Rahm Emanuel is not on the Beto 2020 bandwagon: 'You don't usually promote a loser

Amidst all the fawning within the Democratic Party over Rep. Beto O'Rourke's supposedly admirable loss in the Texas Senate race and his potential as a 2020 presidential candidate, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has a different take:

"You don't usually promote a loser to the top of the party," Emanuel said Thursday on MSNBC.

Here are his comments on Robert Francis O'Rourke's potential candidacy, in full:

"Nancy Pelosi led the Democratic Party for the last two years from a really bad election in 2016. I'm from Chicago, maybe I'm really old school, but to the victor go the spoils. If Beto O'Rourke wants to go and run for president, God bless him, he should put his hat in and make his case. But, he lost. You don't usually promote a loser to the top of the party and then take a winner and say 'We're going to cut your knees off.'"

Why did he say that?

Emanuel was discussing his support for Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for Speaker of the House, and he questioned whether Republicans would ever adopt a backward strategy of ousting a winner (as some Democrats want to do to Pelosi) and elevating an election loser (as some Democrats want to do for O'Rourke).

"Everybody in our party always says the Republicans are so much tougher, so much stronger," Emanuel said. "Do you think they would take somebody that won and say, 'You know what your reward is? We're going to cut your knees off.'

"That's not how you play politics to win," he concluded.

Emanuel believes the Democratic Party needs Pelosi to remain in leadership over these next two years as the party prepares for the 2020 election, saying that this is not the time to have a rookie in leadership against someone as "ruthless" as Mitch McConnell.

(H/T Washington Examiner)