Can’t Hackett

Paul Hackett needs to get his act together for the sake of the progressive movement.

By Tim Fernholz, Georgetown University

When Jean Schmidt won a special Congressional election last August in Ohio ’s second district, the progressives were celebrating. Our candidate, Paul Hackett, a lawyer and veteran of the Iraq War, had lost by barely 4 percentage points in a district where Democrats never get within 30 percent of their opponents. The tide, we said, was turning—the race was just a trial run for 2006, when Hackett and other progressive candidates would be able to capitalize on the corruption and poor governance of Congress and win across the country. But as it became clear that Ohio Republican Senator Mike DeWine was vulnerable, Hackett supporters—and Democratic party leaders—urged him to join the larger race. After progressive Ohio Congressman Sherrod Brown decided to run against DeWine, pressure on Hackett mounted to drop out of the Senate race to avoid a difficult primary and to run again for the congressional seat. Yesterday, Hackett, blaming pressure from party officials, jumped back out. And that’s a good thing.

Unsurprisingly, some in the liberal blogosphere—which had been instrumental in gaining Hackett the exposure and funding that made his first race successful—freaked out when Hackett dropped out. So did Democratic veterans groups, including the recently formed Band of Brothers, a group dedicated to electing veterans to Congress. The usual charges rang out—the party establishment had once again sabotaged the grassroots outsiders; the Democrats had once again fouled up the chance to run a successful candidate. But these charges aren’t true. The two problems here are the ego of Hackett and the confused priorities of liberal bloggers.

Diarists at DailyKos and MyDD argue that Hackett’s withdrawal came at the hands of the establishment, and they’re right—it did. And that’s exactly what should have happened: As Ezra Klein notes, it’s the party leadership’s job to make sure that the strongest candidates are running in competitive races. Once upon a time, it seemed like every other Daily Kos thread wondered why the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee weren’t paying attention to their favorite race. Now that they’re involved up to their elbows, it’s strange that the activists are complaining.

Sure, it looks bad when Hackett leaves the race spewing bile, but its hardly the fault of DCCC Chair Representative Rahm Emmanuel or his DSCC counterpart, Senator Chuck Schumer. Both have been trying to massage Hackett back into OH-2 for months. Hackett complained that party officials told campaign donors to end their support for his candidacy, but that’s what happens when you can’t take a hint in the big leagues. As Klein and other smart pundits are noting, the establishment didn’t care that Hackett was an ‘outsider’ (look how good they are at co-opting outsiders: think Barack Obama at the DNC National Convention), they cared that he was a political novice with 11 months of political experience entering a statewide race without a campaign to back him.

But what about those who say that candidates should be chosen in competitive primaries, without national interference? Even if you ignore the fact that Brown’s fundraising, polling and organization made him practically a shoe-in to win the nomination—remember, as does Daily Kos founder Markos Moulsitas, who defended the effort to get behind Brown, that Hackett’s Congressional campaign was essentially run by Brown’s aides—it’s a smart move for progressives to save our most precious resource: good candidates. Why waste two candidates in a bloody inter-party struggle when we could potentially put one in the Senate and the other in the House? It’s the same liberal bloggers who hate Senator Joe Lieberman for criticizing other Democrats in the press who would love to see two progressives in a knife-fight just for the sake of grassroots democracy. And the Band of Brothers didn’t complain when the DCCC forced Iraq veteran Tammy Duckworth into a Congressional primary against locally-anointed candidate Christine Cegelis in Il-06.

Primaries are important when there are clear ideological differences between the candidates, when one candidate has been tainted by scandal or has been in office for too long. It’s another situation entirely when two relatively young, progressive candidates are duking it out: If one has the campaign to win the big race and the other doesn’t, then there’s no need for a primary, there’s a need for common sense. And if there’s no common sense, then the establishment steps in to sort things out.

That’s why this whole furor is so unnerving. Progressives have forgotten the number one rule of today’s politics: Win. If we want better governance, smarter policy and a Congress we can be proud of, we have to put one there. We can waste our time arguing over who’s in the establishment and who’s not, or we can put progressive candidates in races they can win. That’s why Moulsitas (who, by the way, ought to be forcibly inducted into the ‘establishment,’ his protestations notwithstanding, any day now) isn’t losing too much sleep over this: Because he wants to win. If the liberal bloggers would rather complain about their golden boy getting pushed out of a primary race he can’t win, they don’t.

But there are some pundits who argue that taking Hackett out of play is bad for progressives because it hurts their credibility on national security. They ought to remember that Hackett took himself out of play—I bet Rahm would do a back flip if Hackett ran in OH-2— and that there is more than one Iraq vet running this year.

And speaking of progressives in competitive races, what about Brown, who has gotten lost in the Hackett maelstrom? He’s one of two members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to run for state-wide office. He’s an experienced legislator which will allow him to do more in the Senate than Hackett could have.

It’s time for progressives to get some team spirit. That means we put our best players on the field. And that means that no one player is more important than the whole. Hackett was great candidate this summer. He served his country with honor and distinction. He’s smart, he’s a straight shooter, he’s got the drive to be a great politician. With any luck, he’ll reconsider his early retirement, swallow his pride and run for Congress. If he doesn’t want that job, he’ll have only himself to blame for his new one: bench warmer. And if some progressives don’t realize that having a winning progressive candidate is better than a pointless fight over who’s in charge of the progressive movement, they’ll get to keep their old title: losers.

Tim Fernholz is the Senior Writer at the Georgetown Voice and an intern at The New Republic. He can be reached at tfernholz@gmail.com.

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