People don't censor their tongues when they are drunk or angry. I tend to believe that a drunk uses the words he is saying reflect what he himself thinks, while an angry man uses the words that he believes will inflict the most pain. You've probably already decided whether Rahm Emanuel has little regard for the addle-pated.

So let's not belabor that point. Let's instead take a look at the point that Rahm Emanuel was making when he called a group of liberals "fucking retarded". Were they proposing a plan that was exceedingly ill-considered, or was it that Rahm was not thinking things through?

It's been a while since that phrase was actually uttered. In fact, it was last August, a time that seems a lifetime ago, in this world where the ground is buried below miles of snow that's whiter than a tea party convention. The liberal strategy group was proposing to run attack ads against the so-called "blue dog" Democrats that were opposing health care reform.

Here's The Plan, Fellas

On the surface, the initial thought - that liberals might be running ads against fellow Democrats - seems ill-considered; they need as big a majority in Congress as they can get, and weakening Democratic legislators' public support wouldn't help that. On the other hand, the initial thought is that the advertising might convince Democratic legislators to vote with the Democratic majority.

So which one is right?

It's usually a stupid idea to threaten someone if you're not willing to carry through on that threat. Every parent has learned that, even if most parents are unable to stop doing it. It's one thing to try to change the behavior of teenagers - or even four-year-olds - by promising that their bad behavior will have dire consequences; it's another thing to be able to actually impose those dire consequences on someone you love.

A legislator who isn't voting the right way is hardly a beloved child, but you still generally want him inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside the tent pissing in. A threat to run pressure ads won't work unless you are willing to run those pressure ads - and if you run those pressure ads, you're likely to alienate him entirely. You had better plan on replacing him in the next election, and losing his support in the meanwhile.

Competing Against Yourself

That may not be a bad idea, in the long run. Procter and Gamble makes more than one brand of laundry detergent - and they advertise each as if it were the only product they make. They know that they can't sell Tide to everyone, for various and sundry reasons. I'm allergic to something in Tide, for instance, and when I wear clothing washed in Tide, I itch like crazy. It's better that they advertise Cheer and Oxydol aggressively than to lose those customers to Unilever, which manufactures Wisk and Surf.

It's more common in the orient than in the US for manufacturers to introduce new products that will put their existing highly profitable products in jeopardy. Again, the thought is that "Either I introduce this new product which potentially will destroy my existing profitable product, or else one of my competitors will, and then I'll have nothing."

So let's assume that Joe Senator, a blue-dog Democrat, is resisting the call to vote with the Democratic majority on an important issue. If you twist his arm by threatening to run attack ads in his state, and he votes with you this time, he's likely to resent it. It may be useful in the short run, but it'll likely cost you in the long run. You'll need to pay him back with interest later on, or else you need to replace him.

Who Ya Gonna Call? Blue-Dog Busters!

And if you actually run the pressure ads against him, you probably will need to replace him in that case, as well. In either case, you have some important questions to ask. Who can you run that can beat him in the primary? Can that candidate win in the general election? And having installed a different politician in Joe Senator's seat, have you really accomplished anything?

It would seem obvious that a Blue-Dog Democrat is a Blue-Dog Democrat because he represents a conservative state. That may or may not be true, but if it were false, it's odd that he got elected in the first place. Presumably, the Democrats in that state are more liberal than the Republicans; if you run a candidate that's much less conservative than Joe Senator, he could conceivably win the primary and lose the general election. If a Blue Dog Democrat is unwilling to vote with the Democrats, it's even less likely that a Republican would.

In a spot that MSNBC is running, Keith Olbermann is saying that the minority party doesn't seem to know that they're the minority party. The problem, Mr. Olbermann, is that both parties are minority parties, the Republicans being an ideologically unified minority, and the Democrats being a pragmatically-unified coalition of minorities.

It's thought to be a rough time for incumbents seeking re-election, but then again, maybe it's not. Even though the American people hold Congress in low regard these days - in some polls, the approval rating for the Democratic party is in the 20s, and for the Republican party, it's in the single digits - the latest Pew poll shows that if an election were held today, 49% of the voters would want
incumbent re-elected and only 31% would choose an unnamed challenger.

The Club For Cancerous Growth

The GOP has been doing exactly what these "fucking retarded" liberals are proposing - eliminating GOP legislators who aren't sufficiently pure, ideologically. The principal reason that Senator Arlen Specteor switched back to being a Democrat after all these years is that he was targeted by the Club For Growth as insufficiently conservative. It didn't look like he could win the primary as a Republican with the CFG supporting a challenger.

The liberals' plan to run pressure advertising isn't a game of poker. Nobody has a hole card; every card is on the table, visible to all. If a Blue-Dog Democrat is doing a good job of representing his constituency, pressure ads aren't going to hurt him at all. In fact, they'd effectively point out that he's doing what the voters want him to do.

Mr. Obama says that the reason voters oppose health care reform is that they don't understand it. If you break the health care reform bills into the separate components, he says, the majority of the US population supports each of the components.

The path to passing health care reform, therefore, should be obvious. Instead of passing one huge bill, Congress needs to pass a bunch of smaller bills, each easily understandable, each with significant support from the voters, so that legislators vote against those bills at their own peril.

And for Rahm Emanuel to have missed that idea is, well, it's fucking retarded.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Arlen Spector - arm-twisting - Blue Dog Democrats - censoring tongue - Club For Growth - laundry detergent - Pew poll - pressure ads - Rahm Emanuel - Tea Party