Perez Is The Man To Rebuild The Democratic Party From The Ground Up

It seems like some members of the Democratic party still can’t get beyond the 2016 election. Over the weekend Tom Perez just squeaked by Keith Ellison to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This caused some howls of protest from some of the more ideological progressives in the party, many of whom were associated with the Sanders campaign. Perez’s appointment of Ellison as Deputy Chair did not seem to do much to assuage those Ellison supporters, nor did Ellison’s statement on accepting that position, saying, “We don’t have the luxury to walk out of this room divided”.  Martese Chism, a board member of the National Nurses United, was not appeased, saying, “The DNC voting members crushed us again like they did with Bernie. They didn’t listen to the people, they didn’t even listen to the applause in the room. They want to keep the status quo and they want the left to follow them ― I don’t know what we’re going to do”, hinting at taking her and her union’s activism to other progressive groups outside the party. Some others are upset that Perez did not take a firm stand against TPP or the DAPL and XL pipelines. But those battles at over, primarily because Democrats have no power to fight whatever the GOP decides to do. It really is time to move on and fight about issues we can really influence.

The feud over Perez and Ellison is bizarre in that it became a proxy for waging the Bernie-Hillary primary all over again. Ellison was a vocal supporter of Bernie and Perez endorsed Hillary. But Perez is not really from the Clinton world. He is more of Obama’s guy and it was former Obama officials that pressed Perez to run and pushed for his election. But Hillary became the target of the Ellison supporter much more than Obama, who seemed to get a pass. Obama was never able to convert his personal popularity into votes for the Democratic party down the line. And Democratic losses at the state and local levels during Obama’s eight years are staggering. In many ways, he has failed the institution of the Democratic party more than Hillary.

In reality, those progressives critical of Perez were objecting more to the corporate bent of the Democratic party bureaucracy that they believe he represents. That view is reflected in the statements that Sanders himself made the day after Perez’s election. Said Bernie, “We need a total transformation. We need to open up the party to working people, to young people and make it crystal clear that the Democratic Party is going to take on Wall Street, it’s going to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, it’s going to take on corporate America that is shutting down plants in this country and moving our jobs abroad.”

But Perez’s progressive credentials are, in many ways, as good or better than Ellison’s. His political career began as an upstart progressive beating the mainstream Democratic incumbent on the Montgomery County Council in Maryland. Rising to become council president in three years, he fought for legislation to protect the fights of day laborers, to protect minority communities from predatory lenders and to allow drug purchases from Canada. The latter two measures were passed by the Council and then subsequently blocked by the Bush administration. He was then appointed by Obama to head the Civil Rights division at the Department of Justice. That group had been decimated by George Bush and Karl Rove, who had ousted prosecutors for their political beliefs and tried to force them to bring voter fraud cases that didn’t exist. He rebuilt that office quickly, focusing an abuses by police departments across the country and eventually took on the blatant discrimination in the racist Shrriff Joe Arpaio’s police department. Obama moved him to head the Department of Labor in 2013. He was responsible for pushing through the rules that allowed home care and domestic workers to be covered by federal minimum wage and overtime rules. He spoke forcefully for the fight for $15. He was aggressive in going after wage theft and misclassification of workers to avoid overtime rules. He promulgated the rule that investment advisers put the interest of their clients first, the so-called fiduciary rule. This was a clear attack on the interests of Wall Street but Perez was able to push it through. The law repealing this rule was one of the first acts of the GOP Congress and President Trump. Perez also oversaw the first upgrade to the overtime rule in years and had it indexed to inflation. It would have lifted the salary of millions of workers. An activist conservative judge in Texas who was handpicked by the rules opponents struck down the rule, breaking all precedent that gave the DOL authority to do this, and the Trump administration will not appeal that decision.

That is a pretty progressive resume for Perez. More importantly, however, is that Perez has shown he is a skilled bureaucrat as much as being a politician. And the DNC needs a bureaucrat to help rebuild the party at the state and local level. This should be right in Perez’s wheelhouse. I think most Democratic party regulars see that the party faithful are far ahead of the institution itself. Any rational leader will see that the DNC should be focusing most of their support to the state and local parties so that can capture and build on the wave of engagement that currently exists and begin to compete again locally across the country. Perez’s history certainly indicates that he would see that quite clearly. And he may just be the kind of bureaucrat to do that job successfully.

I endorsed Tom Perez for Vice President and I think that a reasonable case could be made that his efforts at the DOL might have been able to hold just enough white working class voters to overcome James Comey’s election coup. I also endorsed him for DNC chair for not only for the reasons I’ve listed above but also because Democrats do not need to waste resources trying to hold the open seat now held by Ellison in 2018. The map is not favorable for Senate Democrats who are defending many red state seats. Our only hope to regain any kind of power in Washington is to win the House, riding the energized Democratic base and independents turned off by the incompetence and downright meanness of the Trump administration.

Thankfully, Democrats won the special election in Delaware over the weekend and held the state Senate. Imagine the chaos and infighting that we would have had if the Democrats had lost and we still had no DNC chair. So, Perez dodged a bullet on day one. And hopefully he can dodge a few more as he takes on the enormous task of rebuilding the institutional Democratic party across the country and capitalizing on the wave of engagement in the party’s base.