Candidates for DNC Top Job: Obama Failed Us
They rarely mention him by name, but the message from those running for party chairman is clear: the president left Democrats in a weakened state
By REID J. EPSTEIN
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The top candidates to lead the Democratic National Committee are positioning their campaigns as a repudiation of what they see as the political legacy of President Barack Obama.
Though they rarely mention the president by name or address his policies, Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison have sent a clear message that Mr. Obama has left the party in a weakened state.
Messers. Perez and Ellison—along with state chairmen Jaime Harrison of South Carolina and Ray Buckley of New Hampshire, who are also candidates for chairman of the DNC—are seeking a mandate to reverse Obama-era tactics that cut funding and attention to local parties and left Democrats with far less power in Congress, governorships and state legislatures than when his presidency began.
“This needs to be the very last cycle in which the presidential candidate takes over the DNC,” said Mr. Harrison, speaking at a forum for candidates earlier this month. “The DNC is not just about winning the presidency. Amen?”
The audience, mostly Democratic state party chairs, responded “Amen.”
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The next party chairman will be selected by the committee’s 447 voting members in February. It is the first open election to lead the DNC since 2005. When a party holds the White House, the president selects the chairman and the election is perfunctory.
Under DNC chairs selected by Mr. Obama—first Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and then Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz—
the DNC cut funding to state parties. Local Democratic apparatuses withered; in Idaho the state party needed committee funds to rent space to hold its presidential caucuses in March because it couldn’t afford it on its own.
Since the president’s election in 2008, Democrats lost control of Congress and suffered even steeper losses in state capitols, where they hold a minority of governorships and have lost control in dozens of state legislative chambers.
At his year-end press conference last week, the president said he was proud of his own national campaigns but acknowledged he is leaving Democrats in a deep hole.
He was unable to transfer his own popularity down ballot or “build a sustaining organization,” he said. “That’s something that I would have liked to have done more of,” he said. “But it’s kind of hard to do when you’re also dealing with a whole bunch of issues here in the White House.”
At the state level, some elected officials say that while they remain loyal to Mr.
Obama, his presidency has left the lower rungs of the party in disarray.
“There has been too much focus by the DNC on the top of the ticket and too little organizing in between presidential races,” said Philip Bartlett, chairman of the Maine Democratic Party.
“The work of state parties in off-years and midterms are critical to building long-term infrastructure and maintaining grass roots strength,” Mr. Bartlett said. “I think that has been undervalued by DNC leadership and both state parties and the down ballot candidates they support have paid a heavy price.”
Mo Elleithee, a top DNC official under Ms. Wasserman Schultz, said of party officials, “They don’t want a chair who is going to disrespect or critique this president, but they want a recognition that things have not been going well and a plan to fix it.”
There is much to fix.
While the Republican National Committee dispatched officials to expected 2016 presidential battleground states in 2013, the DNC didn’t hire a national field director until after Hillary Clinton became the party’s nominee this summer. At that point, Clinton aides had taken control of the party apparatus.
Now, even though Mr. Obama remains immensely popular among Democrats, the case made by those aiming to replace him as the head of the party and their allies isn’t subtle.
“The painful truth is that despite President Obama’s strong victories in 2008 and 2012, the Democratic Party has lost enormous political ground over the last eight years,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said last week at a rally for Mr. Ellison. “Whatever the leadership of the Democratic Party has been doing over the last many years has failed and we need fundamental change.”
Mr. Ellison didn’t mention the president by name but made the same point.
“We know that even a good car sometimes needs a tune up,” he said. “You’ve got to maintain and update and invigorate…If you just let it slide it tends not to work so well.”
Mounting a campaign critical of the Democratic establishment is trickier for Mr. Perez, who has served in the Obama administration since 2009 and was on Mrs. Clinton’s vice presidential short list.
“We got too reliant on our data,” Mr. Perez told state party officials Thursday during a call launching his campaign.
The labor secretary, who is remaining in Mr. Obama’s cabinet as he campaigns for party chairman, said the 50-state strategy that led Democrats to congressional majorities in 2006 and 2008 has “atrophied.”
“We have to be a year-round operation and that’s where we have fallen short,” he said.