The Race for DNC Chair

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison has said he is not running for reelection. Which set off something of a footrace.

 

The 4th One (So Far)

Ben Wikler

Ben Wikler of the Wisconsin Democratic Party announced very recently for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). He's the 4th to announce (see below). He's chaired the Democrats of Wisconsin only since July of 2019. Before that he was a senior advisor to MoveOn. January 2012, Wikler and a single collaborator launched a radio show and podcast, The Flaming Sword of Justice, but it didn't take off. In November 2013, he relaunched his show as The Good Fight, an hour-long weekly podcast and radio program (which MoveOn sponsors). According to its website, The Good Fight "brings you a mix of comedy, activism, and David versus Goliath battles told from the behind-the-slingshot point of view." 

Wikler also has a track record as organizer and money-raiser. In March 2007, he became Campaign Director for Avaaz, "the globe's largest and most powerful online activist network" (according to The Guardian). He helped grow the org to over ten million members. He ran campaigns on climate change, poverty, human rights, and also managed the technology and communication teams. 

And before Avaaz, he was the start-up producer for the short-lived talk radio Al Franken Show, and he helped write a couple of Franken's books. Served as press secretary for Sherrod Brown's U.S. Senate campaign and was the first editor-in-chief of Comedy 23/6, a comedy news website. 

His understanding and experience in mass media is obviously both extensive and desirable in a national party chair. Plus he's credited with keeping the Trump wave in Wisconsin from swamping down-ballot Dem candidates. (After Wikler won the Wisconsin party chair election in 2019, he dived into grassroots organizing, developed a field team of 13 regional organizers "to get volunteers out on doors.") Trump won Wisconsin this year under Wikler's leadership, though Democrat Senator Tammy Baldwin won reelection. Wikler's running on a platform of "It Could Have Been Worse" might not be a winner, but his emphasis on boots on the ground would be a good trait to have in a DNC Chair. Plus he sounded a lot like the sainted Howard Dean in his announcement:

"When the polls are within the margin of error, we win by the margin of effort," Wikler said in a video launching his campaign. "And what has made a difference in Wisconsin can make a difference everywhere. We need a nationwide permanent campaign, a 50-state strategy in every state and every territory across the United States."

Most recently, NYTimes columnist Michelle Goldberg called Wikler "the obvious candidate to rebuild a broken and demoralized Democratic Party."

The First 3 

Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) chair Ken Martin. The longest serving chair in the 75-year history of the DFL. The Minnesota DFL has won every statewide election since Martin was elected chairman. Martin was only a senior at Eden Prairie High School when he joined Paul Wellstone’s campaign for U.S. Senate. Wellstone inspired Martin to pursue a political career dedicated to the principle that “we all do better, when we all do better.” According to Politico, Martin is the current front-runner for the job, considered "a safe pair of hands." Just what Democrats need: someone safe. Ugh.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley. 48th Mayor of Baltimore, 1999 to 2007. The 61st Governor of Maryland, 2007 to 2015. Served as the 17th Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, 2023 to 2024. O'Malley is about as "establishment" as you can get. 

New York state Sen. James Skoufis. The youngest, 37, of all the announced candidates (at the moment). Currently representing the 42nd District of the New York State Senate since 2023. Skoufis previously represented the 39th District (2019-2022) prior to redistricting. Attractive for his youth, Skoufis may be waaaay too provencial and without national profile for this job.

Who might join the race?

Chuck Rocha

 

Chuck Rocha. A cowboy-hat-wearing Democratic strategist from Texas, Rocha has been teasing a run for DNC chair on social media. In 2020, he advised the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, and he founded a political action committee to turn out Latino voters. In an appearance on CNN on Nov. 20, Rocha called himself “the only senior national Democratic operative without a college degree” and said he wanted the party to return to representing “the common man.” His goal, he added, was to make Democrats “fun again.” (Source: Simon J. Levien)

Michael Blake. Blake is already a candidate for Mayor of New York City in a crowded race, but sez he might switch over to this race. A former New York State assemblyman, he lost a U.S. congressional race in 2020. Served as a party vice chair from 2017 to 2021. Obscure and a New Yawker too boot. No chance in hell.

Max Rose. Former Army officer who earned a Purple Heart in Afghanistan. Former U.S. representative from Staten Island, New York. Served one term, voted as a moderate. Failed twice to retake his Congressional seat. Nope. 

Mallory McMorrow. A rather glamorous Michigan state senator. She earned viral fame in 2022 when she gave a fiery senate floor speech denouncing the Republican treatment of the LGBTQ community as a “hollow, hateful scheme” after a colleague accused her in a fund-raising email of wanting to “groom and sexualize” children (see the video below). That speech earned her a speaking slot at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where she was one of a number of officials to brandish an oversized prop book of Project 2025, the conservative policy playbook developed by Trump.

Pete Buttigieg. We couldn't hope for anyone more articulate, logical, calm. But he hasn't said he was interested.

POSTSCRIPT 

Very interesting and revealing taped interview with "frontrunner" Ken Martin of Minnesota, interviewed by Simon Rosenberg, The Hopium Chronicles. I was distracted by his hair. Looks like such an obvious toupee, and why should I care? I shouldn't. I'm a bad person.

Give Us an Open Democratic Convention!

 

Well that was awful. A catastrophe. You know what I'm talking about. Trump is a crisis for our nation, and now Joe Biden is a crisis for the Democratic Party.

Joe needs to step aside. Let us have an open Democratic presidential convention in August. A loud, angry, smelly political convention that nominates someone capable of beating Donald Trump. Let the power-brokers do their broking. Let the pressure groups apply their pressure. Churn that cream into butter. Someone will emerge that we can all get behind.

Gavin Newsom, who's shown himself fully capable of going straight for Trump's esophagus. Pete Buttigieg, who's supernaturally smart and can turn Republican ignorance back on itself. Stacey Abrams. Jamie Raskin, who knows a poltroon when he sees one. Hakeem Jeffries. Joe Neguse. Hell, Beto O'Rourke.

I'm sure Kamala Harris would put herself forward, and maybe she could rally everyone. Someone is going to have to rally everyone, and I'll be good with whoever that is. (I don't think Joe Manchin would dare.)

Give us a genuine open convention, and let's see if we can turn this ship around.

President Biden: A Speech on Voting Rights Ain't Gonna Cut It

 

Watauga County Board of Elections meeting, 
2013, immediately after a Republican majority
took over following the election of
Pat McCrory.
BOE observers are standing. The Board adjourned
to a much larger room to accommodate the crowd.

The White House announced it, that President Joe Biden will be delivering "a major speech" on voting rights on Tuesday in Philadelphia, the cradle of the Constitution. I'm reminded that President Obama delivered major speeches -- often soaring masterpieces of rhetoric -- when he was otherwise dead in the water because of Mitch McConnell. Have Democratic presidents in the Age of McConnell learned nothing? Where is Schumer?

I know ... Joe Manchin and the goddamn filibuster, an unmovable object blocking the way, but Senate Democrats have got to do something, even if it's wrong (worrying they'll do something "wrong" is the everlasting terror of Democrats, but please!). Make Manchin vote in public, make him say why deep-sixing "rule by the minority" is against his religion. Force the issue on him, along with the spotlight -- his role in the greatest shrinking of the right to vote since the Civil War. Make him vote. Make him vote every week, every month, every day if necessary and keep him on the griddle. Then make the Republicans stage an actual stand-up-and-talk-the-thing-to-death filibuster. Let them explain along the way about why it's a good thing to squeeze people out of participating in their government.

The National Democratic Party -- bless its heart! -- has essentially conceded that nothing is going to happen in Congress to pass the For the People Act. Biden's given up, and he designated Vice President Kamala Harris to deliver the concession, that voting rights ain't gonna be nationalized and there'll be no salvation from state-by-state voting restrictions meant to keep Republicans in power in perpetuity. Kamala Harris was announcing a $25 million "‘I Will Vote’ initiative to address and overcome efforts across the country to make voting more difficult and burdensome." The money will go to voter education, voter protection, targeted voter registration, and technology. In other words, the strategy of the national Democrats has become "grit your teeth and learn to live with it."

$25 million. Okay, that's not nothing, but it also screams capitulation. I've always expected more from Democrats, and I've always gotten less.

Daymares or Cloudland on November 3rd

 

I'm about to do what I'm never supposed to do -- get into pointless speculation about our future in politics, the Democratic tribes and their respective throw-weights, if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually win today. (What else am I supposed to do on Election Day, when I've already voted and I'm no good on the phone? What else can I do, other than, say, replay compulsively Carly Simon singing "The River Runs"?)

The spaghetti fights that are coming! I'm not thinking of the armed Trumpists. They're someone else's problem. (The internal struggle for control of the Republican Party, if Trump loses, may resemble The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'll have tourniquets and/or popcorn handy.) No, I'm thinking of the over-caffeinated and not at all demure Democratic activists from left and middle who are going to duke it out over the direction of the Party -- not to mention exert excruciating pressure on the Biden presidency and the presidential initiatives of the Biden/Harris administration.

I'm rumored to be a "progressive Democrat." A Bernie Sanders partisan. A dangerous liberal. Like Trump's working-class white men, my resentments are class based. If it hadn't been for a good education in a little podunk high school in West Texas, followed by more education at a West Texas Baptist college and then even more education at a Mormon-dominated university in Utah, I probably would have grown up stuck like amber on my tenant farmer rung, ambitious without wherewithal, angry and bitter about others moving on up. My resentment might have coagulated into reactionary politics. Saw it happen to plenty of others. 

"Think you're better'n me?" Trump's fan boys want to punch out educated people, media elites, scientists, and professors. 'Cause I am one of those educated people, I deserve punching-out because I've got it good, or at least better, and I'm probably a snob and a gun-control opportunist and an abortion-on-demand destroyer of traditional values. Some of that's true -- not the gun control part (I was actually the author once of a famous bumpersticker: "Democrats Arm Yourselves"), and I ain't no goddamn snob just because I have a vocabulary and read books. I won't apologize for my education, which is actually -- and ironically -- responsible for the loss of my religion. We had a saying at Wayland Baptist College that it produced either preachers or atheists. You got one guess.

But I still identify with my lower- and working-class roots. It's just that I pick Wall Street to hate. I pick smug rich people and bullies and people who cut me off in traffic. I say sometimes that I can't understand the enthusiasm for Trump among rural and working-class folks. But I do understand it. Trump's core base have every reason in the world to hate and cuss someone, anyone, the easy targets supplied by their leader for the supposed "level playing ground" which actually slants like a bitch. They just mistakenly blame their failure to rise on what they see as the privileging of racial minorities, the tyranny of science and Democratic governors, rather than the privileging of the already rich by an economic system whose dogma is: If you ain't got property, you ain't shit.

I want both the progressives and the moderates of my Party, going forward, to be strategic and practical. They won't be. My side will push too hard and at the wrong pressure points. The moderate/conservative, establishment side, which controls the wheels and cogs, will shut down dissent and breed more dissent. Crockery will get broken. Some people will leave the house and slam the door behind them. There could be a third party, or multiple third parties, and I might have trouble resisting the urge to join one. The tectonic plates will shift and buildings will crumble. I'm too old and tired for that additional chaos.

But the Party has got to be bold in standing for the working class against the forces that keep them subservient (and ignorant!). The Party's got to respect their religion and their traditionalism and actually help nurture its future, without simultaneously allowing church to dominate state. Bring broadband to everyone. Is that a middle way or a progressive way? Regulate assault weapons and atomic bombs but leave the household arsenals alone. Decriminalize a lot of petty offenses that catch up the most vulnerable and the most uneducated. Do not be jerks. Stop insulting and stereotyping those who are less. Stop the pity, too, because pity always runs downhill.

Bonus version:

And another, because that song needs -- demands -- a choir of young people:

We Love You, Howard Dean, And Always Will

Howard Dean taught us modern campaigning. He pioneered social media outreach and fundraising. As chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, he preached and enacted the "50-state strategy," an effort to put staff and resources into every state to bolster the grassroots. Which worked. Which lives on today in North Carolina as "a candidate in every single House and Senate district" -- all 120 House seats and 50 Senate seats, contested -- no matter how improbable the prospects, and the literally hundreds of new candidates in every state that are running strong right now, with clear positive platforms, and who owe absolutely nothing to the political establishment.

When he led the Democrats, he encouraged county parties to return to retail politics, one-on-one voter outreach, and he taught everyone the importance of social media for fundraising and for message propagation -- where boomlets happen like lightning. Howard Dean was leading the DNC when Watauga Democrats flipped the county commission from red to blue in 2006, and Cullie Tarleton and Steve Goss won House and Senate seats. We learned so much.

Dean's tenure at the DNC coincided with Jerry Meek's chairmanship of the NC Democratic Party, a renaissance of grassroots activism and retail politics. Jerry Meek came to Watauga and participated in the biggest ever "kickoff canvass" in 2006. Unfortunately, Jerry Meek passed the torch after two terms, and we didn't hardly see his like again, until recently.

Howard Dean made the right kind of enemy. Rahm Emanuel hated his guts. Emanuel favored a different political model that ignored some states -- actually, many -- and poured all the money into boosting the presidential candidate rather than building local parties. Emanuel got rid of Dean as soon as Obama became president. Senator Chuck Schumer participated in that purge. He didn't like Howard Dean either. As far as I'm concerned, Rahm Emanuel was everything that was wrong with Barack Obama's first term, and Chuck Schumer is everything that's wrong with sucking up to money-pimping Democratic donors today, particularly the ones with Wall Street addresses.

Howard stirred excitement among punked-out Democrats and bored independent voters during his presidential run in 2004. It was such excitement. If you were a part of it, you remember it. I see the same vibration around many new Democratic candidates this year. They're rewriting the Party and rewiring the Party brain, just like Howard Dean did.

Ready To Say It Out Loud: I'm Relieved Hillary Lost

By November 8th last fall, I was secretly thinking what I could not utter to another living soul: It might be better for the Democratic Party if Hillary lost.

Why?

1. Hillary would have been under constant and threatening investigation by two houses of Congress. Nothing -- absolutely nothing -- would be getting passed if Hillary suggested it or wanted it or -- Heaven forbid! -- needed it. I dreaded the ferocious feeding frenzy that a Hillary presidency would serve up for Republicans, red in tooth and claw.

2. The Democratic Party would continue its slide, defending her. Long range, who would look forward to Hillary's first mid-term Congressional elections? Jeebus!

3. With Trump, we get a rejuvenating backlash from Democrats and by Democrats and for Democrats. Decent people everywhere -- but especially in the suburbs -- suddenly discover what they never realized before -- that they want Democrats to win. Cutting off Hillary was like pruning a puny tree in the spring: new growth springs forth.

4. The election of Trump galvanized a whole new troop of non-professional office-seekers who stepped forward and have ideas that are good ideas and who aren't beholden. A national Big Thumb of the establishment Democratic Party doesn't squelch them because it's in disarray, arguing over who to blame for Hillary's loss.

5. Trump is the death of the Republican Party. What replaces it? Maybe the Trump Party, or several different parties arguing over who has to pick up the tab for the last four years. If it's to be the Trump Party, we can watch it collapse rapidly into a chain of Beauty Pageant Accessories and Gun Stores

Opportunity, Knocking

We see these things every day on Facebook: "Sign this petition to force Congress to impeach Trump!" Petition, petition, petition. Different wording, same message.

People, please!

I already hate all the things that Facebook wants me to do every time I turn on the computer (you know what I'm talking about). Why on earth would I take time to do something as futile as signing a petition to the Republicans in Congress?

Do you honestly believe those people are going to slap Trump when they can't even repeal Obamacare?

Granted, there have been and will continue to be the occasional party kamikazes, like Corker and Flake, on suicide missions to save the Republic, not to mention the Republican Party. And expect more resignations by senior Republican members of Congress, opting not to run even in safe districts, like Jeb Hensarling in the Texas Fifth. Not an old guy. Why is he dropping out?

But prosecution/legislative action against malfeasance or obstruction in the Trump administration? Not gonna happen.

We have one more year of this hilarious nightmare. Then the people get to strike back. Until that is over, Congressional Republicans are going to grab the gunwales and sit tight until almost exactly one year from today, when comes a major mid-term general election. They're going to have to be kicked in the gut before they do anything about their disaster that keeps on giving. Serve them the election they deserve, and they'll do something about Trump. However many of them are left by then.

Attendance and enthusiasm are both up at Democratic events since January 20, starting the very next day -- January 21 -- with the Women's March on Washington. People are donating money and responding to phone calls to volunteer to work, and are already working, with more people than ever talking about filing to run for public office. The front-burner skillet is heating up.

Meanwhile, Trump is easily one of the most unpopular figures in American life, let alone the presidency. He works at alienating independent and swing voters. He flails around like a shadow-boxer. Remember his campaign. It was all him, and his superior brain didn't think he needed an infrastructure supporting him of experts and advisors, so when he suddenly needed "foreign policy experts" to look legit, he picks a bunch of people with no experience and no smarts and he gets Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis, who nevertheless work very hard to do what the boss wants.

IMO, the Democratic Party is our only hope as a bulwark against crazy, and anything to do in Washington, D.C., that includes the name Hillary Clinton is crap. Some things we just need to let go of.

Best News of the Day

Howard Dean: "I'm Running for DNC Chair"

 Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean said he is running for his old job atop the Democratic Party.

"The dems need organization and focus on the young," Dean tweeted Thursday. "Need a fifty State strategy and tech rehab. I am in for chairman again."

 Dean served as Democratic National Committee chairman from 2005 to 2009....

For those who don't remember, Howard Dean presided over a revitalized Democratic National Committee through the 2006 General Elections, when incidentally Democrats won every race in Watauga, from County Commission to NC House and Senate seats, and through the surge of 2008 when Barack Obama won the presidency and the Watauga GOP didn't even field a single candidate for County Commission.

Come back to the raft, Howard honey! We're waiting for you!

Is Rahm Emanuel Really That Petty?

Politico is reporting that the Obama team dissed Howard Dean by deliberately staging the transfer of power at the Democratic National Committee while Doctor Dean was 7,000 miles away, where he was actually doing his job. Apparently, there'll be no acknowledgment of Dean's 50-state strategy as the proximate cause of the Obama victory ... let alone no high-profile job for Dean in the Obama administration.

Joe Trippi, who was Dean's main man in the primary campaign of 2004, says it's all Rahm Emanuel's doing.

The prick.