With an establishment Joe Biden leading early….
A Elizabeth Warren knocking on his door…
A non-democratic Bernie Sanders AGAIN trying to game the Democratic Party nomination process?
And a get rid of Donald Trump at ALL costs party chumping at the bit?
Tom Perez IS a busy man….
Democrats have no natural leader to turn to at this moment—Jimmy Carter is 95 with a broken pelvis and has been distant from politics for decades, Bill Clinton is virtually persona non grata in the #MeToo era, and Barack Obama has consciously removed himself from politics until after the primaries are over. “Once we have a nominee, he’s going to be very involved in making sure that Democrats win,” Perez said.
A strong party apparatus could be useful—if there were a strong party apparatus. Operatives say the DNC infrastructure was decimated under the leadership of the previous chair, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who was forced to resign after hacked DNC emails highlighted pervasive frustration with her management. Some argue that Sanders’s 2016 attacks on the DNC undermined trust in the party that it hasn’t recovered, even as he’s extracted concessions and dialed back his diatribes in the years since. Big-dollar donations are double what they were at this point four years ago, but fundraising comparisons between the DNC and the Republican National Committee read like cruel jokes at Perez’s expense.
Perez has identified April 29—the day after the primaries in six mid-Atlantic states—as when he expects to turn over the operation he’s built to a presumptive nominee.
He has six months.
“I have never seen so many people getting involved at the grassroots level—the problem is, it’s the people wearing the MAGA caps,” Tony Eufinger, an attorney who came to another event that day in Ohio, a dairy-farm roundtable, told Perez. “The reason they’re doing it is because [Trump] is speaking to them emotionally. The only way you can overcome that is with something real, something tangible they can touch.”…
image…heavy.com