Why Are The Knives Out For The Democratic Party Chair?

Almost simultaneously, BuzzFeed and Politico published extensive stories Wednesday on what they described as the troubled leadership of Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The Politico story in particular was full of anecdotes from Democratic insiders wielding shivs: She’s tone deaf and tried to use party money to pay for her own clothes. She’s grasping and more concerned with her own personal ambitions than the fate of the party. She’s so relentlessly self-promotional that even President Barack Obama has grown tired of her — and he lets it show.

Some folks within the Democratic Party are clearly dissatisfied with her leadership. But who exactly has their knives out for Wasserman Schultz? And what’s their angle? That’s a little more opaque.

What we do know, though, is that some kind of change could be coming to the DNC very soon. The party is expected to have a presidential frontrunner after the new year — when presumed nominee Hillary Clinton has said she’ll make her decision about whether to run — and presidential candidates tend to want their own people at the top of the party. It might not be normal for a not-yet-nominated candidate to get their pick of party chair (and publicly, she surely won’t), but nothing is normal about the potential Clinton 2016 bid. And combined with the attacks on Wasserman Schultz, it certainly seems that a new chair is not to be ruled out.

“The importance of the party chair has really declined over the years in a lot of ways,” Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College who specializes in political parties, told TPM. “But traditionally what you saw was that the new nominee of the party was able to appoint the next chair. It was their way of establishing their titular leadership of the party.”

If a change is going to be made before 2016, the time is likely to be soon, John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, told TPM in an email. Much closer to the primary season, and there is likely to be too much internal infighting as candidates angle to get somebody close to them positioned as chair, he said.

“Party chairs are replaced from time to time, but for personal reasons or perceived ineffectiveness,” Green said. “The most logical time for such a change is before an election cycle begins — such as before 2015 or in the very early going.”

“It is rare for a party chair to be changed in the run up to a presidential election — that is the year before the primaries and the primary season,” Green said. “In these regards, the chair is supposed to be neutral, and they mostly are. If a candidate pushed for a friendly chair before the nomination is secured, there is usually strong pushback from other candidates and their backers.”

Like most things, Clinton’s unprecedented frontrunner status complicates any pointing to the historical evidence. And it’s not apparent at all that Clinton or her supporters have anything to do with the one-two punch of stories questioning Wasserman Schultz’s leadership at the DNC. She has attracted plenty of backlash on her own, most recently after she made some controversial remarks about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R).

But it does make the possibility of a new chair real. And it seems at least plausible that the ghost of 2008 would weigh heavily on Clintonite minds — and that would likely make them intent on having some say on who replaces Wasserman Schultz, when and if she goes. The maneuvering to appoint a chair is usually a kind of “jockeying between different factions of the party,” Klinkner said.

Back in 2008, then-DNC chair Howard Dean was neutral. But Democratic Party procedures — particularly regarding delegates — did influence the close primary between Clinton and Obama. A different set of ground rules could have conceivably led to a Clinton nomination, Klinkner said.

The decision to replace Wasserman Schultz would be up to Obama, the current head of the party. But it’s worth remembering that many of his top campaign advisers have already aligned behind a Clinton 2016 bid, and one of his senior advisers was meeting earlier this summer with those planning for a Clinton candidacy.

“My guess is the Clinton people want to make sure that the party procedures are in place are going to be favorable to her as possible or that the people who are running the national committee apparatus are as favorable to her as possible,” Klinkner said. “It may be that they want to make sure that they have their person there. People who are looking to run for the nomination want to make sure that the national committee chair is as favorable to them as possible.”

Reacting to the dual negative pieces on Wasserman Schultz, some Democrats called it “overkill” and said the tone of the Politico piece resembled the TV series “House of Cards” — which almost comically overplays cutthroat D.C. politics.

But the picture painted by the two pieces was devastating.

“You need another picture, Debbie?” Obama was said to remark cuttingly whenever Wasserman Schultz asked for a photo-op at the end of a fundraiser or rope line, Politico reported. She reportedly rubbed him the wrong way for complaining shortly after she was named chair in 2011 that she couldn’t appoint a donor’s daughter to a position, according to Politico.

She clumsily denied that she used her own initials when naming her own PAC — DWS PAC — which was implicitly portrayed as another symbol of her personal agenda and ambitions at the expense of the party.

“It stands for Democrats Win Seats,” she told Politico. “And that’s important. It stands for Democrats Win Seats. It is a political action committee that exists to elect Democrats.”