want to contact government offices.

IN HIS DEFENSE:

It does seem like all the stores are putting up their Kwanzaa decorations earlier and earlier every year.

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

"Did people even know what homosexuality was in high school in 1975? I don't remember any discussion about that at the time."

THINK OF HIM AS:

The '50s.


State Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt [R-Colo.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Has repeatedly bragged about performing a gay exorcism (he's a former Navy chaplain) to rid a woman of "the foul spirit of lesbianism," and also tried to perform a long-distance exorcism on President Obama because of something about the NSA. Believes that Obamacare "causes cancer" and that Obama's former FCC chairman was driven by the Devil to "molest and visually rape your children."

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

"Father in Heaven, we pray against the domestic enemies of the Constitution, against this demon of tyranny who is using the White House occupant, and that demonic spirit is oppressing us."

FUN FACT:

Calls himself Dr. Chaps, which is not the least bit creepy.


Rep. Jody Hice [R-Ga.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Claimed that "four blood moons" falling on "major Jewish holidays" could be a sign of "world-changing, -shaking type events."

IN HIS DEFENSE:

Blood moons are freaky.

ACTUAL THING HE WROTE:

Some ask the question 'How does same-sex "marriage' threaten your marriage?' The answer is similar to asking, 'How does a trashy neighborhood affect you?'"


Rep. Mark Walker [R-N.C.]

ACTUAL THING HE SAID:

He's worried Obama will refuse to leave office when his term is up: "I don't think that's out of the question. I think he's gotten pretty comfortable up there spending all of those billions of dollars on vacations for he and his family."

ALSO THIS:

"If you have foreigners who are sneaking in with drug cartels, to me that is a national threat. And if we gotta go laser or blitz somebody with a couple of fighter jets for a little while to make our point, I don't have a problem with that."

AND THIS:

"I would beg to differ that Islam is a religion of peace, because you can't have a religion of peace when you've got nearly a billion people choppin' off heads all over the country."


Governor Paul LePage [R-Me.]

JUST HOW CRAZY?

Refused to attend Martin Luther King Day activities, saying the NAACP is a "special interest." Then added, "Tell 'em to kiss my butt." Said that a Democratic state leader "claims to be for the people, but he's the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline." Urged a repeal of Maine's ban on the plastics chemical component BPA, claiming it wasn't dangerous and saying, "Put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards."

FUN FACT:

Was re-elected in 2014.

THINK OF HIM AS:

If Don Rickles mated with poutine.