Establishment Favorite Tom Perez Wins Vote To Lead Democratic Party

Having fallen just shy of victory in the first round of votes, the establishment favorite former Labor Secretary Tom Perez (and Obama/Clinton loyalist) has defeated Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee in a blow to Bernie Sanders and the progressive wing of the party.

Vice President Biden and other key figures from the Obama administration supported Perez, who backed Hillary Clinton in the primary. Sanders and many of his allies backed Ellison, the first-ever Muslim elected to Congress and a star on the left. The party remains clearly divided…

Keith Ellison was defeated by a billionaire-led innuendo campaign slurring him as an anti-semite. That’s the Democratic Party for you.

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 25, 2017

…winning by 235 to 218 in the second round of voting (after failing to get the 213.5 votes required in the first round).

Perez: “We need a chair who can not only take the fight to Donald Trump” but “change the culture of the Democratic Party and the DNC“

Tom Perez: “We need a chair who can not only take the fight to Donald Trump” but “change the culture of the Democratic Party and the DNC” pic.twitter.com/6tnJO7qA1A

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) February 25, 2017

Bernie Sanders congratulated former Perez on becoming the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, however warned that “the same old is not working.”

“I congratulate Tom Perez on his election as chairman of the Democratic National Committee and look forward to working with him,” Sanders said in a statement.

“At a time when Republicans control the White House, the U.S. House, U.S. Senate and two-thirds of all statehouses, it is imperative that Tom understands that the same-old, same-old is not working and that we must open the doors of the party to working people and young people in a way that has never been done before,” the lawmaker added.

In his statement, Sanders maintained that it is time for the Democrats to “stand up to the 1 percent” and advance progressive values. “Now, more than ever, the Democratic Party must make it clear that it is prepared to stand up to the 1 percent and lead this country forward in the fight for social, racial, economic and environmental justice,” he said.

To an extend siding the Sanders, the Republican National Committee also issued an official statement blasting Democrats for electing former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez as the new Democratic National Committee Head, calling him a “D.C. insider.”

“The Democrat Party has lost touch with the American people. Voters spoke loud and clear last November that they wanted a change in Washington and to reverse the failed policies of the last eight years,” the official statement from RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said. “President Trump and Republican representatives heard the voters’ message loud and clear and now hold a historic number of offices across the country.” 

“By selecting a D.C. insider, Democrats only create deeper divisions within their own party by pushing a far left agenda that rejects a majority of their base outside Washington,” the statement continued. “The DNC would be well-served to learn from two straight election cycle losses, encourage leaders in their party to listen to what the voters want and to get to work with Republicans to fix the mess they created.”

As The Hill reports, the race to become the next Democratic Party leader split along establishment-grassroots lines and in many ways mirrored the divisive 2016 presidential primary between Sanders and Clinton.

The mainstream Democrats won out again.

Perez, the 55-year-old son of Dominican immigrants, becomes the party’s public face and chief spokesperson in charge of staking out Democratic opposition to President Trump.

Prior to serving as President Obama’s Labor secretary, Perez was a civil rights attorney in the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder, who endorsed him in the chairmanship race.

He has almost no electoral experience, save for a successful bid for Montgomery County Council and a failed run at Maryland attorney general, in which he was disqualified over a technicality.

As chairman of the DNC, Perez inherits a monumental rebuilding project across the country after years of Democratic losses at every level of government.

And he will also have to go about the work of unifying a fractured party.

By way of background for how The Democrats got here, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald explains why the Obama White House recruited Perez to run against Ellison:

Members of the Democratic National Committee met today to choose their new chair, replacing the disgraced interim chair Donna Brazile, who replaced the disgraced five-year chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Even though the outcome is extremely unlikely to change the (failed) fundamentals of the party, the race has become something of an impassioned proxy war replicating the 2016 primary fight: between the Clinton/Obama establishment wing (which largely backs Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who vehemently supported Clinton) and the insurgent Sanders wing (which backs Keith Ellison, the first Muslim ever elected to the U.S. Congress, who was an early Sanders supporter).

The New Republic’s Clio Chang has a great, detailed analysis of the contest. She asks the key question about Perez’s candidacy that has long hovered and yet has never been answered. As Chang correctly notes, supporters of Perez insist, not unreasonably, that he is materially indistinguishable from Ellison in terms of ideology (despite his support for TPP, seemingly grounded in loyalty to Obama). This, she argues, is “why the case for Tom Perez makes no sense”: After all, “if Perez is like Ellison — in both his politics and ideology — why bother fielding him in the first place?”

The timeline here is critical. Ellison announced his candidacy on November 15, armed with endorsements that spanned the range of the party: Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Raúl Grijalva, and various unions on the left, along with establishment stalwarts such as Chuck Schumer, Amy Klobuchar, and Harry Reid. He looked to be the clear frontrunner.

But as Ellison’s momentum built, the Obama White House worked to recruit Perez to run against Ellison. They succeeded, and Perez announced his candidacy on December 15 — a full month after Ellison announced. Why did the White House work to recruit someone to sink Ellison? If Perez and Ellison are so ideologically indistinguishable, why was it so important to the Obama circle — and the Clinton circle — to find someone capable of preventing Ellison’s election? What’s the rationale? None has ever been provided.

I can’t recommend Chang’s analysis highly enough on one key aspect of what motivated the recruitment of Perez: to ensure that the Democratic establishment maintains its fatal grip on the party and, in particular, to prevent Sanders followers from having any say in the party’s direction and identity:

There is one real difference between the two: Ellison has captured the support of the left wing. … It appears that the underlying reason some Democrats prefer Perez over Ellison has nothing to do with ideology, but rather his loyalty to the Obama wing. As the head of the DNC, Perez would allow that wing to retain more control, even if Obama-ites are loath to admit it. …

And it’s not just Obama- and Clinton-ites that could see some power slip away with an Ellison-headed DNC. Paid DNC consultants also have a vested interest in maintaining the DNC status quo. Nomiki Konst, who has extensively covered the nuts and bolts of the DNC race, asked Perez how he felt about conflicts of interest within the committee — specifically, DNC members who also have contracts with the committee. Perez dodged the issue, advocating for a “big tent.” In contrast, in a forum last month, Ellison firmly stated, “We are battling the consultant-ocracy.”

In other words, Perez, despite his progressive credentials, is viewed — with good reason — as a reliable functionary and trustworthy loyalist by those who have controlled the party and run it into the ground, whereas Ellison is viewed as an outsider who may not be as controllable and, worse, may lead the Sanders contingent to perceive that they have been integrated into and empowered within the party.

But there’s an uglier and tawdrier aspect to this. Just over two weeks after Ellison announced, the largest single funder of both the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign — the Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban — launched an incredibly toxic attack on Ellison, designed to signal his veto. “He is clearly an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual,” pronounced Saban about the African-American Muslim congressman, adding: “Keith Ellison would be a disaster for the relationship between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party.”

Saban has a long history not only of fanatical support for Israel — “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel,” he told the New York Times in 2004 about himself — but also an ugly track record of animus toward Muslims. As The Forward gently put it, he is prone to “a bit of anti-Muslim bigotry,” including when he said Muslims deserve “more scrutiny” and “also called for profiling and broader surveillance.” In 2014, he teamed up with right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson to push a pro-Israel agenda. In that notorious NYT profile, he attacked the ACLU for opposing Bush/Cheney civil liberties assaults and said: “On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk.”

There’s no evidence that Saban’s attack on Ellison is what motivated the White House to recruit an opponent. But one would have to be indescribably naïve about the ways of Washington to believe that such a vicious denunciation by one of the party’s most influential billionaire funders had no effect at all.

The DNC headquarters was built with Saban’s largesse: He donated $7 million to build that building, and he previously served as chairman of the party’s capital-expenditure campaign. Here’s how Mother Jones’s Andy Kroll, in a November profile, described the influence Saban wields within elite Democratic circles:

No single political patron has done more for the Clintons over the span of their careers. In the past 20 years, Saban and his wife have donated $2.4 million to the Clintons’ various campaigns and at least $15 million to the Clinton Foundation, where Cheryl Saban serves as a board member. Haim Saban prides himself on his top-giver status: “If I’m not No. 1, I’m going to cut my balls off,” he once remarked on the eve of a Hillary fundraiser. The Sabans have given more than $10 million to Priorities USA, making them among the largest funders of the pro-Hillary super-PAC. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential campaign, he vowed to spend “whatever it takes” to elect her. …

The ties go beyond money. The Clintons have flown on the Sabans’ private jet, stayed at their LA home, and vacationed at their Acapulco estate. The two families watched the 2004 election results together at the Clintons’ home, and Bill Clinton gave the final toast at one of Cheryl Saban’s birthday parties. Haim Saban is chummy enough with Hillary that he felt comfortable telling her that she sounded too shrill on the stump. “Why are you shouting all the time?” he says he told her. “It’s drilling a hole in my head.” Clinton campaign emails released by WikiLeaks in October contain dozens of messages to, from, and referencing Saban. And they show that he has no qualms about pressing Clinton and her aides on her position toward Israel. “She needs to differentiate herself from Obama on Israel,” he wrote in June 2015 to Clinton’s top aides.

When Clinton, during the campaign, denounced the boycott movement devoted to defeating Israeli occupation, she did it in the form of public letter to Saban. To believe that Democrats assign no weight to Saban’s adamantly stated veto of Ellison is to believe in the tooth fairy.

Saban’s attack predictably spawned media reports that Jewish groups had grown “uncomfortable” with Ellison’s candidacy (the ADL pronounced his past criticisms of Israel “disqualifying”), while whispers arose that the last thing the Democratic Party needed to win back Rust Belt voters was a black Muslim as the face of the party (even though the Detroit-born Ellison himself is from the Rust Belt).

Defeated Dems could’ve tapped Rust Belt populist to head party. Instead, black, Muslim progressive from Minneapolis? https://t.co/VLfMcEtMka

— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) November 11, 2016

As both Chang and Vox’s Jeff Stein have argued, the fact that DNC chair is a largely functionary position, with little real power over party policy or messaging, is all the more reason to throw Sanders supporters a symbolic bone. If Democrats were smart, this would be the perfect opportunity to capture that energized left-wing movement without having to make any real concessions on what matters most to them: loyalty to their corporate donor base.

But it’s hard to conclude that a party that has navigated itself into such collapse, which deliberately and knowingly chose the weakest candidate, who managed to lose to Donald J. Trump, is one that is thinking wisely and strategically. As Chang persuasively argues, it seems Democratic leaders prioritize ensuring that the left has no influence in their party over strengthening itself to beat the Trump-led Republicans:

*  *  *

In retrospect, the Obama/Clinton elites got their way again and one can hope that the angry crowds railing against Trump will see what just transpired and will look inward this time (not just outward).