Democrats' internal feud about fairness spirals into full-on DNC 'food fight' | Opinion
All of the news around the DNC bickering has missed what it's actually about: Bylaws.
The Democratic National Committee is a sprawling and complicated organization with two current goals that are as simple to surmise as they are difficult to accomplish – limit the damage President Donald Trump is inflicting on America while planning to win back control of Congress from the Republican Party next year.
But turn on any cable television news channel these days and what you see instead is a steady stream of DNC infighting, with that fracas blurring the focus on fending off Trump and the Republican Party.
What should be an engaging loyal opposition has become instead a clash of big personalities in a clamor for power and position. That's a gift Trump may not have expected but must really enjoy receiving.
Much of the media narrative about all this has briefly cited what has been cast as a procedural error during the DNC's Feb. 1 election for new party officers, with an apparent violation of the party's bylaws prompting a challenge that looks likely to lead to a do-over election.
Kalyn Free finds that narrative frustrating. And we should listen to her because she set this all in motion and then watched it spin into something she never intended.
How a procedure challenge turned into a full-scale DNC war
Free, a former federal prosecutor and district attorney in Oklahoma, is a DNC member who vied for one of the spots as vice chair of the party in the Feb. 1 election. She lost and then contested the results with a challenge to the party's credentials committee, which on May 12 recommended that the election be voided and redone.
That threw into question the position of two newly elected DNC vice chairs, gun-control activist David Hogg and Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who have been slugging it out in dueling news interviews.
Free's challenge cites DNC bylaw changes made more than 50 years ago to assure gender parity in party leadership. Her complaint said that after multiple rounds of voting, the party stacked a ballot so that men like Hogg and Kenyatta had a better chance at securing posts than she did.
This didn't start out as Free versus Hogg and Kenyatta. Free told me she respects both but wanted the party to follow bylaw changes made five decades ago by her mentor, the late former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris, when he was DNC chair.
But then Hogg picked a fight with the DNC, announcing his intention to spend $20 million to challenge incumbent Democrats in Congress who he considered to be "out-of-touch." And then Kenyatta went after Hogg, accusing him of having "a very casual relationship with the truth."
And Free saw her challenge about fairness and parity spiral into something very different, a struggle for the coin of the realm in modern American politics – free media attention.
"The reason David Hogg is able to talk about this chaos and portray this chaos at the DNC is because the media likes to see a food fight," Free told me.
Is Democrat infighting based off a simple misunderstanding?
The calendar here backs up the arguments made by Free and Kenyatta.
She filed her challenge on Feb. 28. That was 47 days before Hogg made it clear he is eager to oust some Democrats from office.
"The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other," Free said of her challenge and Hogg's dispute with the DNC. "But I understand how it's easily conflated."
Hogg, who came to national attention for his activism as a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, insists that the push for a new election is really a DNC plot to oust him for threatening incumbents.
"The DNC has pledged to remove me, and this vote has provided an avenue to fast-track that effort," Hogg said after the DNC credentials committee recommendation on May 12 to void the Feb. 1 election.
Hogg and Kenyatta are both savvy practitioners in television tactics. Hogg's version of events provoked Kenyatta to respond. Kenyatta, who usually laments the focus on infighting during interviews, has positioned himself as both a reformer and a protector of the party.
"Reforming the Democratic Party does not mean spending every single day doing interviews saying Democrats suck," Kenyatta told CBS News in a May 14 interview.
Not a bad look for a politician hoping to re-win a party post.
Democrats need to figure things out soon
The DNC has a Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting scheduled for May 22, where the process and scheduling for a rerun of the election are expected to be discussed. The next full DNC meeting is in late August, more than three months from now.
I have to think the DNC is tired of Hogg and Kenyatta trading barbs on television and wants this resolved sooner than that. Free agreed with that.
She's hoping the candidates in a new election get a chance to make their pitch before voting starts. She's intent on explaining the value of having a red-state Democrat and Native American – she's a member of the Choctaw Nation – as vice chair.
Win or lose, Free wants the DNC to follow the rules.
"This is a big, freaking deal," she told me. "I don't know what's going to happen in the next election. David Hogg may clean my clock. And if he does, that's okay. I didn't file this in order for me to win. Obviously, I would like to win. But that's not the reason I filed this. I filed this because the women and the members were disenfranchised."
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