In the course of choosing its new chairman last week, the Democratic Party justified the worries many have voiced over its continuing lurch leftward, a development with potentially serious consequences for the way Americans go about their daily lives.
And the very real concerns on the part of those interested in the crucial strategic relationship between the United States and Israel have been clearly vindicated.
It is hard to miss the sharp difference between the politics of the post-2016 presidential election and what followed earlier national elections. The hostility between Democrats and Republicans during the Obama years was surely epic, but it was played out in the context of familiar partisan gamesmanship within the Congress, courts, and administrative agencies – and in significant measure over particular substantive issues.
Mr. Obama’s presidential legitimacy or whether he should be permitted to complete his term in office was never really in play despite the ruminations of fringe “birthers.”
However, from the day Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Democrats have seemed hell-bent on delegitimizing him and possibly even removing him from office. It will be recalled that there were an unusual number of recount efforts – even by those who conceded they did not have the evidence. There were the shenanigans designed to derail the Electoral College vote to throw the choosing of the president into the House of Representatives to add to an aura of illegitimacy surrounding Mr. Trump, who did not receive a majority of the popular vote.
And now the politics of decision-making has materially moved from the traditional political arena to an attempt to rule from the street with demonstrations replacing debate. Indeed, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have even taken to publicly ruminating about an impeachment of President Trump on grounds that are laughable in terms of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard set by the Constitution for the unseating of a president.
Unfortunately, this phenomenon seems rooted in what appears to be a hard left-“progressive” takeover of the Democratic Party, with a specific goal of erasing national, religious, economic, and gender distinctions. Senator Bernie Sanders was their hoped-for presidential candidate, with Hillary Clinton a distant second. A President Donald Trump is, of course, utter anathema to them. Hence the tumult.
When a national party loses a presidential election, it is effectively leaderless. So the leadership, such as it is, falls to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, or the Republican National Committee, as the case may be. The chairman becomes the face of the party to the world and is tasked with building ad organizing in anticipation of the next election cycle.
For a long while, it was disheartening to see the race for DNC chairman seemingly in the bag for Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, who once worked for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and was one of the few members of Congress to vote against U.S. funding for the Iron Dome anti-missile system so critical to Israel’s security.
It was also perplexing that New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, who certainly wasn’t known to share Mr. Ellison’s views, on Israel or much else, endorsed him for DNC. Mr. Schumer subsequently explained that his support was based on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s strong support for Mr. Ellison. Sen. Sanders has many followers in the Democratic Party, Mr. Schumer, the Minority Leader of the Senate – rather cynically, in our view – chose to cultivate Sen. Sanders’s support.
New York mayor Bill de Blasio, who has sought a relationship with the Jewish community in the past, disappointed many of us when he endorsed Mr. Ellison. His reasoning was also illuminating. As he wrote recently in the Washington Post:
“[W]hat we’ve seen in the days after the inauguration is nothing short of incredible. All over the country, millions of people are getting organized and demonstrating against the president and the broken policies of the Republican Party. People are starting to feel their power to stop the administration.
The new mission of the Democratic Party must be to harness and build on this energy. We need determined leadership that will bring us together as one united party. We need an inspiring vision of equality that resonates in the hearts, minds, and souls of all Americans. We need to renew our commitment to strengthening our grass-roots infrastructure to take on President Trump and the Republicans.
You’d be hard-pressed to write a better description of Keith Ellison’s approach to public service. That’s why I’m supporting him in the race to be the next chairman of the Democratic Party.
As The New York Times reported last week:
Reduced to their weakest state in a generation, Democratic Party leaders will gather in two cities this weekend to plot strategy and select a new national chairman….but senior Democratic officials concede that the blueprint has already been chosen for them –by an incensed army of liberals demanding no less than total war against President Trump.
In the end, Mr. Ellison lost to former president Obama’s secretary of labor, Tom Perez, by a very narrow 235-200 margin, but Mr. Perez promptly appointed Ellison as deputy chairman (a previously non-existent position) and signed on to “taking the battle” to President Trump. By doing so, Mr. Perez acknowledged what the close vote indicated – that the worldview of Keith Ellison and Bernie Sanders will have a prominent place in the Democratic Party going forward.
Will the party’s drift away from full-throated support for Israel also continue apace?