Immediately after the election, when Ellison first threw his hat in the ring for DNC chair, a number of people offered support. A lot has changed since. Several others have entered the race and Ellison’s candidacy has been questioned by some. The final vote for DNC chair is still several months away. Howard Dean has pulled himself out of the running. Raymond Buckley (NH party chair), Ilyse Hogue (President, NARAL) and Jaime Harrison (SC party chair) have declared their interest in the national role. Labor secretary Tom Perez has indicated he might be interested in running, but hasn’t formally declared yet.
In Denver, at the state party chair’s meeting, Ellison said he would consider giving up his house seat if chosen as chairperson. He was responding to the view that the DNC needs a full-time chairperson. This is an interesting objection, since being “part-time” wasn’t an issue when Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was chairperson for five years while holding down a Congressional seat. Nor was it a problem when Tim Kaine was chairperson while serving as governor of Virginia. New rules in a post-Trump world perhaps.
Some old controversies have been reignited, stalling the momentum for Ellison, we’ll discuss those below the break...
Back in 1989, during his final year of law school, Keith Ellison wrote four opinion pieces for the Minnesota Daily (under the pseudonym Keith E. Hakim). All of them discuss racism (on and off campus), but the controversy is about the then 26-year old Ellison’s view of Farrakhan and his attendance at a march led by Farrakhan. Here’s how CNN characterized his involvement:
Ellison's involvement with the Nation of Islam would continue after he graduated from law school in 1990. Ellison helped organized the Minnesota delegation to the 1995 Million Man March, which was led by Farrakhan. The Star Tribune reported at the time that Ellison spoke ahead of the controversial Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who was kicked out of the Nation of Islam by Farrakhan two years earlier for making blatantly anti-Semitic comments, at the University of Minnesota in efforts to raise funds for the Million Man March. According to The Star Tribune report, Muhammed's speech at the university was racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic.
Ellison's spokesperson noted to CNN that "President Obama, Stevie Wonder, Maya Angelou, and many others also attended the March" and said he "had no additional involvement with March organizer Louis Farrakhan or his organizations, has long since denounced him, and rejects all forms of anti-Semitism."
Ellison was interviewed by J. J. Goldberg in The Forward, and he discussed his association with Farrakhan. :
Most important, Ellison says he distanced himself once he understood the reality of Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism. As a young black activist, he’d initially regarded the anti-Semitism charges against Farrakhan as one more white attack on a black leader. And he occasionally said so, as his opponents gleefully remind us.
Goldberg speculates that some oppose Ellison’s bid since they see him as too “left wing” to appeal to the mainstream. For many Democrats (including some White House staff), Ellison is problematic because he is closely associated with Bernie Sanders. Others believe he’s too much of an economic “populist” for high-dollar donors. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO leadership is considering endorsing Ellison, but holding off for the moment till Tom Perez clarifies whether he’s running.
Since one of the DNC’s functions is fund-raising, donors’ opinions matter. One of the most prominent Democratic donors, Haim Saban is adamantly opposed to Ellison. Back in 2002, Saban wrote a 7 million dollar check to the DNC and in one fell swoop became the single largest donor to the party. Here’s Saban speaking at the Brookings institution last week:
"If you go back to his positions, his papers, his speeches, the way he has voted, he is clearly an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual," the Israeli-American said Friday about the Minnesota lawmaker. "Words matter and actions matter more. Keith Ellison would be a disaster for the relationship between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party."
Saban's comment came unprompted and he did not ask a question.
Saban once told the New Yorker “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel” and was a major donor to the Clinton campaign this year. In July, Hillary Clinton wrote a letter to him laying out her position on Israel, including staunch opposition to the BDS movement which seeks to restore rights to Palestinians via boycotts, divestments and sanctions. The letter was shared/leaked to media, supposedly to reiterate Clinton’s private message to donors that she would be a “better friend” to Israel than Obama. It echoed many of the sentiments Clinton expressed in her speech to AIPAC in March.
Saban also managed to inject himself into the presidential campaign when he was interviewed by The Wrap back in November 2015:
What are people in Hollywood saying about the Paris terror attacks?
Many members of the Hollywood community are very liberal and they value their civil liberties more than they value life. I disagree with that. You want to be free and dead? I’d rather be not free and alive. The reality is that certain things that are unacceptable in times of peace — such as profiling, listening in on anyone and everybody who looks suspicious, or interviewing Muslims in a more intense way than interviewing Christian refugees — is all acceptable [during war]. Why? Because we value life more than our civil liberties and it’s temporary until the problem goes away.
Since the US has been “at war” somewhere for much of the past century, perhaps we should all just get used to greater scrutiny for people who “look suspicious”. Huma Abedin reportedly chided Saban, telling him this was in opposition to the party and Clinton’s stance. Ellison is Muslim, of course, and clearly Saban’s is expressing a defense of prejudice towards Muslims, at “until the problem goes away”. Saban later said he “misspoke” and everyone should receive the same level of scrutiny.
Incidentally, this was around the time Trump called Syrian refugees a “trojan horse”, promoted “extreme vetting” of immigrants, spread the false claim that “thousands of Muslims were cheering the 9/11 attacks on rooftops in New Jersey” and proposed a ban on Muslims traveling to the US. So these ideas were in the air.
In a similar vein, some also find Ellison’s defense of Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) objectionable. Ture spoke at the University of Minnesota.The Anti-Defamation League covered the event in their 1992 report “The Anti-Semitism of Black Demagogues and Extremists”.
Here’s Ellison writing in the Minnesota Daily on April 26, 1990 about that speech:
Over the past two years the Africana Student Cultural Center has been in a pitched battle to preserve its right to free expression and free academic inquiry. That battle intensified when University President Nils Hasselmo imposed his official presidential stamp on the campaign to chill black speech on campus.
Under intense outside pressure, Hasselmo decided to denounce Kwame Ture’s Feb. 2 speech sight unseen in a secret meeting on Feb. 23. Later that week, after black students protested, Hasselmo issued a thinly veiled censure of the ASCC for inviting Ture, Hasselmo said he was offended when Ture said in an open speech that Zionists collaborated with Nazis during World War II.
[...] the University’s position appears to be this: Political Zionism is off-limits no matter what dubious circumstances Israel was founded under; no matter what the Zionists do to the Palestinians; and no matter what wicked regimes Israel allies itself with — like South Africa. This position is untenable.
That last paragraph is still relevant, current-day students advocating for Palestinian rights say their advocacy and speech is stifled by universities on the same dubious grounds.
The ADL has joined in to oppose Ellison’s bid, issuing this statement based on a 30 second clip of Ellison speaking in 2010:
New information recently has come to light that raises serious concerns about whether Rep. Ellison faithfully could represent the Democratic Party’s traditional support for a strong and secure Israel. In a speech recorded in 2010 to a group of supporters, Rep. Ellison is heard suggesting that American foreign policy in the Middle East is driven by Israel, saying: “The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people. A region of 350 million all turns on a country of 7 million. Does that make sense? Is that logic? Right? When the Americans who trace their roots back to those 350 million get involved, everything changes.”
Rep. Ellison’s remarks are both deeply disturbing and disqualifying. His words imply that U.S. foreign policy is based on religiously or national origin-based special interests rather than simply on America’s best interests.
Glenn Greenwald called these allegations a “smear campaign against Keith Ellison”, noting that the ADL opposed the ground zero mosque. What makes much of this seem overwrought, is that Ellison has, been a pretty reliable supporter of pro-Israel causes during his congressional career. Here’s J. J. Goldberg again, in The Forward — The Full Keith Ellison Tape Shows He Was (Mostly) Praising Israel:
the first interpretation — the ADL’s reading — accords with the image of Ellison as an Israel-hater that’s popular in conservative Jewish circles. The second, more benign reading, on the other hand, jibes with the picture of Ellison portrayed by the Democratic leadership in Congress and virtually the entire leadership of the Jewish community in Ellison’s hometown of Minneapolis-St. Paul, where he’s consistently described as a friend and ally of the community and a supporter of Israel.
[...] here’s his most conspiratorial-sounding statement: “That country” — Israel — “has mobilized its Diaspora in America to do its bidding in America.” Sounds ominous, right? He’s accusing AIPAC of doing a good job. But now he draws the lesson he wants to drive home to Muslims: “The question is, with all of us here, we ought to be able to do at least as much. You understand what I am trying to say? That we got a lot of work to do.” That is, the Jewish community does effective work on its causes. Muslims should learn from them.
Ellison wrote a response when these old articles and statements were rehashed:
In my effort to pursue justice for the African-American community, I neglected to scrutinize the words of those like Khalid Muhammed and Farrakhan who mixed a message of African American empowerment with scapegoating of other communities. These men organize by sowing hatred and division, including, anti-Semitism, homophobia and a chauvinistic model of manhood. I disavowed them long ago, condemned their views, and apologized.
Amid all this fuss, I wonder where the “historic candidacy” folks have disappeared. Ellison would, after all, be the first Muslim to be elected chairperson of the DNC. He would be the first black person elected since Ron Brown back in 1989 (Donna Brazile has served two terms as interim chair). You would think Democrats would be lining up for another “first”.
As for where Ellison’s appeal may lie, I’ll J. J. Goldberg make the case for Ellison:
By bridging the divide between the identity-politics and economic-justice wings, and by bringing youth and charisma to a mostly aging, worn-out Democratic leadership in Washington, Ellison may appeal to many — including in the Jewish community. “I’ve seen him bring down the house several times in mostly white union halls,” said Hornstein, the state legislator.