New DNC Chair Perez Promises Renewed Focus On Grassroots
February 26, 2017
IMAGE:Â U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez addresses the AFL-CIO Convention, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2013 in Los Angeles. (US Department of Labor/Flickr)
IMAGE:Â U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez addresses the AFL-CIO Convention, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2013 in Los Angeles. (US Department of Labor/Flickr)
I was hoping that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) would win the Democratic National Committee chairmanship because of his experience as an organizer, but former Labor Secretary Tom Perez â who won a narrow victory at the DNCâs Atlanta meeting today â is also a great choice. Heâs progressive, pro-worker, an accomplished advocate for civil rights and social justice, and the first Latino in that job. He immediately asked Ellison to serve as deputy chair â a smart move to bring the party together.
Importantly, the delegates at the Atlanta meeting also elected union organizer and immigrant rights activist Maria Elena Durazo â who supported Ellison for the top post â as DNC vice chair. The daughter of migrant farm workers, as head of UNITE HEREâs LA local and then leader of the 800,000-member LA County Federation of Labor, Durazo helped elect progressives throughout the state and helped transform the California Democratic Party into a voice for the disenfranchised, including immigrants.
We now have a Latino and an African American at the top of the DNC, a moderate Democratic minority leader in the Senate (Chuck Schumer) being pushed to the left by the grassroots resistance movement, a democratic socialist (Bernie Sanders) with a large and energized base within the party, and a charismatic and principled progressive woman (Elizabeth Warren) as the strongest voice within the party and the most likely candidate for president in 2020. These are all positive signs.
The battle between Ellison and Perez was often portrayed as a struggle between the partyâs âprogressiveâ and the âestablishmentâ wings. Thatâs a mischaracterization. Both Ellison and Perez are long-time progressives. Perez is hardly a corporate Democrat or a tool of the partyâs Wall Street wing. His entire career has been devoted to fighting for civil rights, workersâ rights, and social justice.
Perez is certainly the most progressive DNC chair since Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris occupied that post in 1970. Since then, the position has been held primarily by corporate fundraisers and moderate-to-liberal politicians, including Larry OâBrien, Jean Westwood, Robert S. Strauss, Ken Curtis, John C. White, Charles Manatt, Paul Kirk, Ron Brown, David Wilhelm, Chris Dodd, Donald Fowler, Roy Romer, Steven Grossman, Ed Rendell, Joe Andrew, Terry McAuliffe, Howard Dean, Tim Kaine, and the recently deposed Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
It would be a huge mistake for my fellow Ellison supporters to diss Perez and threaten to leave the Democratic Party. No doubt a handful of Ellison supporters will feel the need to go on the warpath. I hope the media donât manufacture a phony party crisis by giving a megaphone to the small number of Ellison supporters who think that Perezâs victory is a defeat for progressives. It isnât.
After he lost the primary fight, Bernie endorsed Hillary. Some of Bernieâs followers attacked him for doing so as a sell-out. A few drifted over to embrace Green Party candidate Jill Stein. But the media exaggerated the extent of the desertion. In fact, about 95% of Bernie supporters voted for Hillary. We need that kind of unity now.
As my friend Gerry McDonough, a long-time progressive activist in Massachusetts, observed: âWeâre in a war against fascists. Thereâs no time for infighting.â
Ellison echoed those sentiments. âIf you came here supporting me, wearing a Keith t-shirt, or any t-shirt, Iâm asking you to give everything youâve got to support Chairman Perez,â he said after the vote. âYou love this country, you love all the people in it, you care about each and every one of them, urban, rural, suburban, all cultures, all faiths, everybody, and they are in need of your help. And if we waste even a moment going at it over who supported who, we are not going to be standing up for those people. We donât have the luxury, folks, to walk out of this room divided.â
The task ahead â which Perez supports â is to rebuild the Democratic Party as an organizing party that can take advantage of the growing grassroots resistance movement that has emerged since Trumpâs inauguration. That means raising money to hire organizers and put them in states and Congressional districts where liberal and progressive Democrats can win governorsâ seats, state legislative races, and the House and Senate races. It means working in collaboration with unions, community organizing groups, environmental and LGBT groups, the Dreamers and other immigrant rights activists, Black Lives Matters, Planned Parenthood, Indivisible and other groups that are already mobilizing on the ground.
The anti-Trump resistance movement is way ahead of the party. The five million strong Womenâs March, the battles at airports against Trumpâs travel ban, the recent wave of town hall meetings all over the country where angry voters (many of them politically involved for the first time) confronted Republican members of Congress, and the 7,000 local groups galvanized by the Indivisible website all happened without Democratic Party involvement. But we need the party to help expand the protest movement and channel that energy into an electoral movement to put progressive and liberal Democrats in office.
Letâs get behind the Perez/Ellison team, strengthen the progressive movement, and defeat the pro-Trump Republicans in 2018 and 2020.
Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books). This essay is reprinted from the Huffington Post.
What follow are the scariest words Iâve read since I first saw President Donald Trump.
âUnless the Democratic Party becomes stronger and more effective, a radicalized Republican-conservative juggernaut is likely to take over for decades,â Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, wrote in Vox.
Skocpol is co-author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, one of the definitive books on the movement that to many Trump opponents exemplifies the widespread reach and sustained opposition necessary for the left to match â if it is to contain and then reverse the new presidentâs agenda. Sheâs rightly seen as a guiding light for insights into effective mobilization from the bottom-up, which she regards as the most significant aspect of the Tea Party story.
Of course, top-down support from Koch-brothers backed groups and Fox News should not be understated, but Skocpolâs research shows that whatever its leaders and funders did, the Tea Party movement sparked a genuine explosion of activism among the partyâs base.
âThese grassroots activists, pretty much on their own, ended up organizing 900 regularly meeting local Tea Parties spread all over the United States,â she told Democracy Journalâs Michael Tomasky. âAnd a lot of the impact they had filtered up from local Republican Party committees, from pressure on elected representatives and candidates, and the effect they had on galvanizing people to vote and participate in Republican primaries.â
And most of these groups were brand new to politics, not rebranded versions of existing groups as many â including your pal @LOLGOP â assumed.
So how can Democrats match the rightâs exponential expansion of its activist base?
She believes that while outside efforts like the Indivisible Groups are âright on,â they wonât be enough.
âBut hereâs the problem in just imitatingâeven if you get it straight that it wasnât the Koch brothers and it wasnât all a bunch of marches, which were the least of it in some waysâitâs hard for the left now, for the center-left now, to imitate what the Tea Party grassroots people did,â she told Tomasky. âBecause they were spread out across the country.â
With Skocpolâs help, itâs easy to identify the leftâs biggest immediate problems: (1) its geographical density in a Constitutional republic designed to empower well-distributed minorities; and (2) the understandable urge to burn it all down. (Effective messaging, including the lack of a clear contrast to the GOPâs âGOVERNMENT BADâ rallying cry, is the third biggest problem, but this requires a much more concerted long-term effort to match conservativesâ decades-long framing advantage.)
âAnti-institutional tendencies in todayâs culture make the idea of dismantling the existing order attractive to many people,â she wrote in her post, âA guide to rebuilding the Democratic Party, from the ground up.â âBut social science research has long shown that majorities need strong organizations to prevail against wealthy conservative interests in democracies.â
Skocpol argues that the Democratic National Committee is our best â and possibly only â hope to combat the âstrong possibility of a long-term authoritarian right turn in US politics.â
This is a terrifying thought for several reasons.
You have to start wetting yourself when you consider the reality that America has likely been in a âfeedback loop of growing inequality and Republican ruleâ for decades, with conservatives using their victories and the billions of dollars in gains theyâve secured from those victories to firmly establish their political dominance by shrinking the tax base, hammering organized labor, and making voting more difficult while buying elections, especially local elections, only gets easier.
Almost equally underwear-spoiling is the prospect of having to depend on the DNC, which has seen its reputation shredded both due to its pro-Hillary Clinton leanings and concerted attacks on the institution from foreign interests.
The contest to lead the Democratic Partyâs central organ now seems to be verging on repeating the trauma of the 2016 presidential primary between frontrunners Rep. Keith Ellison, the choice of most Bernie Sanders supporters, and former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, the choice of most Obama-and-Clinton-leaning factions of the party.
Especially when compared to the ruthless, increasingly autocratic opposition Democrats face, the differences between Ellison and Perez are subtle, stylistic, and somewhat hard to find. Yet these differences are still easy to magnify.
Skocpol believes Democrats need to âembrace a year-round, face-to-face organizational style.â
Both Ellison and Perez are capable of pulling off such an organizational and functional transformation. Both candidates represent groups targeted by Trumpâs overreach. And both can appeal to the sort of genuine populism that the president effectively faked during his campaign.
Yet despite these affinities itâs easy to imagine the Bernie-wing taking a second straight rebuke as proof that it is not welcome in the party. This would be a disaster for the United States and the world.
There is simply no other organization on the left that can match the âwell-entrenched networksâ of the right including âthe cross-state federated networks of the NRA, the Christian right, and the centerpiece Koch organization, Americans for Prosperity.â
With 2017 and 2018 elections rapidly approaching and likely to establish the momentum for 2020, Democrats need to quickly move on to effectively combatting the GOP and its concerted efforts to prevent non-conservatives from voting by âchecking and adding voter registrations.â
And the DNC has to be the beating heart of this effort, regardless of who wins the chairmanship. Or any hope of defeating Trump may be DOA.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
Right-wing media have launched a smear campaign against Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) that largely focuses on his Muslim faith, continuing a long pattern of anti-Muslim attacks on the first Muslim congressman.
On Monday, Ellison announced a bid to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). He has been endorsed by Sens. Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and several progressive organizations. Others considering seeking the chair include former DNC chair Howard Dean and NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue.
FoxNews.com launched the conservative response to Ellisonâs candidacy the same day as his announcement with an unbylined article headlined, âWho is Keith Ellison? Left-wing congressman with past ties to Nation of Islam wants DNC job.â As ThinkProgress noted, other conservatives followed by calling Ellison a âMuslim Brotherhood shillâ and âa former disciple of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam,â and comparing him to Stephen Bannon, the newly-announced chief strategist to President-elect Donald Trump who is facing a growing backlash over his ties to anti-Semitism and white nationalists. Yesterday, a Fox guest said Ellisonâs âallegiances are more to the Islamic civilization than Judeo-Christian civilization.â
Those conservatives are regurgitating attacks linking Ellison to Farrakhan that were first leveled at him during his first run for Congress in 2006. In fact, Ellisonâs connection to the Nation of Islam is limited to writing a column defending Farrakhan as a law student in 1990, and working with the group to organize Minnesotans to attend the 1995 Million Man March (President Obama also attended the march). Ellison subsequently wrote in a 2006 letter to Jewish leaders, âI have long since distanced myself from and rejected the Nation of Islam due to its propagation of bigoted and anti-Semitic statements and actions of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, and Khalid Muhammed.â
Ellison has been subject to anti-Muslim attacks from right-wing commentators since he won his first congressional election and announced that he would swear his oath of office on the Quran. Fox News host Sean Hannity and syndicated conservative radio host Dennis Prager responded to the use of the Quran during his swearing-in by comparing Ellisonâs actions to using âHitlerâs Mein Kampf, which is the Nazi bible.â Glenn Beck opened an interview with Ellison shortly after his election by saying, âwhat I feel like saying is, âSir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.'â Beck added: âIâm not accusing you of being an enemy, but thatâs the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.â
Those Islamophobic attacks have continued over the years. Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested that if Ellison were really worried about extremism, he should âfocus on getting the burqa offâ Muslim women. Hannity responded to a confrontational interview with Ellison by doing a segment highlighting his âradical connectionsâ to âLouis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.â And Fox host Eric Bolling called him the âMuslim apologist in Congress.â
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