After Rahm Emanuel reportedly told Harry Reid to please Joe Lieberman and pass whatever they possibly could out of the Senate (although the reliability of the narrator in this case is dubious; Reid may have resigned himself to this cave and wanted to shift the blame), progressive groups have made him the “target for a day.” The PCCC released an ad targeting Emanuel in his home district.

All of us back home hope Rahm Emanuel is fighting for people like us as White House chief of staff. But if he sides with insurance companies and undermines the public option, well, he won’t have many fans in Chicago.

I guess the going theory here is that hurting Rahm Emanuel’s future chances for election back in Chicago will make him do the right thing? I don’t know.

What I do think is that Rahm Emanuel didn’t just pop up as a pesky thorn in the side of the Obama agenda. He was picked to perform the same task he has always performed in the Democratic Party – protecting the conservative wing and putting “W’s” on the board. And he’s succeeding in that narrow assignment. So why this kind of an ad would cause him any consternation, or his employer, in Washington is a mystery to me.

The companion polling on this shows that Democrats aren’t even all that concerned about Emanuel, though they would like to see good policies rather than bipartisanship.