The Enlightened Despot

On Wednesday, the odious Terry McAuliffe will officially begin his campaign to become governor of Virginia. Out of deference to any potential deity that holds Sundays sacred, I won’t say anything more about McAuliffe. I only bring him up because his story is mirrored by that of Tim Kaine, the current Virginian governor, who is about to take over McAuliffe’s old job of DNC Chairman. In the scheme of things, this doesn’t seem like that major a news story, but I think Matt Yglesias is being overly dismissive - and not just because I’m contractually required to point it out when he’s wrong about something:

I don’t think I have a real opinion about this — given the current configuration of political power, the DNC is basically destined to be an adjunct of the White House political operation no matter who heads it.

Now, it’s possible that this is nothing but a consolation prize for Kaine. He has ties to Obama, and he was by all accounts very close to being the vice-presidential nominee. He is about to be unemployed - he is constitutionally barred from seeking re-election - so running the DNC is certainly a nice way for him to stay relevant.

Yglesias is certainly very right that the DNC is going to become an arm of the Obama machine, but it is not at all clear that the top DNC job will thus be marginalized in the way he suggests. For one thing, OFA (Obama for America) 2.0 is, at least on paper, going to be run out of the DNC. For those who aren’t familiar, OFA 2.0 will be the successor to Obama’s massive ground operation: the president-elect assembled an army of paid 20-somethings and volunteers of all ages, and a lot of them don’t want to stop campaigning and go home. OFA 2.0 is a way of making sure they never have to. The administration will continue to have a ground presence in all, or almost all, 50 states, in some cases a fairly serious presence. These folks will primarily be concerned with building support for Obama’s legislative agenda, though they will also support local Democrats.

It’s entirely possible that this outfit will have nothing more than a superficial connection to the rest of the DNC, and that Kaine will just be going through the motions and drawing a paycheck. But he could be getting this job precisely because he is someone who Obama thought qualified to be his number two, and that he will be playing a leading role in the early days of an unprecedented political outfit.

Tags: Kaine, OFA 2.0, President Obama

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 3:51 am and is filed under posts by Akhbar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.