This title shouldn't be perceived as an attack on Michael.  I like Michael; I like his passion, and respect his analysis, and appreciate that he doesn't devolve into the namecalling that so frequently characterizes the Emanuel threads.  But I think his most recent diary, which I recommended, raises a very important question.  I don't agree with Michael's answer, but I think the issue deserves the kind of reasoned response that I will now attempt to provide.

What I will attempt to show in this diary is that, while I personally dislike Rahm Emanuel, he's doing a reasonably good job as DCCC head; that there are in fact circumstances in which it's appropriate for the DCCC to get involved in a primary; and that the Duckworth-Cegelis situation was a catastrophic blunder on Emanuel's part, but an anomaly, not a part of a larger trend as Michael sees it.  I'll explain on the flip.

Michael states his case succinctly in this comment:

I have a simple premise here, that was only reinforced through my direct experience with it:

Do you think it is right for the DCCC to get involved in contested Democratic primaries?

I do not.

Let the candidates run and stay the hell out of it. Don't send staff, provide media and PR people, shut down fundraising, refuse to return calls, or show favoritism to one candidate over another.

Let the voters, not the DCCC, pick who represents a district.

I agree, mostly.  I think if the DCCC got involved in most contested races, it would be a bad thing, and keep the voters both from choosing their preferred candidate and from picking the person who has the most authentic support in the district.  But I also believe that, as the representative of a party whose job is to put itself back in power and stay there (and whose goal we implicitly endorse by registering as Democrats), Emanuel has the responsibility of making sure candidates get elected.

This brings me to my first point: the DCCC absolutely has the right to recruit candidates into races where lesser candidates are already there. You'll ask me who's to say which candidate's better, and I'll get to that in a bit; but for now let's look at races where the "stronger" candidate is unquestionably obvious, and let's pick some examples from the bailiwick of our favorite incompetent party leader, RSCC head Liddy Dole.  Congressman Tom Osborne is unquestionably the most popular politician in the state of Nebraska -- not just the most electable or the most insider, but the most POPULAR.  He's certainly more popular than the three guys who are running against Dem Senator Ben Nelson right now: Don Stenberg, David Kramer, and Pete Ricketts.  But because Liddy Dole couldn't recruit him successfully into the Senate race, Tom Osborne is wasting his popularity on a fruitless battle with the incumbent GOP Governor, Dave Heineman, while Nelson skates to reelection.  Are you going to tell me that it's wrong for Liddy Dole to try to recruit Tom Osborne into the Senate race, or that he wouldn't be the strongest possible candidate against Nelson, or that Dole wouldn't have done a service both to her party and to the voters of Nebraska by putting up the strongest possible opponent against Nelson?  I think not.

Here's another example.  Dino Rossi is the most popular Republican in Washington; he just lost a really close race for Governor to Christine Gregoire.  Dole unsuccessfully recruited him to run against Senator Maria Cantwell, who won election last time by only 4,000 votes.  Rossi decided to run against Gregoire again in 2008 instead; some guy named McGavick is challenging Cantwell now.  Would it have been wrong of Dole to recruit Rossi into the race over McGavick?  Absolutely not -- in fact, it's her job -- to try to win as many Dem seats as she possibly can, with the strongest candidates she can possibly find.

Now, recruiting a candidate doesn't mean endorsing them, or doing anything for them other than asking them to enter the race.  And in many cases, it's better to let them fight it out with the other candidates than to step in -- most critically when the candidates are even and DCCC involveent would tip the balance.  It's not Emanuel's job to make one candidate beat another.  I'll say that again, because it's important: Emanuel's job is not to pick the Congressman or Congresswoman from a district in defiance of the voters.  However, I do believe there are two instances in which endorsement of a candidate in a contested primary makes sense, both for the DCCC and the voters.

First, endorsement makes sense when one candidate is truly unelectable. Don't get me wrong here, the threshold for "unelectable" is and should be really, really high -- Cegelis was certainly electable despite her progressive nature.  But when a candidate has lots of primary support but is really an extremist, endorsement of their opponent may be necessary to put a credible candidate on the ballot line.  For example, the 2001 Republican primary for Governor in New Jersey was between moderate former Governor Bob Franks and neoFascist Bret Schundler.  Schundler was a truly unelectable candidate who had neo-Nazi tendencies, but he had strong support in the primary.  The state party's failure to support Franks in the primary resulted in a Schundler victory; Schundler was then handily defeated by Jim McGreevey, and the Republicans have not won statewide elective office in New Jersey since.  Clearly, the Republicans would have been justified for the good of the party in intervening to help Franks beat Schundler.

Second, endorsement makes sense when one candidate is clearly going to beat another, but will have to spend money to pull out the victory. This situation occurs when one candidate is vastly ahead of the others but has to try to win by a huge margin anyway to look good in the primary.  For instance, when Jim Kolbe announced he was retiring his seat in AZ-08, a lot of bloggers said the Dem who was already running, Fighting Dem Jeff Latas, should have won the DCCC endorsement.  Latas is an awesome candidate and I like him a lot, but the man has not been able to raise $20,000 in almost a year of campaigning.  Emanuel took this into account when he recruited into the race State Senator Gabrielle Giffords, a telegenic centrist who raised a quarter million dollars in two weeks.  Should Emanuel have propped up a candidate who couldn't raise money in one of the most winnable open seats in the nation, or should he have made sure the voters of AZ-08 had a Dem nominee who could win in November?  I think he made unquestionably the right choice.  (The subsequent entry into the race of TV anchor Patty Weiss has complicated matters somewhat.)

Now, let's look at the preeminent instance in which DCCC recruitment and endorsement backfired -- that of IL-06.  Emanuel's immediate support of Duckworth, contrary to what people here have said, makes some sense.  Cegelis was having trouble raising money and was perceived as really liberal; in contrast, Duckworth was a centrist, a war hero, and looked great on paper.  To be fair to Emanuel, he also did not initially have the information on the ground that many of you did.  He could not have known from the get-go just how solid was Cegelis' grassroots support, because support like that chronically underperforms in polls.  In contrast, telling people the unknown Duckworth was a maimed war hero, which DCCC pollsters would have had to do because that was the only way to get a fair assessment of her ability to win the seat, would have artificially inflated her poll numbers.  The elected officials in Illinois, people like Durbin and Obama, were not behind Cegelis.  Should Emanuel have looked at the situation a little more carefully before taking his polling data to the bank?  Definitely.  But I think he's permitted the rookie mistake, because there was some basis for it.

But as time went on, it became clear that Emanuel had made a grievous error in judgment.  Cegelis was neither clearly going to lose nor ridiculously unelectable (he should have known the latter from her 2004 showing, but he ignored that result); in fact, she was surging.  Here is where Emanuel made his catastrophic error; instead of backsliding on the endorsement and waiting for the candidates to sort it out, he pulled in the big guns, raised tons of money for Duckworth, and pulled her over the finish line just ahead of Cegelis.  The weaker candidate prevailed solely because of DCCC help.

What should Emanuel have done in IL-06?  Let's look at a successful recruitment backslide, the 2004 Republican primary for Senate in South Carolina.  The seat was open, and the Dem candidate, Inez Tenenbaum, had the GOP running scared, so they recruited and endorsed moderate former Governor David Beasley.  Despite the fact that two other strong candidates, Congressman Jim DeMint and developer Thomas Ravenel, were in the race, the RSCC's move made sense: Beasley had held statewide office and was moderate and popular, while DeMint was a right-wing Congressman who supported a 23% universal sales tax and Ravenel a complete unknown.  But somewhere during the campaign, something changed.  DeMint's rabid anti-free-trade positions began to resonate with the voters; he began climbing the polls against Beasley; after the initial primary, which Beasley won, Ravenel endorsed DeMint for the runoff.  So the RSCC did what all party organizations should do when a candidate other than the one they prefer starts doing really well; they backed the hell off and let DeMint and Beasley fight it out on their own.  DeMint swamped Beasley in the runoff, and the RSCC jumped back in and raised tons of money for DeMint, who then beat Tenenbaum by ten points.

This is exactly what Emanuel should have done when Cegelis started to surge against Duckworth.  It's not his job to handhold an inferior candidate like Duckworth against a candidate who's got the hearts and minds of the people on her side.  When it became clear the race was going to be close -- as it obviously did given that Duckworth was polling the hell out of the district and not releasing her numbers -- he should have backed off, pulled his endorsement, and  offered immediate help to the winner.  Why didn't he?  Why did he hang tough with his chosen candidate when all signs pointed to her weakness?  My only explanation is pride, or a pigheadedness that he was right no matter what the experience on the ground indicated.  In any case, he managed to fuck up that district for a long time to come.  But it's important to note that Emanuel did this BECAUSE he didn't follow his own strategy, not because it's how he plays districts.  He messed up on this one big time, but not because he recruited or because he endorsed -- because he messed up on his calculations and refused to admit his mistake even when it was glaringly obvious.

In the case of NY-24 that Michael cites in his diary, the situation is completely different.  Arcuri is a resident of the district who's popular, electable, and elected; Roberts is a bit of a carpetbagger with great experience and ideas, but no name rec and no obvious popular support.  Sure, Roberts COULD be better-liked by the residents of NY-24 than Arcuri, but I do tend to assume that Rahm has access to poll numbers that the rest of us don't, and that the poll numbers show a pretty dramatic difference between Arcuri and Roberts.  Of course, those are the same polls that showed Duckworth up over Cegelis, but again that was an unusual situation -- Cegelis was a candidate with outstanding grassroots forces who's always done better than the polls expect, and Duckworth, with no name rec, would have been essentially push-polled with a description of her injuries and her service in order to procure the numbers Emanuel saw.  With Arcuri, no push-polling is necessary; everybody knows who Arcuri is and likes him, while Roberts is an unknown who has to dig himself out of a name-rec hole to even compete against Arcuri.  Unless evidence emerges that he has done so or is doing so, Roberts is exactly the kind of candidate that can fruitlessly draw off funds from Arcuri without standing a chance of beating him -- the kind of candidate Rahm should endorse against.  Arcuri is a good pick for a DCCC endorsement from all angles.

None of this is to say that the DCCC's formula is perfect; in fact, it's got some inherent biases.  The folks at the DCCC put too much emphasis on candidates being moderate; they tend to discount progressives with good ground games and lots of support, like Cegelis; they like establishment candidates over newcomers and out-of the box individuals.  There are warning signs in other races as well; to me, the DCCC's increasing support of Joe Sulzer in OH-18 over the equally-qualified Zack Space is not justified by any evidence I've seen (and any polls showing Sulzer ahead don't mean anything, because no one knows who either candidate is, even though they both hold elected office).  But by and large, Rahm has brought home the bacon for us.  He's given us candidates like Harry Mitchell in AZ-05, Ken Lucas in KY-04, Ron Klein in FL-22, Patsy Madrid in NM-01, and Angie Paccione in CO-04 -- people that wouldn't have run without significant support from the DCCC and whose candidacies put previously safe Republican seats in play.  Like I said, I don't like the guy, but he's done his job, giving us one of the strongest challenger slates in recent memory.

And I strongly disagree with the assertion that Rahm's doing this just so he can build a personal power base in the House.  That attack has merit against Schumer (think the Hackett-Brown race in Ohio) but none against Emanuel.  Why?  Because if Emanuel really wanted to build up personal loyalty among new Dem Congresspeople, he'd get involved in races like MD-3, where at least five Dems have raised six figures for a safe Dem open seat, or OH-13, where the latest poll puts the top three Dems exactly tied in the primary.  Here are two races where the outcome doesn't matter, where any of the candidates can easily win the seat, and where Emanuel could really make his mark by intervening.  And what's he doing?  Just what a conscientious DCCC head should do -- he's ignoring them and focusing on the races that matter to the ultimate goal of taking back Congress.

Furthermore, even a candidate who goes strongly against the tide of the DCCC's biases can gain critical support from Emanuel when she proves that she's got some of her own.  Why else would the DCCC be so strongly supporting Francine Busby in CA-50?  Even a liberal college professor can catch the DCCC's notice when she raises $300,000 in a single quarter.  She did it the old-fashioned way, by bringing in the cash, and Emanuel didn't even bother recruiting against her -- he'd found his candidate.

Rahm Emanuel is a DC insider hack, but he's doing his job, and doing his best to help us take back Congress for the American people.  His terrible mistake in IL-06 shouldn't make us lose sight of all the good he's done as DCCC head, or of how much he's had to do with the current good situation in which the Dem House slate finds itself today.