Democrats would be smart to embrace Keith Ellison as DNC chair [View all]

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Democrats would be smart to embrace Keith Ellison as DNC chair
Matthew Yglesias
Vox

Many members of the Democratic Party establishment remain profoundly angry at Bernie Sanders and the leading supporters of his 2016 primary campaign. Conversely, many grassroots Sanders supporters remain profoundly angry at the leadership of the Democratic Party. Rehashing the origins of this situation would be pointless, but it hangs like a cloud over the race for chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Keith Ellison is the right choice for unity

Sanders anchored what amounts to a negative partisanship mass movement on an unprecedented scale. His campaign grew far larger than Dean’s ever did, despite even less support from party insiders. If that mass of people remains where they were throughout the 2016 election, they’ll be a potentially dangerous force that ends up undermining progressive politics despite itself. But if they can be brought inside the Democratic Party and turned into the kind of party regulars who vote in midterms and volunteer for local races, they’d be an extraordinarily powerful force.

Since what they want is, in some ways, different from what existing party leaders want, they’d also be a bit of a disruptive force. But ultimately both young insurgents and older establishmentarians are going to be happier with that disruptive force taking place inside the context of a party politics paradigm rather than on the sidelines.

There are, of course, a lot of objections you can raise to Ellison. And in the spirit of a political campaign, they’ve pretty much all been thrown at him.

People who think it’s obviously absurd to believe that a black Muslim from Minneapolis can help Democrats win white working class votes in the Midwest would probably be fascinated to hear about what a black guy from Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama managed to pull off.

To make a comeback, an out-of-power party needs a dose of good luck, unity of purpose, and to recruit strong candidates for midterm elections. Luck is in God’s hands, Ellison is the best choice to deliver unity, and recruiting a big-name candidate for what will unquestionably be a tough race would be an excellent down payment on the broader recruiting challenge. Given where the 2016 campaign ended up, Sanders and his faction of the Democratic Party clearly have something coming to them. A well-qualified Sanders ally who is willing to make it a full-time job at the head of the DNC is a reasonable ask, and if Democrats are smart they’ll give it to him.