We have six candidates vying to be DNC chair—and not a single real reformer among them

There are six declared candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee: Rep. Keith Ellison; outgoing Labor Secretary Tom Perez; executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party Sally Boynton Brown; chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party Raymond Buckley; South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg; and South Carolina party chair Jaime Harrison. 

I was supporting NARAL president Ilyse Hogue. With her out of the race I’m officially neutral and, to be honest, not feeling it for any of these guys. Buckley will obviously work to maintain the Iowa-New Hampshire duopoly, and Harrison’s South Carolina also benefits from the current primary calendar system. In any case, none of them have, in anything I dug up, offered tangible changes to the presidential selection process such as the ones I previously laid out. (Although the fact that Harrison is the first African-American chair of any South Carolina political party is an amazing accomplishment. The fact that he is a lobbyist for the Podesta Group while serving as SC chair, less so.) If the chair of the Idaho Democratic Party had led local candidates to amazing victories, I might be taking her more seriously. Not to mention, I couldn’t find any campaign site at all. Buttigieg’s campaign website literally lacks any platform at all.   

That really leaves two serious candidates for the job—Ellison and Perez. I’ve already noted Ellison’s wholly uninspiring platform. A staffer promised me more sizzle once the cattle-call process begins. God, I hope so. As I wrote, Terry McAuliffe could’ve written Ellison’s platform. There is no reform in his proposal. Zero. Other than a few nibbles in the margins, it maintains the status quo. 

That leaves Perez, whose platform is pretty much a carbon copy of Ellison’s. There is pretty much zero disagreement between the two, so Perez’s suffers from the same problem as Ellison’s—there is zero hint of reform, of doing things differently. There isn’t a single reformer running for DNC Chair.