Keith Ellison is chair-slumped in a nondescript union office a few hundred yards north of the Capitol, surrounded by boxes of fliers for his campaign to chair the Democratic National Committee, nursing a nasty cold and eye-rolling at another question about his onetime admiration for Louis Farrakhan.


The Minnesota congressman — a powerful speaker and canny political organizer — was on the cusp of an easy victory in the race for DNC chairman until the past few weeks, when his decades-old writings on the Nation of Islam leader (he called him a “role model for Black Youth” in a 1995 student editorial) resurfaced and ignited.

Soon after, reporters unearthed 2010 comments about how Israel, “a country of seven million,” dominates U.S. policy in the Mideast — prompting a denunciation from the head of the Anti-Defamation League and Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban, casting his coronation into sudden and serious doubt.

“Everything is fair game and it’s interesting. … [But] I’m 53 years old,” Ellison said during this week’s episode of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast — adding that his fondness for the Nation of Islam movement began when he was a student and lapsed soon after. “I have four kids. My youngest child is 20. Some of the things they want to hit me for, I was younger than her when I wrote them. And so, come on. At some point, we all are human beings who have evolved over the course of 25 years, and yet we want to freeze each other in time.”

Ellison is an open and engaging guy to talk with — and he relishes the chance to explain himself at length, as he did in a recent memoir — but he bristled when I suggested that everything an elected official utters or scribbles during their adult life should be fair game.

“But every single word, though?” asked Ellison, a convert from Catholicism to Islam who was the first of his faith to be elected to Congress.

Despite the support of the first couple of populist progressivism — Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — the controversy has emboldened the opposition: Last week, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, a buddy of President Barack Obama (who called him “wicked smart” last week), jumped into the race. The effort to boost Perez, paradoxically and to Ellison’s irritation, is led by operatives allied with the country’s first black president, who view the Minnesotan as too tied to the identity politics they think cost Hillary Clinton the election.

“We like Keith,” one longtime Obama political ally, who was pushing Perez, told me in November. “But is he really the guy we need right now when we are trying to get all of those disaffected white working-class people to rally around our message of economic equality?”

If the flashpoint is Farrakhan, the subtext of the debate over Ellison’s election is a deeper debate over the future of a party rocked by the most stunning electoral rebuke in generations — and dry-rotting after eight years of neglect by Obama’s Barack-brand-obsessed political team. Perez, along with two highly regarded state party chairs — Raymond Buckley of New Hampshire and Jaime Harrison of South Carolina — have been making a broader case to learn the lessons of Donald Trump’s victory: a need to revitalize local organizing in all states, as opposed to replicating the Obama strategy of maximizing turnout among minority communities and on the liberal coasts.

Ellison espouses that approach too, but he’s more focused on the failures of the Clinton campaign to execute — and believes the future still lies in max-turnout operations among the groups that were targeted in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

“Of course, we’ve got to have a big tent. We’ve got to be inclusive. We’ve got to get everybody involved,” Ellison said. “[But] we’re not performing as well as we should with any sector.”

Ellison says there are “literally millions of people registered to vote or eligible to vote who have not voted, and some of them are white women, educated women and some of them are black college men and some of them are Latino.” He argues that the problem isn’t one of issues — or even a focus on pocketbook economics — but sparking sufficient excitement to motivate the party base. “If our problem is we’ve got low voter turnout, I am the one who is best suited to solve that problem.”

Like many Democrats I’ve spoken to recently, Ellison admires (in a hold-his-nose way) Donald Trump’s political skills and sees political profit in embracing his simplified, blunt message of economic resurgence. But he sees no gain in cooperating with him, even only tactically — for instance, he thinks Trump’s big infrastructure package, which would reportedly be powered by tax incentives, is a Trojan horse, trickle-down plan that Democrats should probably oppose.

When I asked him if thinks Trump’s campaign rhetoric means the president-elect is racist, as many African-American leaders have suggested, he shrugs.

“There are racists. There’s racially insensitive, and then there are people who are anti-racist,” Ellison said. “There’s a range, and I think that he is the kind of person who is not above manipulating race in order to gain something that he wants. So that’s pretty bad, in my opinion. That’s actually kind of low-down and not admirable at all. But is it in his heart that he just is — too much melanin just creeps him out or something? I would be happy to believe that that’s probably true, but at the same time, so what? Because if the power that he has derives from people who do hold racist views, he’s going to be all in with them.”

Ellison’s own racial views, now the subject of such intense political scrutiny, seemed to evolved along a fairly traditional path for young black college students of his generation. A child of the 1980s and 1990s, he witnessed the explosion of violent, community-killing drug-related crime in his native Detroit and adopted home of Minneapolis and searched for a way to push back.

“So, like, in 1991, you had Rodney King get beat right out there on videotape, 50-some blows, all on tape. Cops standing around doing nothing,” he explained. “It was happening all over the country. In 1995, in Minneapolis, which is known as a pretty laid-back, cool town, got the moniker Murder-apolis that year. And Detroit … unemployment was high, community violence was high, community police relations were awful, and you had people coming up in that space, speaking to that issue, and Farrakhan was one of them.”

Ellison’s critics dispute his account of an 18-month infatuation with Farrakhan followed by years of his public denunciations of the Nation of Islam founder. Citing newspaper clips of his early political career identifying him as a Nation acolyte, they say his affiliation stretched far longer. But Ellison sees the whole experience as transitional, part of an exploration that began with a role defending Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March.

“It’s hard for people who are not in the experience to understand it, but there are times in your life when somebody is speaking up in a bold, brave way against circumstances that you find intimidating, make you feel personally vulnerable,” he added. “And when the march started getting really attacked, I wrote back and tried to defend the march, and I thought it was important to defend the person who called the march. I came to learn that defense wasn’t deserved. Why? Because I just saw those guys as big on fundraising, using the platform to pander to people’s anger and fear without really giving them back much. And scapegoating other groups. Not just Jews but you name it: gays, black preachers, other Muslims. We had a long list.”

When I told him that his rhetoric on Farrakhan and Trump sounds similar, he smiled and sat up in his chair. “I’ll tell you this: They’re charismatic speakers speaking to people’s pain. Blaming other people is an old trick” — equating the leading black nationalist’s call to arms with a Trump rage-fest that fired up white nationalists.

As one of two Muslims in the House — Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) is the other — he’s had to spend much of his time explaining that, no, his beliefs do not entail support for violent global jihad or oppression of women. In one infamous 2006 exchange, Glenn Beck flat-out asked Ellison to “prove you are not working with our enemies.” He still gets some of that out on the road — and responds with a take-a-deep-breath explanation of what his religious practice entails, and how much in common it has with Christian and Jewish ritual.

Like that of Obama, Ellison’s narrative is rooted in shared legacy of growing up black, and, like Obama's, his unique branch grew beyond the bounds. He spent much of his young adulthood patiently explaining to schoolmates and voters that he didn’t grow up in fatherless, bookless ghetto poverty — his father was a prominent Detroit psychiatrist, and his mother was a social worker — and most of his recent forebears from Michigan and Louisiana were raised in two-parent families that valued education.

But even in his middle-class upbringing there were shadows of a different, earlier life — as he found out when, as a teenager, he asked his mother a seemingly innocuous question about her father, a prosperous local landlord.

“I learned quite accidentally that he probably couldn’t read,” Ellison recounted. “He was the smartest person I ever met. … He was a factory worker, and he saved up his pennies, and he bought some rental property, and he’d have my brothers and I cut the grass. And he would always ask us to write out the receipts to the tenants.”

One day, Ellison, returning home to change his clothes, asked his mother why grandpa needed so much help with the simple paperwork — were his eyes OK?

“Don’t you shame your grandfather!” his mother, now in her late 70s and still working as a social worker, shot back. “Where your grandpa comes from, they just didn’t let people like him go to school. He had to be in the fields when he was your age.”