It’s unfortunate that the race for the DNC chair has sucked us back into the primary wars, because really, the two serious candidates, Keith Ellison and Ilyse Hogue, are both impressive in their own rights. There is nothing from the primary battles that is of any relevance to these two candidates, no matter who you supported.
Criticism of a part-time DNC chair was always warranted. Running the party has to be a full-time job. And so is being a congressman. So if Ellison tried to do both at the same time, he’d be short-changing one or the other of the jobs. Ellison/Sanders partisans tried to claim it was a non-issue, but it was the biggest issue facing Ellison’s candidacy. But no longer.
In order to further their commitment and maximize my effectiveness, I have decided to resign as a member of Congress if I win the election for DNC chair.
Beautiful. We should never again let anyone treat the DNC like a part-time job. Ellison’s statement is a response to the DNC delegates demanding full-time attention to the party’s vexing problems. And Ellison’s commitment to resigning his congressional seat if he wins is a testament to the seriousness in which he’s taking this race.
Ellison still needs more fire in his platform. We need more specifics on how he would bolster state parties and we need to know how he’ll reform the primary process—from the calendar, to the caucuses, to the superdelegate system. He glaringly ignored that issue in his platform, thus I still think Hogue’s platform is superior. But there’s plenty of time to address those inadequacies, and today, he eliminated the biggest challenge to his candidacy.