New Leadership

Pundits and analysts from Chris Hayes to the insufferable Chuck Todd are finally saying what I've been saying for months - the Democratic Party has been thoroughly decimated and is completely bereft of leadership.  And Martin O'Malley, long rumored to be a possibility for the job of Democratic National Committee chairman, has indicated his desire for the job. 

O'Malley should get the job on the basis of his ability for seeing this catastrophe coming.  He warned the Democratic National Committee (DNC) about how the Democrats were in serious trouble at the state level, but his warnings were ignored.  During his presidential campaign, he called for more primary debates among the Democrats vying for the party's presidential nomination (one of them being himself, of course) to challenge the outrageous statements of "that racist carnival barker," Donald Trump, and added, in reference to the DNC tipping the scales for Hillary, "We're the Democratic Party, not the Un-Democratic Party."  Here's the reception he got from then-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after he said all that in a speech to a DNC meeting in Minneapolis in August 2015:

Her very expression says, "I'll bury you, you bastard!" Now she's been buried by the weight of her own hubris.

O'Malley got it.  He still gets it.  He should run the Democratic Party, hands down.  But he has competition.  Howard Dean, who pursued a fifty-state party-building strategy as DNC chair from 2005 to 2009 only to see it inexplicably abandoned by his successor (former future Vice President Tim Kaine), wants his old job back, and Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison has voiced interest in the position.   But Dean is a former Clinton confederate who voted for Hillary as a superdelegate to the Democratic convention despite a complete lack of support for Hillary for the nomination in his home state of Vermont, and he's become a health-care lobbyist working to prevent single-payer health care.  Ellison is a decent guy, but he's an incumbent U.S. Representative, and as Wasserman Schultz proved, you can't represent your constituents in Congress and be party chair and do both jobs effectively.  (And Debbie did neither job effectively.  Nonetheless, she was re-elected to the House - a triumph of establishment politics.)  However, Ellison's handicap as an incumbent House member hasn't prevented him from getting support for the DNC job from incoming Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer and Senator Bernie Sanders (wait - isn't Sanders an independent once again?).

I have a feeling that O'Malley, never well-respected in the Democratic Party, is about to get dissed again.  And if he does, well, screw the Democrats!  F--- 'em!  Let  them go the way  of the Whigs!  In the event that O'Malley is rejected for the DNC position, I hope he leaves the party and coalesces with the Greens, other progressive Democrats, and left-leaning independents to form a new progressive party . . . . and challenges President Trump and the presidential nominee of what's left of the Democratic Party for the White House in 2020.  

Back in February, I wrote that I wouldn't forget the slight against O'Malley.  I still haven't.  I'll be furious if the Democratic Party slights him again.  Forgive and forget?  Sure, I'll never forgive myself if I forget to stay angry at the Democrats.