| One of the dumbest leverage points of the current political system is how the meaning of elections can be changed simply by having powerful people repeat a bunch of things that aren't true. Especially with modern political campaigns that are fairly complex and keep politicians locked in a fundraising room doing call-time for days at a time, politicians will eventually be affected by the argument that they were elected not based on what they campaigned on, but what they are constantly told they campaigned on. It's much easier to take an election based on populism and turn it around in the mind of the politician than get someone elected based on populism and then convince them to vote for corporate pork.
That's what strategies like this, where Rahm Emanuel is just full of it, are designed to do, to trick the politician into ignoring what he saw with his lying eyes.
Emanuel - a former White House aide, a third-term lawmaker from Chicago and a leading member of the New Democrat Coalition - is nudging the group toward a pro-business agenda with a technology focus. That puts the group at odds with more-liberal Democrats and, on the other end of the political spectrum, out of step with the more conservative Blue Dog Coalition.
Emanuel points to the March election of Bill Foster , a fellow Illinois Democrat, as evidence that New Democrats are on a good course.
Foster campaigned on more federal incentives for research, tougher border security, flexibility on skilled-worker visas and funding for Illinois research laboratories in his effort to succeed former Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. (1999-2007).
That is just nonsense. Here's Chris Cillizza, from the farily conservative Washington Post, immediately after the race.
As much as Republican strategists sought to downplay the national importance of the race -- mostly accomplished through bad-mouthing of their candidate -- it's clear that the race was fought on national, not local, issues.
The winner, Democrat Bill Foster, focused heavily on the troubled state of the economy and hit his Republican opponent -- dairy magnate Jim Oberweis -- as a willing advocate for the President Bush and the administration's policies on Iraq. Oberweis and national Republicans, on the other had, cast Foster as a tax-and-spend Democrat willing to throw money at any problem to make it better.
Just look at Foster's ads, where he dedicated most of his resources in communications with the public. Do you see "federal incentives for research, tougher border security, flexibility on skilled-worker visas and funding for Illinois research laboratories" mentioned anywhere? Of course not. That's insane. There's no polling that suggests any of that was important to voters. But don't take my word for it, take the word of Bill Foster's aggregate polling and media operation.
Here's an ad against privatizing Social Security. Here's one pushing middle class tax cuts. This one's anti-outsourcing and anti-trade. And this one and this one are anti-Iraq ads, while fiscal responsibility and lowering the cost of health care round out the suite.
Roughly a million dollars was spent pushing this messaging out into the district, but the meaning of the election is now being twisted so that Rahm gets another vote in his New Democrat Caucus. At least we know that the argument that Federal funding for research dollars mattered, and Iraq was not important, is bullshit, and transparently so. |
