How Democrats got ‘tough enough’ to win
The Thumpin’
How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution
Naftali Bendavid
Doubleday: 262 pp., $23.95
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IN politics, 24 months can be an eternity. At a press conference two days after the 2004 election -- in which Republicans not only held the White House but also picked up seats in the Senate and House of Representatives -- President Bush crowed: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”
Two years later, his capital dissipated, he watched as Democrats won 30 seats in the House and six in the Senate to take a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in 12 years. “If you look at it race by race, it was close,” Bush argued the morning after the vote. Still, he admitted, the overall result “was not too close. It was a thumpin’.”
Bush’s off-the-cuff assessment makes a fitting title for Naftali Bendavid’s “The Thumpin’,” a deft piece of immersion journalism about Illinois congressman Rahm Emanuel and his tenure as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Bendavid, deputy Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, requested access to the DCCC in early 2005, shortly after then-minority leader Nancy Pelosi tapped Emanuel to oversee the Democrats’ 2006 congressional efforts, and he spent the next year and a half as Emanuel’s shadow, first writing about it for his paper. (Full disclosure: Times editor James O’Shea was “an early and enthusiastic backer of the project” when he was managing editor of the Tribune.)
Books that grow out of newspaper pieces often have a padded quality, but not this one. “Given the election’s outcome and what it showed about the American political system,” Bendavid writes, “it seemed worthy of a book that would incorporate elements that had been left on the cutting room floor and tease out broader themes.”
Perhaps most prominent among those themes is that of toughness, of politics as an endeavor in which you have to shrug off civility and fight. This has long been a hallmark of Republican strategy -- consider the attacks that took down Sens. John McCain and John F. Kerry, and former Sen. Max Cleland, not to mention former House majority leader Tom DeLay’s masterful gerrymandering of Texas congressional districts -- but as Bendavid notes, it’s an idea with which Democrats have had trouble coming to terms. “You know what our party thinks?” Emanuel asks him. “ ‘We’re good people with good ideas. That’s just enough, isn’t it?’ Being tough enough, mean enough, and vicious enough is just not what they want.”
Emanuel, of course, is a different kind of Democrat. Among his first steps as DCCC chairman was to build a staff of “allies who were not afraid to draw blood, who had no problem launching a harsh attack against a Republican and smiling at him in the Capitol the next day.”
A veteran of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, he served as a senior advisor in the administration, then worked as an investment banker before being elected to the House in 2002. Equally influential was his position as the middle son in a family of uberachievers from Chicago’s North Shore suburbs: His younger brother Ari is a leading Hollywood agent and his older brother Ezekiel is a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health.
Even Republicans had respect for his intensity; when told that Emanuel had been tapped for the DCCC, DeLay responded, “Now they’re finally serious.”
“The Thumpin’ ” records just how serious Emanuel was, describing what it takes to run a successful campaign. From the outset, he stressed the need for discipline: to let the other guys make the mistakes.
Among other things, he warned against unrealistic expectations. “Republicans,” Bendavid writes, “had captured nine Democratic seats in 1992 setting the stage for their fifty-four-seat blowout two years later. Similarly, [Emanuel] thought, a handful of Democratic wins in 2006 could pave the way for retaking the House in 2008.” But as events snowballed -- Hurricane Katrina, the DeLay and Mark Foley scandals, Bush’s declining popularity -- he reassessed.
At times, that led to problems, even among Democrats. Some of the most interesting material here details his clashes with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who wanted a 50-state strategy that looked beyond 2006. For Emanuel, that idea was anathema; the key was to win now.
“No disrespect,” he said to Dean, “but some of us are arrogant enough, we come from Chicago, we think we know what it means to knock on a door. You’re nowhere, Howard. Your field plan is not a field plan.”
All this makes for compelling drama, and Bendavid’s narrative is fraught with tension, even though we know the outcome -- because of the acuity with which he brings Emanuel to life. We see the effect of the campaign on his health and family, watch him lose weight and grow distanced from his kids. Then, there’s the political fallout, which, surprisingly, grew more pointed after the Democrats won.
“Barely had the polls closed,” Bendavid writes, “when liberals began asserting that Emanuel had little to do with the victory, that he had even prevented the Democrats from winning more seats. Emanuel had picked the wrong type of candidates, they said, focusing on inoffensive centrists rather than forthright anti-war populists who had more grassroots support.” Bendavid disputes this, but the argument suggests what’s at stake. For Emanuel, the campaign was a battle about the party, about whether politics should be pragmatic or idealistic, whether it was better to compromise to win.
Of course, if there’s a subtext here, it has to do with Emanuel’s ambition, his desire to join the Democratic leadership. To his credit, he admits it; “If I make gains -- and I’m not talking about one or two seats, I mean, make gains -- I’ll be seen as part of it,” he says in the early stages of the campaign. Even his decision to give Bendavid access can be interpreted through that filter, as an opportunity to be framed as the man who finally set the Democrats right.
And yet, why not? For what is politics, Bendavid wants us to consider, if not a balancing act between risk and opportunity? In early 2005, no one thought the Democrats were going anywhere; two years later, Emanuel was chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, “in line to become House Speaker someday.” All it took was 24 months and the willingness to believe. Or, as Emanuel puts it: “Half of winning is thinking you can win.”
David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.
