DUmmie FUnnies 03-24-06 (Pied Piper Pitt---The New Bob Shrum?)

Good News! Despite my deep concern, following his DEBACLE as an advisor for the Cegelis campaign primary in the Illinois 6th Congressional District, Pied Piper Pitt has RETURNED! Yes, I was deeply concerned that having FAILED at yet another endeavor, Pitt would hit the Bukowski barroom floor, never to get up again. And why my strange compassion for William Rivers (Pied Piper) Pitt? It is because I have come to realize that this hapless shmoe is becoming a new BOB SHRUM.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bob Shrum, he is a Democrat campaign advisor who is a BLESSING for Republicans. The reason for this is that Shrum is cursed with the WORST track record of anybody involved in politics. In over 30 years as a campaign consultant, Shrum has a track record that is exactly 0 for 7 in presidential campaigns. That's right. Bob Shrum has NEVER been involved in a successful presidential campaign EVER. His record is so bad that one suspects that Shrum actually brings BAD LUCK to his campaigns. Apparently John Kerry felt sorry for Bob Shrum and decided to give the old campaign consultant ONE LAST CHANCE so he could rack up just ONE presidential victory in his career before going out to pasture. Big mistake. Of course, Bob Shrum thought he had broken his curse on election night 2004. It was a little after 7 P.M. and the exit polls showed John Kerry winning in a landslide. A jubilant Bob Shrum, thinking he FINALLY had a presidential campaign win under his belt, said to Kerry, "May I be the first to say 'Mr. President'?" Kerry's campaign staff reportedly CRINGED at those words, probably thinking of his PERFECT track record for losing. However, they were too late. The very presence of Bob Shrum in any presidential campaign in any capacity whatever is enough to DOOM it.

Likewise, Pied Piper Pitt is developing a Shrum-like record for losing. In less than a year, Pitt has FLOPPED in every major endeavor he has attempted. Last June was supposedly the DAY WHEN EVERYTHING FINALLY CHANGED when he organized a rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. over the Downing Street Memos. Of course, that rally fizzled out and was quickly forgotten. This was followed by the NEXT DAY WHEN EVERYTHING FINALLY CHANGED which was to be a MONUMENTAL anti-war rally in September. Talk about bad timing! As a result of Pitt/Shrum luck, Hurricane Rita hit the mainland on the same day as that rally (in which Pitt denies having absolutely ANY contact with the A.N.S.W.E.R. comrades despite the fact that his PDA organization worked closely with that group to organize the event). The result was there was NO NEWS at all on TV about the rally (or at least none on that evening's NBC News which I watched).

And now the latest effort by the Shrumian Pitt. A congressional contest in which Pitt and his PDA forces were to elect the most "progressive" (farthest Left) candidate in that race, Cegellis. Not only does Pitt describe here the DISASTER that happens with unintentional humor on his TruthOut.Org page in an article titled, "The Mouse That Roared," but he pretty much DOOMS whatever chance the eventual Democrat nominee of that race has with his snide remarks. So let us now watch the good work that Pitt is doing for conservatives in his role as the NEW Bob Shrum in Bolshevik Red while the commentary of your humble correspondent, asking if I may be the first to call him "Mr. Shrum," is in the [brackets]:

When I walked into the headquarters of the Christine Cegelis for Congress campaign, I was immediately struck by the bustling energy in the hallways and offices. Campaign headquarters was on the third floor of a cookie-cutter building on Highland Street, a nice space with all the amenities. There was a body at every phone, groups gathered in conference rooms to pour over maps and walking sheets, and volunteers banging through the glass doors on their way to work the precincts.

[Little did they know but they were about to suffer from the CURSE of Shrum...I mean Pitt.]

The frenetic energy within campaign headquarters reflected the overall mood of the race itself. This was no ordinary primary. It had turned into a David v. Goliath brawl within the Democratic party, a challenge to see just how far a grassroots organization could carry the fight against a well-funded campaign that was supported by some of the leading lights of the Democratic establishment.

[It was also a way for Pied Piper Pitt to showcase himself for Mama T's BoyToy, in an effort to get a PAYING job with that presidential primary campaign. Of course, it all depended on Pitt racking up a WIN for his candidate.]

The story of the race for the Illinois 6th District House seat, which encompasses portions of both Cook County and DuPage County, shakes out like this. In 2004, Christine Cegelis, a mother of two who worked in the technology sector, challenged Henry Hyde for the seat. Hyde had been an institution in the 6th to this point, holding the seat for sixteen terms in a district that had been reliably Republican for decades. Hyde, as well as many others, were quite surprised when Cegelis managed to get 44.2% of the vote after stomping her primary opponent by nearly a 2-1 margin.

[It was those DAMN Diebold machines that did her in!]

Hyde chose to retire in 2005, making the Illinois 6th an open seat for the first time since the Carter administration. The work done by the Cegelis campaign in 2004 essentially established, for the first time in a long time, a serious Democratic presence in the district. Cegelis chose to continue campaigning even after the '04 election, and had been working ever since towards a run in 2006. She had established a ground game and name recognition among the constituents she hoped to represent, and based her campaign on the need to bring jobs back to the area.

[Including a presidential campaign job for a very hopeful Shrum wannabee.]

Enter Rahm Emmanuel and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Emmanuel, himself a congressman from a neighboring district, has been a kingmaker with the DCCC as chairman. He saw the open seat in the 6th as an excellent opportunity to cut into the GOP majority in the House, and made the race for that seat a central priority of the DCCC. For whatever reasons, however, Emmanuel chose to ignore Christine Cegelis and the work she had done, and instead endeavored to pull a different candidate into the race.

[Rahm Emmanuel Goldstein---the Apostate of the Far Left.]

Emmanuel spent eleven months searching for an alternative to Cegelis. He started with an Illinois state senator, who turned Emmanuel down for personal reasons. He next approached Peter O'Malley, a lawyer who works with the Illinois Mediation Service. O'Malley got into the race, but finding his campaign unable to raise any money to challenge Cegelis, dropped out in the summer. Emmanuel next approached Brian McPartlin, Chief of Administration of the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, who did not want to leave his job and turned the offer down. A local businesswoman was approached after McPartlin refused the job, but the campaign never materialized. It appeared, for a time, that Christine Cegelis was going to weather this inter-party storm and stand as the candidate.

[Pied Piper Pitt carefully adjusts the Hate Week Telescreen so we can properly scream at his image of Rahm Emmanuel Goldstein.]

After a long and fruitless search, Emmanuel finally located a candidate willing to challenge Cegelis. Tammy Duckworth was an Army Major and an Iraq War veteran who had lost both legs when her helicopter was attacked. Duckworth was not a resident of the district, and has a voting record that is only two years old. Emmanuel and the DCCC, however, believed her status as a veteran would be a boon to fundraising efforts, and would be attractive to moderates and conservatives who swoon over anyone who has worn a uniform. The running of Iraq veterans is a DCCC plan being enacted in a variety of other districts across the country.

[Thanx for publicly smacking down Democrat candidate Duckworth to ensure a Republican win in that race in November. Your efforts will be rewarded with a Bob Shrum Kewpie Doll.]

During Emmanuel's long search, a third candidate for the Democratic primary in the 6th district emerged. Lindy Scott, an evangelican Christian college professor, jumped into the race with the belief that he could bring religiously-oriented voters back into the party. Throughout the primary, Scott polled in the low teens, but would wind up having a significant effect on the overall outcome.

[EVANGELICAN! Shout it out with the same gusto as "UZBEKS!" < /SCTV Reference>]

The Cegelis campaign, meanwhile, was sailing through rough waters of its own. The campaign manager managed to spend $250,000 on nothing, putting the campaign into a deep financial hole. The ground network established since 2004 was left fallow. Six weeks before the primary, Cegelis fired her campaign manager, along with virtually her entire staff, and brought in a man named Kevin Spidel. Spidel, who was at the time serving as Deputy National Director for Progressive Democrats of America, took a leave of absence from PDA to take over as campaign manager. He organized a whole new staff, took a look at the money they had on hand, and engineered a whole new plan based on the ground network that had once been the main strength of Cegelis' run.

[And thanx for DOOMING any future political career that Cegelis might have had. Think anybody will vote for her after you squealed about how hapless she was by allowing her campaign manager to blow all her dough on "nothing?"]

The challenge was daunting. Emmanuel brought in Senators Durbin, Obama and Kerry, along with a variety of other leading lights, to do vigorous fundraising for Duckworth. He reached out to David Axelrod, a powerful campaign and media consultant in Chicago, to help with a media blitz. By the end of the campaign, the Duckworth crew had sent eleven different pieces of direct mail to voters in the district, covered the airwaves with commercials, and had spent close to $1,000,000.

[Can I keep the kewl giant Telescreen after I yell curses at the image of Rahm Emmanuel Goldstein?]

The Cegelis crew, however, was not interested in quitting. First of all, their candidate's stand on a variety of local and national issues was far clearer than those of Duckworth, especially on the issue of the Iraq occupation. They believed their candidate to be more than a match for the GOP opponent they would face in November, a far-right DeLay clone named Peter Roskam.

[Play ominous Count Floyd music < /SCTV Reference> in the background when you say "far-right Delay clone."]

More than anything, however, was a sense of outrage directed at Emmanuel, the DCCC and the Democratic party establishment in general. Where did they get off bringing in an outsider with no local support? Where did they get off trying to poach the hard work Cegelis had done over the previous two years to establish a Democratic presence in a district that had not known of such a thing for decades? All the money in the world, and all the endorsements from Democratic worthies, could not change the essence of their beliefs.

[HATE! HATE! HATE Rahm Emmanuel Goldstein!]

And so, last Tuesday, the primary to determine the Democratic challenger for the 6th District went down. Cegelis lead by a whisker throughout the night, until the results from Cook County began trickling in. The campaign had expected to do poorly in Cook, and their expectations were met. By the time the clock wound past midnight, the slim advantage Cegelis had enjoyed in DuPage County also began to bleed away. Thanks to the mayhem that took place in Cook County's election stations that night, a winner in the race for the 6th was not declared until the wee hours of the morning. It was Duckworth by a nose.

[The nose beat the whisker due to all those Cook County Graveyard votes. So what else is new?]

The final numbers are telling. Duckworth got 43.8% of the vote to Cegelis' 40.4%. The margin of victory for Duckworth was exactly 1080 votes. The 6th District has 512 precincts, which means Duckworth's margin of victory was 2.1 votes per district. Given the fact that her campaign spent nearly a million dollars to win this race, the price tag on those 2.1 votes per district is staggering.

[Hey! DUckworth's victory was almost exactly DOUBLE Bush's 537 vote win over Gore in 2000. And guess WHO is President today?]

It was that close. Had Spidel been brought in a few weeks earlier, and had the previous campaign manager not spent a quarter of a million dollars worth of campaign funds on shadows and dust, the outcome probably would have been much different. The Lindy Scott factor likewise cannot be ignored. In the end, he got nearly 8,000 votes, amounting to somewhere around 16%. It is telling, when thinking of Scott, to see the blog post he made days before the election, in which he bragged that a majority of the votes he expected to get would come from erstwhile Cegelis voters.

[If, maybe, perhaps. And who was the IDIOT that hired that campaign manager who blew a quarter million on "shadows and dust?"]

The "If" factor cannot alter the outcome, but there is a significant lesson for the Democratic party establishment to learn here. Tammy Duckworth, Rahm Emmanuel, the DCCC and all those big-time endorsers got brought down to the wire by a grassroots campaign with a tenth of the money, and in the end came within an eyelash of losing. Conventional wisdom says Cegelis should not have made it that close. She didn't have the cash, the endorsers, or the media team Duckworth had. It should have been an easy win, but it wasn't.

[From what you've been telling us, Pitt, Cegelis also didn't have the BRAINS. A QUARTER MILLION BUCKS blown in plain sight. SHEESH!]

The next time the Democratic establishment decides to come barnstorming into a district to force an outsider candidate upon a grassroots network that has been working day and night for an already-established and campaign-seasoned candidate, they will look at what happened in the Illinois 6th and, perhaps, think twice. The next time a grassroots organization in a district looks at a big-money primary challenger and sees no chance to succeed, they will look at the Illinois 6th and, perhaps, think twice.

[Will they also look at your incredible WHINE about not accepting defeat and making the Illinois Democrats blow over $100,000 on a MEANINGLESS vote recount? Even your fellow Progressive DUmmies of America parted company from you on that dopey idea.]

In the meantime, many Cegelis supporters have begun the process of swallowing the bitterness of defeat in order to organize for the defeat of Peter Roskam. They do this not because they suddenly like Tammy Duckworth, but because of the larger issues at hand. Kevin Spidel noted in the aftermath of the election that the point is not to elect Duckworth in November simply for the sake of electing Duckworth. The point is to win the November race in order to take one step closer to ending the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. The point, Spidel will tell you, is to see Rep. John Conyers Jr. sitting as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when all is said and done.

[So you admit you don't give a crap about DUckworth. You just want to defeat an EVIL Republican to make John Conyers Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee so he can begin his Moonbat Impeachment Hearings. Believe me Pitt, that quote alone about Conyers is worth much more than its weight in gold...for the Republicans.]

That, Spidel says, is the worthiest and most progressive-minded goal he could possibly imagine.

[Elect Democrats to make Moonbat Conyers House Judiciary Committee Chairman.... Great "thinking," Pitt. Methinks you just Shrummed the chances of the Democrats this year with your DISASTROUS quotes.]