Disir
Platinum Member
- Sep 30, 2011
- 28,003
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The Democratic Party is in crisis, hollowed out at the state level, and desperate for new ideas, bold leaders and a cutting-edge plan of action against Donald Trump.
The race for Democratic National Committee chair is bland and bloodless. The seven candidates are downplaying differences and offering conventional ideas they all agree on.
Go local. Pursue a new 50-state strategy. Something about cybersecurity. Organize. The list goes on, but the pitches share one thing in common: they’re not very complicated, imaginative or a break from the past.
In part that’s a reflection of the seriousness of the Democratic predicament, both as a political party and in its official institutional apparatus. “ntil you get the basics right, innovation is sort of a luxury,” said Donnie Fowler, who ran for DNC chair in 2005 and has stayed involved, including as a consultant through the last few months of the 2016 cycle.
But the nothingness and me-too-ism of the race is also a reflection of a crowded field that’s short on star power and heavy on party mechanics.
....The fact that the DNC hasn’t had an open race for 12 years, and is busy trying to figure out its existing rules at the same time it works out its new identity isn’t helping either. There are just 447 people who’ll have a vote when they gather in Atlanta the last weekend in February, and though the race is being turned from the outside into a vehicle for the party’s rolling existential crisis, it’s still going to be decided by a collection of local chieftains with their own parochial interests and hands out for cash and attention — and that’s what the candidates have been catering too.
DNC race: Low on energy, ideas, imagination
And because they can't manage to reinvent themselves the DNC (separately)and the candidates in 2018 are done.
The race for Democratic National Committee chair is bland and bloodless. The seven candidates are downplaying differences and offering conventional ideas they all agree on.
Go local. Pursue a new 50-state strategy. Something about cybersecurity. Organize. The list goes on, but the pitches share one thing in common: they’re not very complicated, imaginative or a break from the past.
In part that’s a reflection of the seriousness of the Democratic predicament, both as a political party and in its official institutional apparatus. “ntil you get the basics right, innovation is sort of a luxury,” said Donnie Fowler, who ran for DNC chair in 2005 and has stayed involved, including as a consultant through the last few months of the 2016 cycle.
But the nothingness and me-too-ism of the race is also a reflection of a crowded field that’s short on star power and heavy on party mechanics.
....The fact that the DNC hasn’t had an open race for 12 years, and is busy trying to figure out its existing rules at the same time it works out its new identity isn’t helping either. There are just 447 people who’ll have a vote when they gather in Atlanta the last weekend in February, and though the race is being turned from the outside into a vehicle for the party’s rolling existential crisis, it’s still going to be decided by a collection of local chieftains with their own parochial interests and hands out for cash and attention — and that’s what the candidates have been catering too.
DNC race: Low on energy, ideas, imagination
And because they can't manage to reinvent themselves the DNC (separately)and the candidates in 2018 are done.
