Excerpt:
"Wherever they were given the opportunity, voters across the country went strongly for antiwar candidates. True, the national Democrats, led by Rahm Emanuel of the Democratic Congressional Campaign, had tried pretty successfully to keep such peaceniks off the ballot, but in a few key races the antiwar progressives romped home. The Democrats won, despite Emanuel. If the Clintonites weren't still controlling most of the campaign money, and more openly antiwar populists had been running, the Democrats today would probably be looking at a wider majority in the House and one committed solidly to getting out of Iraq.
Take the sixth district in Illinois, in the Chicago suburbs. This was where the national Democrats threw money at Tammy Duckworth, the prowar double-amputee running in the primary against antiwar Christine Cegalis, who almost took down Republican Henry Hyde in 2004. Flush with Emanuel's campaign cash, Duckworth narrowly beat Cegalis. But yesterday Duckworth's clouded message on the war failed to rouse the voters and she went down to defeat.
In northern California, another of Emanuel's Democrats was Charlie Brown, an Iraq vet. The race looked like a landslide for the Republican but in the last weeks it began to tighten up. Then in a debate, Doolittle, the Republican, tried to bait Brown with supposed ties to Cindy Sheehan. Instead of standing his ground and denouncing the war, Brown quavered that he had no ties to Sheehan and Mrs Brown later told Sheehan to stay away. Confronted with this craven performance voters gave up on Brown and the awful Doolittle cantered home.
In the nearby district around Modesto it was a different story. Here was a ripe target, an implacable foe of nature called Richard Pombo, who had spent his entire career campaigning against the Endangered Species Act, and any enjoyment of nature other than the enrichment of cotton and rice farmers. In the primary season Rahm Emanuel and George Miller put the party's resources behind a Pombo lookalike who was duly trounced by Jerry McNerney, an antiwar foe of corporate agriculture. National Democrats chafed at McNerney's effrontery and predicted victory for Pombo.
But on Tuesday the voters leaped at their opportunity. They booted out Pombo and sent McNerney to Washington. In the upset's aftermath, the Contra Costa Times marveled, "It will go down in California history as a massive upset in a congressional district where the incumbent held a 6 percentage point party registration advantage. No other district in the state has ever flipped parties with such a large registration gap."
In northern Kentucky another progressive Democrat opposed by the Emanuel Machine, John Yarmuth, an alternative newspaper publisher, was nonetheless able to survive the primary. On Tuesday he defeated Anne Northrup, a popular Republican incumbent.
So the Democrats have taken the House, but Emanuel should not be crowing too loudly. The Democrats' victories were clearly driven by antiwar sentiment across the country. Furthermore the contour of success in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, send a very clear message that if the Democrats keep on pushing the old Clinton neoliberal recipe as now purveyed by Emanuel and the others, they will not recapture the White House in 2008, or even bolster their position in the Senate."
The rest here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11082006.html
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