In 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama sewed up the nomination, his team rushed to fill the ranks of the Democratic National Committee. That is normal, as the committee’s No. 1 task is to support the presidential campaign (the Senate and House Democrats have their own committees).
If you remember, Howard Dean was the head of the DNC at the time, and he remained nominally in charge, but Obama’s team was in full control. Dean had been moved to the sidelines. It wasn’t an antagonistic move. It simply meant that the presidential campaign and the DNC had to be in sync, and the best way to manage that is to have people from the same team in charge.
So with that bit of background, say goodbye to Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Hillary Clinton's campaign is taking the reins of the Democratic National Committee, installing a new top official on Thursday to oversee the party's day-to-day operations through the general election.
Brandon Davis, national political director for the Service Employees International Union, will become the general election chief of staff for the Democratic Party. His selection formalizes the coordination of the Clinton campaign and the committee, a stark contrast to Donald Trump who is currently at odds with his party.
Davis is f’n fantastic, I’ve known him for years. He’s smart, energetic, passionate, and competent as fuck. In other words, the opposite of Wasserman Schultz.
Now the way this works is that DWS will keep her title. You can’t just fire the party chair on a whim. There has to be a party election to choose a replacement, which is a formality if the president is a Democrat (the party will rubber stamp her choice), or can be an all-out battle if the president isn’t (think of the Dean party chair election in 2005). So she’ll still walk around pretending to be chair of the DNC, and her title will reflect that fiction.
The appointment of Davis is intended to allay some of the concerns about party leadership. It is a standard transition, as Clinton becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee.
"This is in fact what happens," Howard Dean, former Democratic Party chairman, told CNN. "Debbie will still have the title, but somebody else will be the effective operator of the DNC. It's Hillary's pick."
In an interview on Thursday, Dean recalled how he transitioned immediately to simply raising money and campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008 after Paul Tewes, a trusted Obama aide, stepped in to lead the committee.
"We basically just turned it over to him and I left the building to him. He ran the DNC," Dean said. "It was very clear I wasn't going to be running the DNC as soon as there was the a nominee."
DWS’s days at party headquarters were always numbered, but there was an outside chance that Clinton would let her stay on. How does that conspiracy theory go, that the party chair greased the skids for Clinton? Well, if she did, she didn’t get any rewards (at least not yet). Rather, she’s getting the inglorious shove-aside. And she deserves no less.