"The Plan" - Same old rhetoric, same old Rahm

With the 2006 midterm campaign in it’s final stretch, much of the news and commentary is focusing – to an even greater extent than before – almost exclusively on the horse race. I thought I’d try and buck the trend, so on a recent business trip I decided to read The Plan, Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed’s new book that aims to be a sort of Democratic answer to the Contract with America and Winning the Future, by Newt Gingrich.

I actually found some of the ideas and proposals interesting and worth exploring further. I will be posting rebuttals to their agenda on my own site throughout the course of the next few weeks, in an attempt to give people a people a place to debate policy as we head towards November 7th. Here, I will simply share with you here my critique of the political credibility of their argument, which goes beyond just the predictable spin (i.e., talking about how Republicans “cynically exploited the post-9/11 concern about security,” while Democrats “responded to legitimate fears” about the economy). Unlike Gingrich in Winning the Future, Emanuel and Reed promote their proposals with uncompromisingly partisan rhetoric that reduces the book’s appeal among voters not already pre-disposed to accept their party’s major talking points.

Emanuel and Reed are both loyal Democrats, and I certainly didn’t expect them to hide that fact or attempt anything resembling absolute objectivity. I don’t decry partisanship – unless it is being practiced by those who do. And so while Emanuel and Reed bemoan the preeminence of “hack” government in Republican controlled Washington – where winning political points is more important than finding real solutions – I find it hypocritical of them to practice it so much themselves. In the course of a 185 page book, they criticize President Bush by name more than 95 times. In contrast, prospective House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – who would theoretically play a critical role in helping turn “The Plan” into a actionable legislative agenda – is mentioned only once, and not even in reference to her Leadership duties. And without irony, they assert that “the rules of the road weren’t designed to withstand one-party rule” while giving no indication of which branch or chamber they would voluntarily cede to the Republicans were Democrats ever to be as electorally successful as the GOP in recent years.

An example of their disingenuous commitment to placing policy over politics can be found in the chapter on healthcare, in which they write about “reaching across the aisle” to find answers. But while they make sure to praise Rod Blagojevich for proposing AllKids in Illinois, they simply refer to “Massachusetts’s” innovative mandate on the purchase of healthcare coverage by those who can afford it, without bothering to mention that it was Governor (and potential Republican Presidential candidate) Mitt Romney who introduced it. And in regards to small business healthcare affordability, they write at length about the Durbin-Blanche proposal that was floated last May, but fail to even acknowledge that House Republicans passed, and the Senate Democrats blocked, (as they have almost every session this decade) a small business healthcare bill that was endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (over 95% of whose membership is small businesses) and almost every professional and business association that has a legislative advocacy program.

One of the most outrageous points in the book, however, comes in the chapter on security. Emanuel and Reed state that “the Administration jeopardized the success of our mission in Afghanistan by shifting troops to Iraq because it didn’t have enough to go all out in both places. Osama bin Laden got away at Tora Bora in part because we didn’t have the personnel to pursue him.” Now, the Tora Bora incident is one of the few criticisms leveled by John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election with which I actually agreed. But to imply that it had anything to do with deployments to Iraq, which didn’t start until over a year later, is a shameful distortion of the truth.

Emanuel and Reed maintain that “most Americans apply the same yardstick: they vote for what works.” I was questioned whether or not they truly believe that, since right afterwards they say that “there aren’t enough hacks, even in Washington, to sell policies that don’t work – although that never stopped Bush from trying.” And, as it turns out, winning. But those two statements aren’t as contradictory as they might seem when you consider that Bush’s opponents, for the past 3 election cycles, haven’t been asking the American people to vote for what the believe will work, they’ve simply been asking them to vote against what supposedly doesn’t. To their credit, Emanuel and Reed tried to change that. But their unfortunate reliance on Bush-bashing, instead of presenting The Plan on its own merits, makes the whole effort seem small and insincere.