Rahm Emanuel cursed out Dean yesterday for inadequate DNC spending on his priorities, and he's tracking the Presidential candidates to see how helpful they are for DCCC fundraising.  The leaders are Kerry, Clark, and Gore (though Emanuel has come out publicly for Hillary Clinton).  This is in addition to the point system Emanuel has implemented for House members.  This is basically what Tom Delay did to cement control and discipline in the Republican caucus, liberally sprinkle candidates with money and punish those who can't or won't raise it.  I think it's going to be harder to implement this system of control on the Democratic side, but I don't see many other attempts to build a political machine that can wield power.

My guess is that Emanuel's verbal attack on Dean is a mixture of anger and CYA in case the Democrats don't take the House.  There's a lot of self-promotion going on with his tough image, and he's a bully.  I know credible people who have been thrown out of his office for not hewing to his ideological brew.  I've also heard that his DCCC doesn't listen particularly well to local leaders, claims credit for pretty much everything, and tends to throw its weight around.  The big single issue groups operating out of DC often look to the DCCC endorsement to see whether they should come in on a race (see Duckworth, Tammy).

At the same time, if your perspective is simply that of a partisan, I kind of have to ask, so what?  Emanuel is an effective fundraiser and competent at the mechanics of elections.  He's a smart operator in the House, and it's clear that House Democrats desperately need a system for wielding power and a set of incentives/disincentives for cooperating with each other and acting as partisans.

Still, this anger is silly.  Emanuel has to know that Dean was elected DNC Chair on a promise to not spend money on behalf of national committees like the DCCC.  He also has to know that he could have intervened during the DNC Chair race, but he did not.  He's probably kicking himself for allowing Dean in there.  

I worked on that race against Dean, but it's very much a good thing Dean is following through on his promises to state parties.  I'm not a fan of Dean's recent pandering (neither is Taylor Marshor John Aravosis) and his lie about the Democratic Party platform, but promises should be kept.  And Dean won that race fair and square on a platform of spending money in the states and not on a cycle basis, so bitching now about how he spends the DNC's money is sour grapes.

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Noam Scheiber just wrote the standard article about Howard Dean's stewardship of the DNC.  There are two claims: Dean can't deal with high dollar people, and he won't spend money on 2006.  I'm not entirely sold on Dean, and I have some reservations about how he's running the place.  

The piece, though, is just ill-informed.  Scheiber clearly talked to a bunch of insiders mad that Dean isn't a 'traditional' party chair.  Well why should he be?  The DNC Chairman is actually an elected position, and Dean made campaign promises to the people who elected him.  These include (a) building up the state parties (b) not focusing on DC (c) not focusing on swing districts and states (d) and giving money and resources to state parties.  I didn't like the proposals at the time, but Dean won fair and square.  I respect that, and so should the rest of the party.  But they don't.

While Reid and Pelosi and Rahm and Chuck might bitch about Dean 'not playing the traditional party chairman's role', where were they in February of 2005 when the elections were held?  Why did they let uber-local pol Donnie Fowler become a near kingmaker?  Why didn't they endorse or get involved in a serious way?  There was an election for this position, a position that was clearly going to control hundreds of millions of dollars and party resources in the next few years.  Was this election below them?  Apparently.  Well Dean was elected and he is doing what he promised.

Noam Scheiber could have pointed this out, though it's not clear to me he understands how the party works.  I'm not even sure that Scheiber knows that Dean was elected, which is ironic because I believe TNR journalist Ryan Lizza wrote the definitive article about what happened in the Chair's race.  Update the Dean story, my friends.  The 'outsider liberal internet savvy' storyline isn't right anymore, though it appears correct from inside DC and from the blogosphere.  There are many more factions than you realize, and Dean's time at the DNC is much more complicated than it looks.

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