Sunday, Jun. 04, 2006

Whose Party Is It Anyway?

By Mike Allen, Perry Bacon Jr.

Darcy Burner knew that prospective Democratic candidates sometimes left in tears after meeting Representative Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who heads the party's efforts to recapture the House and was the one-man screening committee for recruits. Burner, an alumna of Harvard and Microsoft, didn't cry. But she found the wiry former Clinton Administration official as ruthless as any corporate chieftain she had known, as he went down a checklist of questions, including one at the top he had written to himself: Is she worth the investment of my time and the committee's money?

"Apparently, it didn't occur to him that I could read upside down," Burner recalls. Or maybe he didn't care. Either way, at the end of all his queries about polls and consultants and budgets, she asked him, "How are we doing on No. 1?"

"The jury is still out," Emanuel said with studied bluntness.

Burner, who wanted to run in a district that stretches from wealthy Seattle suburbs to farmland at the base of Mount Rainier, passed muster. Now the two are bonded on a historic adventure--the Democrats' increasingly promising quest to evict Republicans from the leadership suites they have occupied for the past dozen years. "This Microsoft mom is going to be part of us taking back the Congress," Emanuel said hoarsely at a rally in a Mercer Island, Wash., community center last week.

Equal parts coach, babysitter and disciplinarian, Emanuel, 46, has groomed Burner and 21 other varsity challengers--seven more than the number of seats that Democrats need to take control of the House. But Emanuel, a lifelong control freak, has a problem that could trip him at the finish line. Although he'll be the one taking the victory lap or the blame, it's not only his Democratic Party. His title is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)--the "D triple C," as it is known. The national party chairman is Howard Dean, former presidential candidate and Vermont Governor, who has not exactly muted his unself-conscious liberalism in the job, even while Emanuel and his star pupils are trying hard to hug the middle. Emanuel even bought radio ads on Christian radio stations recently, perhaps partly as a stunt but also to remind Reagan Democrats that they used to be Democrats.

A constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is scheduled for a vote in the Senate this week, and congressional Democrats are mostly downplaying the issue, saying the country has bigger problems to worry about. Dean, however, issued a proclamation saluting Pride Month for "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals" and lionizing the early gay advocates who stood up for themselves in June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn. On Friday and Saturday, gay-rights messages took up much of the valuable real estate of the Democratic National Committee's home page, which warned Republicans, "Don't Trample on LGBT Americans for Partisan Gain." "Wow!" exclaimed a shocked House Democratic official. "That's way off our message."

You would think victory for the party might depend on the sort of unity that until recently seemed instinctive for the Bush Republicans. But hunger for a November landslide has not kept Democrats from flying off in a variety of ideological and strategic directions even as the G.O.P. was faltering. At a time when Democratic House candidates are finding that spending restraint resonates among voters and are running on fiscal discipline, many Democrats continue to support the President's deficit spending. Democrats were so split over Iraq that House minority leader Nancy Pelosi couldn't settle on any national leader to give the party's response to President George W. Bush's State of the Union address last winter. She instead turned to a brand-new Governor, Tim Kaine of Virginia, who was better known for his views on traffic and suburban sprawl than on national security.

Democrats lately recognize the perils of entropy and have started taking steps to fix it. Democratic leaders told TIME that in coming weeks, the party will coalesce around several working-class issues, including raising the minimum wage and increasing student loans, which the leaders believe will appeal to voters concerned about values. Emanuel's candidates will sign on to a "Six in '06" list of issues with a populist theme. Dean, who says the party should appeal to Evangelicals, will echo those working-class appeals this fall with a push on values. And Pelosi has promised that bills along those lines will be the first the House would take up if Democrats won a majority.

But that unity push won't eliminate some of the tensions that have existed between Emanuel and others leading the push for a takeover of the House. Democrats worry about the long-term consequences for the party if Pelosi--whom Republicans call a San Francisco liberal but whose aides prefer to describe as a "churchgoing mother of five, grandmother of five"--becomes the public face of the majority. Allies of Pelosi, who put Emanuel in his campaign job, say that if the Democrats take over, he could become whip, the third-ranking leader. Several Democrats familiar with House sentiment speculate that if the party wins big, members might decide to be bold and pass over her for a Speaker Emanuel, which has a nice ring. (Says Emanuel: "She will be the leader. Not interested.")

So the relationship between Emanuel and Pelosi, friendly but never warm, is fraught with intrigue. Leaders of the House's black and Hispanic caucuses recently got so fed up with Emanuel over his reluctance to hire minority consultants for the fall campaign that they appealed to Pelosi to intervene, and she is working on brokering a truce. Still, Emanuel and Pelosi have come together to try to persuade Dean to stop spending so much money--for consultants and an average of four organizers and communicators in each of the 50 states. Pelosi and Emanuel want to do what the Republican National Committee is doing--husband the money so it can be pumped in massive quantities into tough but winnable races in the final months.

"My big thing is, come August, September, October, this is a resources game," Emanuel told TIME late one night after a day of West Coast fund raising. He was a bit more direct after a recent meeting he had with Dean to discuss the matter. Emanuel cursed and stormed out to go to the floor and vote, according to witnesses. "I wish the Democratic divisions could go away," Pelosi said when asked about the Dean dispute. "There's so much at stake here."

Democrats do not complain about the amount Dean is raising, just that he is spending too fast. At the end of April, his committee had $9 million on hand and the Republican National Committee had $48 million. In an interview from Oregon, Dean defended his approach with the simple logic that what the Democrats had been doing was not working and said he has a responsibility to think beyond '06. "There hasn't been a long-term business plan for a long time," he said. "We're going to win some races in places people don't expect with this 50-state strategy."

But that strategy runs counter to the highly tactical approach that Emanuel has pursued, which is to pick winnable districts and candidates who can win them. Looking to beat popular G.O.P. incumbents, Emanuel has sought out people who break the mold of the white male state legislators who generally run for Congress. He has enough female candidates running in key races that if the Democrats take over, there's sure to be a spate of Year of the Woman stories.

Heath Shuler, an ex-NFL quarterback who lives in North Carolina, resisted Emanuel's entreaties because, Shuler said, he was worried that a race would stop him from spending time with his family. Emanuel started barraging Shuler with several phone calls a day last summer, leaving messages like, "Heath, Rahm. I'm taking my kids to day care." The implication: You can do it too. Shuler signed up for the race, and polls show he's already even with Republican Charles Taylor in the Asheville district. Emanuel's army includes a sheriff, a former FBI agent and several Iraq war veterans, including Tammy Duckworth, a National Guard pilot who lost both legs when a grenade exploded in her helicopter in Iraq.

Each week the DCCC brands one congressional Republican the "Rubber Stamp of the Week," to mock fervent support for President Bush, and holds a conference call with reporters in the member's district to hammer the point home. "Our rapid-response operation is presidential timber," Emanuel brags.

In April, when the DCCC found out that Representative Richard Pombo, a Republican from Northern California, was attending a Houston fund raiser organized by energy lobbyists while gas prices continued to shoot up, the committee quickly alerted local reporters, leading to headlines like ENERGY LOBBYISTS FUEL POMBO in the San Francisco Chronicle. Many of these ideas come from Emanuel, who emerges from a predawn swim at his YMCA in Washington each morning and soon starts barking out orders to his aides.

"I don't need an alarm clock anymore," says David Axelrod, a Chicago political strategist who consults for the House campaign. Emanuel sends cheesecakes from the famed Chicago bakery Eli's to show his appreciation to donors and recruits. But last year he cut off use of the phone lines at the DCCC for House Democrats who fail to pay their dues to the campaign committee, which can run from around $100,000 to $600,000 depending on seniority. The DCCC is one of the few physical places those politicians can use to raise cash during work hours, as they are barred from making the calls from their offices, so many Democrats are miffed by the threat of another crackdown. Candidates who are getting lots of money from Emanuel's committee have to sign formal agreements that they will bring in enough on their own to compete in the district and get attention in local media--something Emanuel calls "M-squared," for money and message.

Shuler, the quarterback who had never run for office, hears from Emanuel as often as once a week. "So how much money have you raised today?" Emanuel asks, often barely greeting Shuler before getting to the question. "We don't need pronouns, adjectives or verbs," says Emanuel. "They know why we're calling."

With reporting by Eli Sanders/Seattle, Michael Duffy/Washington