Posted by Mike Dorning at 1:57 pm CST.
Rahm Emanuel, who led his party’s successful campaign to take control of the House, will not try to ride the wave from the election victory into the high-visibility congressional leadership post of Majority Whip.
Instead, he will run for the chairmanship of the House Democratic Caucus, the fourth highest post among House Democrats.
The 46-year old Chicago Democratic congressman had been weighing a bid for party whip, which will be the third-ranking post in the House Democratic leadership in the next Congress and would have given Emanuel a place in the top rank of the leadership only four years after he arrived in Congress. He will announce his decision to sit out the whip race later today.
A bid for the whip’s post would have put him in a contest with Rep. James Clyburn, an African-American congressman who is strongly backed by the Congressional Black Caucus. Clyburn is currently the Democratic Caucus Chairman.
“I seek this post, and not any other, because I believe what we need now is a unified Democratic caucus, focused squarely on the business of moving this country forward,” Emanuel said.A former Clinton White House aide known for his aggressive style and blunt, obscenity-peppered speech, Emanuel’s leadership of the congressional campaign stirred tensions with minority lawmakers.
Some black and Hispanic Democratic members of congress protested what they considered heavy-handed pressure from Emanuel to make large contributions from their campaign funds to the overall Democratic effort to take the House. They argued the contribution quotas did not take sufficient account of the low-income constituencies they represent and their diminished ability to raise funds. There were also complaints that his campaign committee did not hire enough minority staff.
Though this week’s Democratic sweep was driven by voter dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and corruption in Washington, Emanuel’s leadership of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been widely credited with providing the infrastructure to transform the shift in voter sentiments to a Democratic victory.
An exceptionally strong fundraising effort that Emanuel oversaw narrowed the money gap that Democrats typically have faced in campaigns against Republicans, allowing the party to at least stay competitive in the ad wars. His candidate recruitment efforts early in the two-year election cycle positioned solid challengers in previously Republican districts who could seize the moment when pupblic sentiment shifted against the GOP. And early on in the campaign, he began aggressively pressing a theme of a “Culture of Corruption” in Washington, a message that fit easily into a broader theme of accountability as the country turned against the failures in the Iraq War.
Despite his decision not to seek the whip post, Emanuel’s electoral success is likely to enhance his stature within the Democratic party. He already is a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which controls tax and trade policy.
