JUST GO TO HELL, RAHM

If you’re looking for one person to blame for the present state of our politics, Donald Trump is not the guy you’re looking for - he’s just the beneficiary of the efforts by the guilty party.

Who is that? It’s former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, later Mayor of Chicago and a veritable fount of political moron stupidity.

President Obama came into the White House in 2009 with a 60-seat Democratic majority in the Senate, and a solid majority in the House of Representatives. This was the result of a huge grassroots campaign, that had been waged nationally. Democrats on the ground were energized, and the organization existed to keep them energized for the coming elections. That organization was the result of DNC Chairman Howard Dean’s “50 State Strategy” that saw Democrats competing - and winning - everywhere.

And then President Obama made his single worst decision of his presidency: he brought the “Chicago Democratic Mafia” with him to the White House, most prominently former congressman Rahm Emmanuel, who he appointed Chief of Staff in the White House.

Within a month of the 2009 inauguration, Emmanuel got Howard Dean out of the DNC and the “50 State Strategy” was replaced with Emmanuel’s idea that you only invest energy and money in offices you know you can win. Additionally, he also dismantled the grassroots organization that had been responsible for victory, Obama For America. And he did that at the same time t hat the Republicans were organizing their grassroots campaign, the “Tea Party.”

The result was easy to foresee for anyone who has any political awareness. In 2010, Democrats only campaigned for “seats we can win,” without the grassroots organizing that had turned out the vote in 2008, and the result was the Republicans not only knocked off the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives with the energetic “Tea Party” movement, they took control of a majority of state legislatures in what has turned out to be one of the most consequential off-year elections in the country’s history.

2010 was a “decennial year,” the year the Census is taken and state legislatures reapportion political districts. With their control of state legislatures, and thus of reapportionment, the Republicans could undertake the Great Gerrymander that led to the overthrow of Democrats nearly everywhere. Even with The Donald to campaign against in 2018, the resulting Democratic majority in the House was narrow, nowhere near what it had been in 2006 and then in 2008. And as we saw in 2020, that House majority became even slimmer as the party failed to carry down-ballot races while Biden took the White House. Again, they lost a “decennial elec tion,” allowing Republicans even more power to reapportion, especially with the census handing enough congressional seats to Republican-controlled states for even more gerrymandered reapportionment - creating enough safe Republican districts to almost insure their ability to retake the House of Representatives in 2022.

Losing two decennial elections in succession, in a political atmosphere as partisan as we now have, is as close to a fatal blow as can come to a political party.

Thank you, Mr. Emmanuel. They couldn’t have done it without you. They ought to erect a statue in your honor.

As a result, we’re now at a place where only national legislation to save voting rights can keep this building wave of Republican-led voter suppression from crashing onshore next year.

Writing the the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein (one of the best political reporters in the country - you should read anything that has his name in the by-line) points out the danger of not acting now:

“Biden’s speech came at a precarious moment for the Democrats’ voting-rights legislation. In mid-August, the Census Bureau is scheduled to send out population data that the states use for redistricting; the fear among Democrats is that key states with Republican-controlled legislatures, including Florida, Georgia, and Texas, will move as quickly as possible after that to draw new lines for congressional districts.

“The GOP’s goal, Democrats believe, will be to lock in new districts that favor Republicans—and improve their odds of recapturing the House in 2022—before congressional Democrats can pass new constraints on such gerrymandering in any voting-rights bill. Party strategists worry that if red states finish the districts before Biden signs any voting-rights bill, this Supreme Court is highly likely to rule that new standards for drawing the seats can’t be applied retroactively. (Some voting-rights advocates considered it a worrisome sign that Biden, in his speech, didn’t cite that mid-August deadline—or any deadline—for passing voting-rights legislation.).

And then, yesterday, good old Rahm Emmanuel came forward with another “winning idea”: that the issue of voting rights is a “multi-cycle problem” and that Democrats at the state level should out-organize the Republicans, and then get state initiatives on the ballot to protect voting rights.

What. The. Actual. Hell?

Several of the people Brownstein spoke to answered that idea with the political equivalent of the ice bucket challenge:

“A third possible factor in the White House ranking may be the most confounding to voting-rights groups. In his speech yesterday, Biden, like Vice President Kamala Harris in an address last week, seemed to suggest that Democrats could overcome the recent red-state moves with sufficient on-the-ground organizing. A top White House official had first made that argument to me in May in response to the initial wave of criticism from civil- and voting-rights groups that the administration was not adequately engaged in this fight.

“The repeated White House suggestion that voters—particularly voters of color—can overcome these restrictive laws with more effort has infuriated many civil-rights activists. They say it deflects responsibility from the real issue: whether Biden and Senate Democratic leaders are making enough of an effort to pass a new floor of federal voting rights. Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, expressed that discontent most sharply in a recent tweet: ‘Don’t come relying on activists to out-organize voter suppression to compensate for your legislative failures. This ain’t The Green Mile or Bagger Vance and we are NOT your magical negroes—covering up your mediocrity, lukewarm support & broken promises.’

“In less pointed language, O’Rourke agreed that grassroots activists cannot overcome the obstacles to voting that red-state Republicans are erecting. ‘This is not something we can organize our way out of,’ he told me. ‘You couldn’t ask the civil-rights and voting-rights leaders in 1964 to organize their way out of voter-suppression laws that existed in Mississippi and Georgia and Texas at the time. You needed federal legislation.’

“The one thing of which advocates are certain is that the Democratic holdouts are highly unlikely to act against the filibuster unless Biden, in public or private, shows much more urgency about doing so than he displayed in his otherwise forceful remarks yesterday. Until Biden confronts the filibuster, his words will ring hollow for many on the front line of this fight.”

What we don’t need is Rahm Emmaneul giving us more of his Professional Bad Advice about how to win in politics.

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