Rahm Emanual's Speech at Brookings

Thanks to Greg Sargent of TPM the full text of Rahm's speech is available here. It is all that the excerpts promised and then some. In particular I very much approve of what I can best describe as the tone of the speech. We on the left, thanks to our reality based character and love of critical review and the scientific approach, too often come across as not quite being sure of our position until the audience approves. The thing is that is exactly the right attitude when presenting a scientific finding. As a scientist you are looking for everyone else in the field to critically review your work and test it before treating it as a fact. Some measure of uncertainty is expected, even from the researcher himself, until some consensus is reached among other knowledgeable researchers. However, in the political realm one needs to speak more as an attorney would to a jury. In that case, the attorney should already be firmly convinced of his clients case before starting to address the jury and should always treat the conclusions as being already resolved. That legal attitude I get from this speech by Rahm Emanuel. I am very glad to see it.

Fantastic

Wow, all I can say is wow.

Well, ok I can say more. This from over at TPM is an advanced copy of remarks that Rahm Emanuel will make tomorrow at the Brookings Institute. Rahm has certainly picked up the steam that we progressives have been longing to see in our Democratic leaders. Go over to Josh's site and read it all, but a few quotes here

His[Rahm's] aides are billing the speech as a broad and far-reaching indictment of the GOP and the Bush administration that seeks to find a common thread in all the GOP scandals from the Attorney Purge to the Katrina failure to the mendacity that brought us the Iraq war.

That common thread: On every conceivable policy front, the administration and the GOP have placed party before country, and government has become politicized to its core. Rather than casting the administration's manifold failings as simply the result of incompetence, Emanuel will argue that they're really driven by nothing more than all-pervasive partisanship -- the imperative of putting party before country, always, without fail.

"There is a common denominator," Emanuel will say. "Instead of promoting solutions to our nation’s broad challenges, the Bush Administration used all the levers of power to promote their party and its narrow interests...Nothing was free from political influence."

This captures a point I've tried to make before. These are not, and should not be treated as, a bunch of individual issues. There is a common theme throughout these issues, which incidentally Rahm has captured very well. I was frustrated in the run up to the 2006 election with talk implying that we had to pick one issue to make the center of the campaign. All the progressive issues are tied together and we can, and should, always make a point of linking them and showing the links. Read the whole thing and look for a full transcript tomorrow. It will be well worth noting.