Considering a DNC Chair run.

Dear Friends: 

It has been an absolutely grueling three weeks, and there is little doubt as time goes on that things will only get worse.   We have no idea what is coming, nor what will be asked of us over the next four years. I have given much thought as to what role I must play in this struggle, and it comes back to pushing as strongly as I possibly can for the ideas that I think will allow us still to turn things around at the ballot box. It is not that I am confident the fight can any longer be won there, but I know that is an arena that cannot be abandoned. There is also for me the question of how to have the most influence and be heard the loudest. Though the suggestion of a dear friend I have landed on the following idea. While I do not take this step lightly, I am considering a run to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee. My deadline to decide is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.  My agenda boils down to three simple truths.   

First, what the party is doing is not working on a fundamental level. We have lost 3 out of 5 of the most recent elections at a time when the consequences of losing are at best catastrophic. To have any hope of seeing the country governed in accord with anything close to our values, we need to win the next three at a minimum. To borrow from the great Vince Lombardi, for the foreseeable future for Democrats, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. We can’t ever forget this. 

Second, we have many good candidates, and I am well aware that someone who is more deeply connected to the party structure is likely to be elected. Yet we need to realize that everyone with a connection to the party has the potential downside of wanting to please current constituencies and groups within the party. Plainly put, the more you know the people who benefit from the status quo the harder it is to break from it.  The Party must absolutely tackle big questions.  For example, does the barrage of television ads still work, or does some of that money end up being wasted? Can the Party respect the idea that certain things belong to different leaders, with the DNC taking a back seat to Congressional leaders on Congressional races etc.? These are two of potentially dozens of examples.  Absolutely every strategy and tactic must be on the table in terms of what options should be considered, and the fewer ties you have to the people potentially affected, the easier it is to make change. 

Third, we need to change who we picture when we describe who the party is. Too often, and this is absolutely the case when it comes to those who will elect the next DNC Chair, we think of the party as the Institutional Democratic Party, those with party office or title or membership. But in our current configuration, the party needs to become those people who give to our candidates and/or vote in our low turnout primaries. Therefore, someone must be a voice for those midrange donors who primarily have winning as their only major consideration and give where they think it will matter most. We are currently spewing an insanely unfair amount of communication through text and emails to these people. What is worse, our campaigns rather than competing against Republicans are often competing against each other for the same resources. This creates a situation in which the party is almost unable to communicate to the people who it needs the most to take up its banner.  This communication problem almost certainly requires a party wide fix, and that can only happen if the DNC pushes in that direction. Abandoning text messages for fundraising solicitation would be an excellent start because they really are assaultive and are too often used by scammers. If the regular party gave them up, the scammers would fall flat.   Showing more respect to the 15 million people who engage with the party in some fashion has the potential to allow us to turn them into our ambassadors rather than merely our overtaxed ATMs. 

My hope is that by entering this race I will be able to push the conversation forward on the idea that we need systemic rather than slight changes at the DNC. These changes are much more in the direction of how we communicate rather than what we communicate. Were I to enter the race, I would flesh out these ideas in much greater detail. I probably will anyway. For now, I just wanted to hear from people on whether this makes sense to them and also what changes you might like to see to the party so I might incorporate them into the platform I will be writing.