I spent the Memorial Day weekend with Rahm Emanuel. No, I wasn’t
hanging out at the beach with President Obama’s chief of staff.
Rather, I spent the weekend reading Naftali Bendavid’s
The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats
Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution.
Emanuel’s tenure as chairman of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee during the 2006 election cycle is the model
Republicans must attempt to reverse-engineer if they hope to
regain power in Washington anytime soon. And Republicans are
never going to succeed if they listen to those who tell them the
reason they’ve been losing elections is that the GOP is too
“mean-spirited.”
Ever since Rush Limbaugh spoke the Four Words Nobody Is Allowed
to Say About Obama — “I hope he fails” — Republicans have heard
a symphonic serenade from a chorus of critics who insist that
blunt words and other such mean-spiritedness are the essential
sources of their party’s woes.
Chief among the choirboys of niceness is Rod Dreher, the former
National Review staffer, Dallas Morning News
columnist and BeliefNet blogger. In his 2006 book Crunchy
Cons, Dreher accused the “conservative mainstream” of
believing that “accumulating wealth and power is…the point of
life,” and further declared, “The tragic flaw of Western
economics is that it is based on exploiting and encouraging greed
and envy.”
Lately, Dreher has endlessly whined about talk-radio
personalities he considers uncouth lowbrows. In
March, Dreher said that Limbaugh’s speech to the Conservative
Political Action Conference “made clear that the GOP and the
conservative movement are stuck on stupid.” In
April, Dreher said Glenn Beck was “giving crackpots a bad
name.” Then
Friday, Dreher called Mark Levin a “cretin,” a “creep” and a
“trashmouth.”
Levin had responded to a liberal caller (“Obama is a lot smarter
than you folks give him credit for,” the lady said) by wondering
why her husband didn’t commit suicide. This is the kind of
bombastic putdown Levin’s regular listeners expect from the man
Sean Hannity dubbed “the Great One,” and whom Limbaugh often
calls “F. Lee Levin.”
“Cretin”? A magna cum laude graduate of Temple
University, Levin served in the Reagan administration, ultimately
as chief of staff to Attorney General Ed Meese, before becoming
president of the Landmark Legal Foundation. All of this Levin
accomplished before beginning his successful radio career and,
most recently, authoring the No. 1 bestseller
Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto.
That Levin employs hyperbole and sarcasm on his show is only
shocking to people who don’t listen to talk radio. More
importantly, Levin believes conservatives are in a fight they
cannot afford to lose, against implacable adversaries determined
to win at all costs. When a guy begins a fight by slamming a
barstool into the back of your head, the Marquis of Queensberry
rules do not apply. If you respond by ripping open his carotid
artery with the jagged edge of a broken beer bottle, whose fault
is that? (“He needed killing,” as Texans like to say.)
“Turn the other cheek” is an excellent moral principle, but it
doesn’t work in politics any better than it works in saloon
brawls. When Democrats were encouraging their friends at MSNBC to
describe conservatives attending Tea Party rallies as
“teabaggers” — a term borrowed from gay-porn vernacular — where
were Dreher’s complaints about incivility? And if Dreher
considers “trashmouth” to be a mortal sin, why isn’t he throwing
stones at Rahm Emanuel, who unloads f-bomb barrages as
remorselessly as the RAF pounded Dresden?
Naftali’s book about Emanuel and the 2006 campaign is an emphatic
rebuke to the Dreheresque notion that niceness is a winning
formula in politics. Emanuel is a hard-driving Chicagoan
(“intense+Rahm+Emanuel” =
46,800 Google results) who takes pride in the brutal
effectiveness of his political tactics.
Too much analysis of recent Republican electoral woes has been
written by intellectual elites in search of a “Big Picture” trend
that explains how the GOP went from dominance to near-irrelevance
in four short years. Rather than propounding abstract ideological
theories, Naftali’s detailed account of the 2006 campaign offers
concrete examples of how Democrats won through improving the
basic mechanics of partisan electioneering.
One telling vignette: In summer 2006, accusations of shady
dealings by Democratic Rep. Al Mollohan of West Virginia
threatened to wreck Emanuel’s message that Republicans had a
monopoly on corruption. And if an incumbent Democrat were
defeated, that would change the math on Emanuel’s strategy to
recapture a House majority.
How did Emanuel rescue Mollohan? By calling the incumbent’s
Republican rival a liar. The GOP challenger had been in the
military during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and called himself
a “Gulf War veteran,” although he hadn’t deployed overseas.
Emanuel seized on this and had DCCC staffers push it to
reporters. “We need that story,” Emanuel said. “It’s all about Al
Mollohan unless we come up with something.” The result?
“Mollohan Foe Battles Résumé Charges,” said the headline on a
news story by Roll Call’s John Bresnahan. Other
publications followed suit, effectively changing the subject —
exactly the outcome Emanuel sought. Was this unfair? Ask
Emanuel that question, and you’ll get a two-word response. (Hint:
The second word will be “you.”)
Whatever you think of Mark Levin’s radio program, he at least
seems to understand that employing the politics of niceness
against today’s Democrats is like sending a church-league women’s
softball team to do battle with the Crips.
Meanwhile, Dreher urges
conservatives to choose as their role model fifth-century
Italian monastic Benedict of Nursia. Piety is a virtue, but the
founder of the Benedictine order has not been previously renowned
as a political strategist.
Let Rod Dreher urge Rahm Emanuel to be more like Benedict of
Nursia. He’d get a two-word response, which is all he deserves
from Mark Levin.
