The warrior-wonk: Rahm Emanuel's moral center.

• Author: Schmitt, Mark
• Position: The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution - Book review

The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution

By Naftali Bendavid Doubleday, 272 pp.

There are, we are told, two kinds of congressional elections. In most even-numbered years, the issues are local and only a few incumbents are vulnerable, usually for reasons unique to them or their districts. Occasionally, as in 1994, an election is decided on national issues and a strong partisan or ideological wave loosens the bonds between even the hardest-working members of Congress and their constituents, and new members are swept in on essentially identical messages.

Last year's election was something a little different, a national wave on one level but an intensely local election on another, in which each Democratic victory took advantage of the particular circumstances of each challenger, each incumbent, and each district.

The Democrats' mastery of that unusual combination is the work of one man, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the year described by Chicago Tribune reporter Naftali Bendavid in his new book, The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution. The DCCC chair is typically just a recruiter and fund-raiser in chief for candidates, charged with bullying his colleagues to use the power of their incumbency to raise money for a narrowly targeted set of challengers. Emanuel was all but bred for the job as traditionally defined (he was even a DCCC fund-raiser in his youth), but he turned the job into something else, acting as a strategist for each campaign and expanding the number of targeted races. His role is best captured in a metaphor employed by former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers: "Here comes this tidal wave, and Rahm has them all in sturdy little boats ready to row to shore."

Another way to think of the difference between 2006 and the last truly nationalized election is this: the architect of the 1994 Republican victory, Newt Gingrich, communicated with his candidates by disseminating cassette tapes of his lectures, and memos listing words to use to describe any Democratic opponent. Emanuel operated instead by cell phone, maintaining almost constant two-way contact with all his promising candidates, listening as well as directing. Even at the first stage, in recruiting candidates, for example, Emanuel would target those who hesitated to run because they had...