Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Get those palms and scattered garments ready: the Savior is coming to town, and his name is Rahm Emanuel. Rahm is God, and the Washington Post is his prophet:

As the member of Congress responsible for recruiting candidates for House races, raising money and vetting strategy for dozens of districts, [Rahm has] received raves from campaign connoisseurs in Washington for running a taut committee. Notably, he's nearly closed the perennial cash-on-hand gap between his team -- with $36 million in the bank at the end of September -- and its GOP counterpart. He's fielded credible candidates in districts no one had expected to be in play a year ago. And he's generally been flogging the party like a never-satisfied CEO.

"He has been an amazing success any way you look at it," says congressional scholar Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. "I think it's the best operation of any chairman of either party in several years."

If Democrats do take the House -- they need to gain 15 seats to do so -- Emanuel, in only his second term in Congress, stands to claim considerable credit for ending a 12-year electoral drought. That's the kind of triumph Johnson rode to the top of the Senate.

This veni-Emanuel outlook has been heartily embraced here and there in the blogsphere, e.g.

If Democrats win back the House, this guy gets all the credit

"They call Tammy Duckworth a cut-and-runner when she left two legs in Iraq?" [Rahm] shouts, jabbing a finger in the air, drawing stares from around the deli. "How dare they! I'm going to give them the medicine that they've been giving out. That's what shocks them."

It takes a Chicagoan to fight a Republican on their own turf.

This Americablog post attracted some grousing comments to the effect that hey, maybe Howard Dean deserves some credit too. Now I agree that Rahm Emanuel is no Lyndon Johnson, but then neither is Howard Dean. In fact, what none of the blog munchkins is willing to acknowledge is that the only people the Democrats will have to thank for any advances they make in November are... the Republicans. The Repubs may be flying the plane right into the ground, but they're still the ones at the controls.