I just wanted to weigh in over the Rahm Emanuel appointment as Obama's chief of staff. The usual netroots suspects (*cough*Chris Bowers*cough*) are already wringing their hands over this idea, for no reason other than the fact that Rahm, as head of the DCCC in the 2006 cycle, advocated for legislation on explcitly electoral grounds, famously advising Democrats not to persue immigration reform on the grounds that it might leave conservative-district Dems out to dry.
Guess what? He was right, and the wave of Dem victories in right-leaning disticts in 2006 set us up for Tuesday's triumph. Now we have a Democratic president and Congress and can do real immigration reform. If the Bowers crowd had gotten their way, all three of those things would've been in real jeopardy, all over an ideological spat.
But that's beside the point. The people fretting over the Rahm appointment are ignoring the fact that the DCCC chair job is explicitly electoral in nature - the chair is judged on how well the party performs at the ballot box. It was his job to think about how legislation would play in November, and he advocated strategy based on how he felt the electorate would respond. To blame him for doing that is to ignore the realities of that job.
The chief of staff's job is not nearly as focused on elections, though. I mean, sure, the President will probably want to get re-elected at some point. But for the first two years at least, Rahm's job is going to be to help push the Obama agenda through Congress and to run the White House the way the campaign was run - tight, efficient, and drama-free. You don't need to be an ideologically pure progressive to do that effectively, but what you do need is a relationship with the man in the office and some hard-nosed Washington know-how. Emanuel has both.
I think the animus, especially with Bowers, is more personal than anything else. I'll never forget the petulant post he wrote in 2006 after the Chicago Tribune published a laudatory profile of Emanuel (who is from Chicago) that (rightly) credited him with helping foment the Democratic wave that year. Sounds like someone's little feelings got hurt.
None of that means that progressives shouldn't be prepared to ask a lot of Obama and friends once he takes office. Even though I hate online petitions, I think the current campaign against Larry Summers is a good start - here's a guy who was a deregulation advocate, a major player in the mortgage mess, a terrible president of Harvard, and an apparent misogynist to boot. He doesn't belong anywhere near the Treasury Department. I also like the campaign against RFK Jr - someone who has proven to be manifestly anti-science by fueling vaccine hoaxes - as head of the EPA.
But to get bent out of shape over a non-political, non-ideological appointee who possesses all necessary attributes for the job - only the Internet left could be so shortsighted.
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