It means little to have an election if voters have but a single choice.
    People ask, "Doesn't the Democratic Party victory in 2006 prove that the
machines were not fixed?" (And that all those bizarre results from 2000 on
must have been just, well, bizarre.) If the Republicans controlled the
machines, surely they wouldn't have permitted themselves to lose...
    Well there are plenty of indications that they didn't "permit" this (see
especially the work of Simon and O'Dell), but is the assumption even
correct? Who in fact won and lost in 2006? In its ideological and voting
make-up the 110th United States Congress hardly differs from its
predecessor. Despite an overwhelming desire among the electorate for change,
from most every vantage point, the Democratic Party victory in 2006 didn't
change anything at all.
    This report shows why: a large proportion of the victorious 2006
Democrats were wealthy conservatives - often actually (former) Republicans!
- recruited and financed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
(DCCC), Truthout's Matt Renner writes, "Rahm Emanuel, then head of the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, took sides during the
Democratic primary elections, favoring conservative candidates, including
former Republicans, and sidelining candidates who were running in favor of
withdrawal from Iraq."
    Despite an official policy of neutrality in primary races, the DCCC
seems to have fought harder to defeat "fringe" (i.e., anti-war,
anti-warrantless wiretapping, or pro election-reform) Democrats in the
primary than to beat Republicans in the general election.

 Democratic House Officials Recruited Wealthy Conservatives

By Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t | Report

Thursday 06 September 2007

This letter sent from then DCCC Head Rahm Emanuel to Democratic House
hopeful Jan Schneider underscores a DCCC policy of remaining "neutral" in
primary races. Schneider soon came to doubt the letter's sincerity.

   It was the day after Christmas 2005 and Christine Cegelis sat alone at
her dining room table, trying to figure out how to tell her campaign
volunteers that she was going to drop out of the 2006 Democratic primary.
    The next evening she was to meet with friends and colleagues who had
organized around her candidacy for the House of Representatives in the 6th
District of Illinois. Her volunteers had walked block after block of the
suburban district and spent hours making phone calls to solicit donations
and promote the campaign. Many of these people had been at Cegelis's side
during her 2004 campaign and witnessed the fruits of their labor when
long-time Republican Representative Henry Hyde decided to retire instead of
facing Cegelis again in 2006. This was their shot to have a national impact.
    But pressure coming from the national Democratic Party was too great.
The Democrats had found a challenger for Cegelis, an Iraq veteran named
Tammy Duckworth. Contributions were pouring into the opposing campaign and
Duckworth was shuttled into the national media spotlight. Cegelis began
receiving calls from Democratic members of Congress informing her that they
were planning to support Duckworth.
    Some of Cegelis's own paid campaign staff implored her to drop out; and
she had every reason to listen. She had only $40,000 in the bank, her
campaign manager had given up on the campaign and given her office staff two
weeks' paid vacation without Cegelis' permission, and her media coordinator
had recently quit. Rumor had it that Illinois Senator Barack Obama was going
to star in television commercials for Duckworth - star power the Cegelis
campaign could never match.
    The next day when she sat down in her campaign office with her twelve
closest volunteers, Cegelis prepared herself to admit defeat. She laid out
the worst-case scenario: The Democratic Party was willing to spend millions
of dollars to defeat her in the primary. If she did manage to beat
Duckworth, the party would not help her in the general election, leaving the
campaign on its own to face a Republican candidate who was hand picked by
the national Republican Party.
    Instead of agreeing to quit, every one of her volunteers looked her in
the eye and said, "We are here to fight."
    In May 2004, a former candidate for the New York State Legislature named
Cynthia Pooler founded November Victories and Democrat Unity, online forums
for new candidates who were running for Congress as Democrats.
    "Before you knew it, candidates started talking about the difficulties
they were having with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and
the Democratic leadership," Pooler said.
    According to Democratic candidates who ran for House of Representative
seats in 2006, Rahm Emanuel, then head of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee, took sides during the Democratic primary elections,
favoring conservative candidates, including former Republicans, and
sidelining candidates who were running in favor of withdrawal from Iraq.
    Appointed as head of the DCCC by then-House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi, Emanuel spearheaded the Democratic Party effort to regain control of
the House of Representatives during the 2006 election cycle. Emanuel claimed
credit for the Democratic takeover and was promoted to chairman of the
Democratic Caucus, the fourth-highest ranking position in the House. But his
election tactics have been criticized by progressive activists and former
Congressional candidates.
    According to his critics, Emanuel played kingmaker by financially
supporting his favored candidates during primary contests with other
Democrats. His critics say that this interference was in direct
contradiction of a DCCC policy to "remain neutral" in party primaries.
    According to Doug Thornell, spokesperson for the DCCC, "The policy of
the DCCC is not to get involved in primaries, unless there is an unusual
circumstance that demands it. I cannot speculate on what those circumstances
might be. The majority of these cases [2008 primaries] will be left up to
the voters on the ground. Meddling hasn't taken place this cycle, and for
the most part last cycle. That isn't an accurate way to describe what
happened. We are cognizant of having local support for our candidates."
    Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, would not
comment on the DCCC's alleged interference.
    However, a source close to the DNC indicated that there was disagreement
between Dean and Emanuel over election tactics. In his recent book, "The
Thumpin'," Naftali Bendavid, a journalist who spent months inside the DCCC
operation and at Emanuel's side, reported a heated conversation between
Dean, Emanuel and Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) regarding election
strategies of the DCCC and the DNC. At the time, Dean was focusing on
helping local organizations across the country to mobilize their communities
to support Democrats. Emanuel wanted to focus the resources of the national
party on specific races that were the most likely to be competitive for
Democrats. According to Bendavid, Emanuel said to Dean, "You're nowhere,
Howard. Your field plan is not a field plan. That's fucking bullshit ... I
know your field plan - it doesn't exist. I've gone around the country with
these races. I've seen your people. There is no plan, Howard."
    How Emanuel came to his decisions about which candidates to support
against Democratic opponents is known only to Emanuel and his staff. Emanuel
declined direct comment on this story. But an examination of individual
races reveals a pattern of financial and political support for wealthy
conservative candidates and an assault on their grassroots-supported
opponents who were running on platforms that included a full withdrawal of
US forces from Iraq.
Illinois's 6th District: Christine Cegelis vs. Tammy Duckworth
    A well-documented instance of interference by the DCCC during a
Democratic primary occurred during the contest between Christine Cegelis and
Tammy Duckworth. Cegelis, a strong proponent of withdrawal from Iraq,
encountered unexpected and effective opposition from the DCCC.
    Cegelis challenged former 16-term Republican Congressman Henry Hyde in
2004. An information technology specialist, Cegelis had no previous
experience in politics, but decided to face off against an entrenched
incumbent Republican. Her 2004 campaign, run on a meager budget with mostly
volunteer staff, was able to create a tightly knit grassroots infrastructure
in the Illinois 6th Congressional District. In 2004, Cegelis received just
over 44 percent of the vote. The 82- year-old Hyde decided to retire rather
than face another reelection campaign in 2006. This seat became a top target
for the Democratic leaders and a microcosm of a much larger battle for the
future of the Democratic Party.
    Emanuel, himself a congressman from the neighboring 5th District of
Illinois, apparently tried to recruit six different candidates to run
against Cegelis. According to Kevin Spidel, campaign manager for the Cegelis
campaign, all of Emanuel's attempts failed because the potential candidates
"all said 'hell no!' They knew the resentment they would face. If you were
in the district, you knew how much Cegelis was loved. She built her own
machine."
    Eventually, Emanuel found a candidate who lived just outside the
district, Tammy Duckworth. Duckworth, a helicopter pilot who was severely
injured in combat in Iraq, was convinced to run against Cegelis by Emanuel
and two Democratic heavyweights, Illinois Senators Dick Durbin and Barack
Obama.
    Duckworth was not a proponent of a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq.
The Los Angeles Times, quoting Duckworth, reported that she believed the
military should not "'simply pull up stakes' in Iraq because it would
'create a security vacuum' and 'risk allowing [Iraq] ... to become a base
for terrorists.'" According to the same article, Duckworth supported "a
pullout of US forces on a ...

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Steven Freeman wrote, "It means little to have an election if voters have but a single choice [wearing two masks]."

In his 1992 Inaugural address, Bill Clinton, former Cecil Rhodes scholar, gave praise to his mentor Carroll Quigley, a Georgetown University historian and political scientist who was given unrestricted access to the records and personages of the Council for Foreign Relations, the official voice of the Eastern Establishment.  Quigley published a magnum opus  of nearly 1,400 pages, Tragedy and Hope in 1966.  The CFR was shocked and furious, suppressed the book, and destroyed parts of the plates.  Quigley sued in vain; the courts ruled that the publisher had met its obligations by printing the book even though it refused to print it further and destroyed the plates it had used to print it.   This process is called "privishing."

The CFR's traditional mechanism of control has not been the outright massive rigging of the vote count, a much more recent development reflecting the rise of the neoconservative-religious right opponents of the CFR, with whom they still share the goal of global hegemony and under the aegis of preserving "international order" and civilization itself.    Here is Quigley on the way things were typically done.   The method can also be found spelled out in Phillip Dru, Administrator, written anonymously in 1912 by Edward Mandell House,  Woodrow Wilson's "other self," and the CFR's man who put Wilson in the White House and who guided all his policies.
  "As we have said, this Eastern Establishment was really above parties and was much more concerned with policies than with party victories.  They had been the dominant element in both parties since 1900, and practiced the political techniques of William C. Whitney and J.P. Morgan.  They were, as we have said, Anglophilic, cosmopolitan, Ivy League, internationalist, astonishingly liberal, patrons of the arts, and relatively humanitarian. ...The chief problem of American Political Life [for the CFR] for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international.  The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.  Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy."  pp. 1244-1248.
Regards,

Michael Green

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