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How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution
Doubleday
May 2007
On Sale: May 8, 2007
272 pages ISBN: 0385523289 EAN: 9780385523288 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
In the 2006 midterm elections, the Democratic party ended
twelve years of electoral humiliation by seizing back
Congress and putting an end to Republican rule. The Thumpin’
is the story of that historic victory and the man at the
center on whom Democratic hopes hinged: Congressman Rahm
Emanuel, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee (DCCC). Chicago Tribune reporter Naftali Bendavid had exclusive
access to Emanuel and the DCCC in the year and a half
leading up to the elections and ended up with the story of a
lifetime, the thrilling blow-by-blow account of how Emanuel
remade the campaign in his own ferocious image. Responsible
for everything from handpicking Congressional candidates to
raising money for attack ads, Emanuel, a talented ballet
dancer better known in Washington for his extraordinary
intensity and his inexhaustible torrents of profanity, threw
out the playbook on the way Democrats run elections. Instead of rallying the base, Rahm sought
moderate-to-conservative candidates who could attract more
traditional voters. Instead of getting caught in the
Democrats’ endless arguments about their positions, he went
on the attack, personally vilifying Republicans from Tom
DeLay to Christopher Shays. And instead of abiding by the
gentlemen’s agreements of good-old-boy Washington, he broke
them, attacking his counterpart in the Republican party and
challenging Howard Dean, the chairman of his own party. In 2005, no one believed victory was within the Democrats’
grasp. But as the months passed, Republicans were caught in
wave after wave of scandal, support for the war in Iraq
steadily declined, and the president’s poll numbers
plummeted. And in Emanuel, the Democrats finally had a
killer, a ruthless closer like Karl Rove or Lee Atwater,
poised to seize the advantage and deliver what President
Bush would call “a thumpin.’” Taking its cues from classic political page-turners like
Showdown at Gucci Gulch and documentaries like The War Room,
The Thumpin’ takes us inside the key races and the national
strategy-making that moved the Democrats from forecasted
gains of three seats in 2005 to a sweeping gain of thirty
seats when the votes were finally counted. Through this
masterful account of Rahm’s rout, Bendavid shows how the
lessons the Democrats learned in 2006—to fight for every
vote, to abandon litmus tests, and to take no prisoners—will
be crucial to the party’s future electoral success, and
shape the political course the nation will take in the
twenty-first century.
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