Rahm Emanel

Chris Bowers on Rahm Emanuel:

Rahm won the House of Representatives for Democrats, but it didn't stop there.

Rahm also won the four Republican-held House seats where the DCCC candidate lost the primary, but where the primary winner went on to take the seat anyway.

Rahm raised all the money for the DNC, and was actually every small donor who contributed to the DNC.

Rahm was every donor to Act Blue.

Carol Shea Porter is actually Rahm.

Rahm won us back six Governorships. Hell, he had groomed Deval Patrick from birth for the 2006 elections.

Rahm Emanuel is even greater than he says he is:

Brittany Spears is getting a divorce so she can marry Rahm.

Rahm masterminded the D-Day invasion.

Rahm is every new Democratic precinct captain in the country.

Rahm wrote every progressive blog post this cycle.

Rahm single-handed won these elections.

When the world ends, it will be because Rahm blinked.

In the comments, DanD doesn't seem to appreciate the brilliance of Emanuel:

Here's a summary of what i mean:

- Before 9/1: Of the races that were won (or who are still in doubt), the DCCC spent more than 10K on only 11 of them. (Well, 14 if you count the contributions to the primary where they backed a challenger to the winner ;-) ) If you lower the threshold to 5K, they only had 17 winners. Compare that to a total of 27 races where they spent 5K or more. (I mean, 'cmon, 5K is nothing...)

- Between 9/1 and 10/1: Of the races that were won (or who are still in doubt), the DCCC spent more than 5K on only 15 of them. This is well into where they were getting polling data and seeing which races were tight. During that period they spent $7.3M. They spent >5K on only 21 races! They spent huge cash on a lot of races that were lost (like KY4, OH15, PA6, VA2, IL6).

- After 10/1: they got a little better, they spent >20K on 18 of the winning races. During that period they spent $14M (and still blew huge amounts in loosing efforts in PA6, KY4, OH1, OH15, VA2, CT4, OR5, CO4, etc., etc.)

So in the last month, the DCCC did jump into a few races that they hadn't supported before, but they still ignore a number of them that were key to the margin of victory. And more to the point, the only reason that the races were close was because others (like ActBlue, blogosphere, etc. had kept the campagns financed, staffed, and motivated.)

The key in 2008 is to have a Democratic Party that can win in any year because of strategy, not one that gets lucky in a great year with awful instincts. We need good Democrats running in every district.