Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison is the progressive favorite for Democratic National Committee chairman. If Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders get their way, he’ll replace disgraced Donna Brazile, who replaced disgraced Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as the party’s chief organizer.
As an African-American Muslim, Ellison’s intersecting identities check off so many coveted diversity boxes that none of the fallen heroes charting the party’s post-Clintonian course seem to have picked up on one problem: Diversity aside, he’s fairly boring.
And that’s not just this reporter’s opinion. At a Clinton campaign millennial phone bank THE WEEKLY STANDARD infiltrated back in September, Ellison had the misfortune of following colorful Symone Sanders, the Bernie Sanders press secretary turned Clinton surrogate.
At the September phone bank, he took center stage to gentle “woo”-ing and rippling whispers of “Keith who?” And he proceeded to carry on painfully longer than Symone, the queen of charisma, who’d left the room to pump up a millennial phone bank in Michigan via live stream. Ellison, meanwhile, deflated D.C.’s callers.
“You’re already hyped, am I right?” he said. Well, they were.
“This is not small stuff.” He invoked Donald Trump’s high favor among Klansmen. And then he praised Hillary’s knack for small stuff.
“She’s into the detail.” (Yipee!) When it comes to policy, “She’s getting specific”—and so did Ellison, at the expense of his audience’s interest. He even backtracked somewhat on an instruction to be authentic in their calls: “Share with them why you are compelled to support our candidate HIllary Clinton,” but, “Use the script, I’m not saying don’t use the script.”
Clinton volunteers shushed DNC staffers talking shop in the hall. “I will vote, I will vote,” callers flatly droned. People don’t vote when no one asks them, so Ellison asked volunteers working the phones to pledge in unison that they would. (He’s known for his skills as a grassroots organizer.)
He’d had better luck schedule-wise at the Democratic National Convention in July, where he introduced crowd favorite Bernie Sanders. Taking rhetorical advantage of abiding Bern-thusiasm, Ellison praised the socialist senator, whom he’d endorsed for the presidency, in the same shouty monotone we’ve come to expect from Democratic politicians. (But by the time Ellison, and Bernie, addressed the convention most of America was asleep.)
Over at Slate, Michelle Goldberg argues that Ellison is the Democrats’ best option because of what an irresistible target he’ll make for our big meanie of a commander in chief. (Establishment has-been Howard Dean, known for his manic streak, is also a
contender.)
Ellison is a readymade “radical” whose intersectional identities put him “under direct and imminent threat from Trump and Trumpism,” Goldberg writes. Pick Ellison, she might as well say, and you’ll get a pint-sized punching bag for President Trump!
It won’t matter if he falls flat in front of a crowd already prejudiced in his favor, because he’s a diverse foil to a president progressives deplore and reject. But playing up identity politics, unsupported by a compelling personality—Democrats ought to have learned by now—doesn’t cut it.
