As an activist, I've been through four presidential cycles and knocked on doors or made calls for over 30 candidates for office. I've been on the winning side of primaries and the losing side of primaries. While the work the DNC Chair does is important, a DNC Chair has never decided a primary and probably never will.
What good DNC Chairs do is empower state and local parties to recruit and elect candidates to city councils, county commissions and state legislatures. Good DNC Chairs are farmers who plant seeds that then grow into future leaders. Ron Brown was DNC Chair in 1992 when Barack Obama ran a voter registration drive in the thrn-swing state of Illinois.
What matters in this election is not whether the DNC Chair backed Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in the recent past, but what they will do to inspire--and support--the next generation of political leaders to run for office. What matters is how they will support local parties in their efforts to turn our newfound passion into tangible policy gains.
Tom Perez and Keith Ellison are both good progressive Democrats. They've both served our country with distinction and they both have bright futures within our party. Yet their passionate supporters have decided to turn the contest between them into a proxy battle in which we can re-litigate and re-live the 2016 elections. I don't know about you, but I'm not eager to re-live a year which ended with Donald Trump getting elected President. I fear that if either Perez or Ellison wins that there will be much made of "healing, the divide" and far too little said about the thing that matters, the future.
Pete Buttigieg is a 35 year old two-term Mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He is a veteran of the War in Afghanistan. And he has shown throughout the campaign that he understands the value of strong state and local parties and the importance of state and local elections. (To be fair, Ellison and Perez have done the same).
But Mayor Buttigieg talks about the future a lot because he has a big stake in it. And he is well positioned to unite our party, he started his political career by writing an essay about the courage of Bernie Sanders in high school. But he also campaigned for Hillary Clinton last year. Mayor Buttigieg knows that we will be defined not by what we did in the past, but by what we do in the future.
Mayor Buttigieg has been endorsed by leading figures in the party, including former DNC Chairs Joe Andrew, Ed Rendell, and Howard Dean. They all point to the need for the party to have younger leadership (currently most Democratic leaders are septuagenarians). I think they're right. I hope Pete Buttigieg is elected Chairman of the Democratic National Committee tomorrow.