It seemed pretty obvious, at first. Bernie Sanders fans (myself included) all endorsed either progressive Keith Ellison or even further left-wing, non-establishment figures. Naturally, the Democratic party — through a process involving just over 400 decision makers — decide to go with a man who just got done serving in an administration to prove how far the party had come since the Superdelegate-fueled primaries split it in two.
Allow me to back up. I have no personal beef or grudge with Tom Perez. He was Obama’s labor secretary and has, at least from what I heard during the DNC Chair debates, a decent head on his shoulders and a track-record of fighting for workers. That’s a good thing, and good on him for that. I’m not sure of his reason for wanting to win the DNC, but now that he’s victorious and he’s made the symbolic appointment of Berniecrat Keith Ellison as his deputy, well, I guess I’m left wondering if any lessons were really drawn from the 2016 election.
You see, Perez lost any chance of me voting for him (Not that I could) when, as Politico reported, he started talking about having all of these people lined up to vote for him before the actual vote, as if to say, “Psh, I’ve already won so why bother asking?” Of course, a second round of voting was needed as Sally Boynton Brown and others stole half-and-whole votes, but Perez did indeed come out victorious. It reeked of the nasty vibe left over from the Primaries, about how, as PoliticusUSA reported at the time, the Democratic party’s process pre-determined the winner — and pre-determined that it would be whoever the Establishment wanted, Berniecrats be damned.
Maybe the use of the term “Berniecrat” is, itself, unfair; I’m using it only because I identify as one, as do many of the politically-active friends I have, and we all seem to agree on at least some level of this feeling being present in the party. Maybe my own internal sound-garden is starting to create a black hole in my soul. (Bonus points if you get the reference) But here’s the problem: The people I speak with are at least 15-20 people deep, each with similar views and each with their own associates who feel, mostly, the same. It’s a feeling held by at least some significant portion of the Democratic party, those who really joined up to support Bernie Sanders in the first place, and those who are staying around to do things like take control of California’s state party.
With that in mind, congratulations to Tom Perez on his victory. He wasn’t my choice — I was between Sally Boynton Brown and Keith Ellison — but he is the leader the Democratic party chose. I think it was a choice that will turn a lot of Democrats further away from the party, I think it has inspired a re-litigation of some of the party’s problems (as Mrs. Brown was asked about during the CNN DNC Chair Debate; her answer was brilliant), and it’s one we’re going to have to heal from regardless. I’m here and ready to move on, but that means I am going to pass forward with, simply, the first thing I believe Tom Perez needs to do to be successful:
We need to change how Democratic Chairs and Candidates are chosen.
Did you know that I wasn’t kidding when I said “just over 400” people decided who would run the Democratic party. It wasn’t the Democratic membership, itself. I did not get a vote. Instead, an arcane enough system that I don’t see it clearly described on the relevant Wikipedia page was used to allow some 447 “voting members” of the DNC to decide who would run the party in opposition to an increasingly fascist-looking Republican party. We live in unparalleled times, and after all of the outcry about elitism and political establishments being a hindrance to retaining a functioning Democracy in the United States, the choice of “who will lead the political opposition” fell not to the millions of Democrats in America, but to less than five hundred people?
This is the Superdelegates debate all over again, the embodiment of the split between moderate and liberal Democrat and, in parallel to the Electoral College, the very undemocratic system which cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency and forced an ‘Alt-Right’ ‘President’ (and his Neo-Nazi boss, President Bannon, but that’s another story) onto America.
Tom Perez, your first goal as DNC Chair is to call for an immediate change in how the DNC picks its leadership. Your plan should be simple and straightforward: Every registered Democrat may vote in the first ballot, and the top three candidates are featured in a run-off where, again, every registered Democrat may vote.
Your second, yet concurrent goal must be to end the Superdelegate system entirely, and to push towards at the very least a same-day registration system, if not entirely Open Primaries. Rest assured, this will go hand-in-hand with what the Democrats’ first national push has to be: The restoration of voting rights and improvements in the voting system to bring access to more voters.
If the Republicans are allowed to gerrymander their own electorates together, it doesn’t really matter who runs the DNC, now does it?
Jesse Pohlman is an educator and author from Long Island, New York. When he’s not expanding the minds of the next generation, he occasionally writes science-fiction novels. Here’s one wherein two of the characters argue about robots believing in a God!