It Looks Like They Really Are Going To Make Keith Ellison The New Chairman Of The DNC

The threat has been out there for a while, and it isn’t like there was a viable alternative to him – we can joke about it but Jehmu Greene and that guilty white woman from Idaho don’t exactly scream “viable” – but heading into this weekend’s vote it’s really beginning to look like the Nation of Islam is about to take over the Democratic National Committee.

Rep. Keith Ellison (Minn.) has the edge over former Labor secretary Tom Perez in The Hill’s new survey of DNC members. But while both men claim they are close to securing commitments from the majority of the 447 voting members, neither candidate is assured victory.

The Hill has identified the stances of 240 DNC members, either through their private responses to a survey circulated over the past week or from public endorsements.

Out of those who responded, Ellison leads with 105 supporters to Perez’s 57. The remaining major candidates have less than a dozen supporters each, while more than 50 DNC members remain undecided.

You would have thought that once Ellison’s background as a Louis Farrakhan disciple and current status as CAIR’s mouthpiece in Congress was fully fleshed out the Democrats would have become more and more skittish about making him the face of their party. But you would have been wrong. Even Chuck Schumer, the Jewish senator from New York who holds the highest rank of any Democrat in American government, backed him – and didn’t waver last week when a prominent Jewish state legislator from back home denounced the choice.

Dov Hikind, a 34-year Democratic New York state assemblyman and leading pro-Israel voice, disclosed to the Free Beacon late Monday that he has started a petition meant to pressure Schumer into pulling his public support for Ellison, who has long been accused of holding anti-Israel positions that fall out of the mainstream Democratic party.

Electing Ellison to head the DNC would send a message that the Democrats have embraced anti-Israel policies and no longer care about being a centrist party in touch with mainstream America, according to Hikind, who lashed out against Schumer and Ellison in a wide-ranging interview with the Free Beacon.

Hikind’s public campaign against Ellison comes just weeks before the Democratic party is set to elect its new leader, with most polls showing that Ellison is the frontrunner.

“It’s almost like the Democrats want to entirely destroy their party,” Hikind said. “When someone like Ellison can be a leading candidate to be the head of a major party, we’re in a lot of trouble.”

Perez, who headed the corrupt Civil Rights Division of the Eric Holder Justice Department and was then named Labor Secretary in the Obama administration, has the support of Joe Biden and his old boss at DOJ. That apparently isn’t enough, particularly when Bernie Sanders – who isn’t even a Democrat anymore, as he renounced his party affiliation and went back to being an “independent” – trashed Perez as belonging to the “failed status quo.” Perez’ camp is promising victory despite the odds, though; here’s a quote from the article in The Hill linked above…

“We are confident in the support Tom has received and are working hard every day to have one on one conversations with state parties and DNC members,” Perez spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa said.

“Many of our supporters have requested that we not release their names publicly due to fear of unwanted calls and other harassment. We believe these members deserve our respect.”

No, we have no idea how to pronounce Xochitl, either. It sounds obscene when we try it.

There are other candidates in the race and there has been a bit of talk that one of them – most prominently the gay 35-year old former Navy lieutenant mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg (we don’t know how to pronounce that, either, and don’t want to try) – might emerge if there’s a stalemate between Ellison and Perez. At the moment, though, the buzz seems to be that Ellison is going to get the DNC’s chairmanship.

How Keith Ellison the former Louis Farrakhan disciple leads the Democrats back from their current rump status, we don’t know. Right now it seems as though they’re about to give him a chance.

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