



ST. LOUIS — Tom Perez thinks of himself as a mechanic — a guy who turned around the Labor Department and before that, turned around operations in the Civil Rights division at the Justice Department during Obama’s first term.

Now, the former Labor secretary is running to become chair of the Democratic National Committee, an organization he firmly believes needs fixing. He thinks Democrats could learn by watching what Republican Party has done in recent elections, from focusing on races for state legislature and state attorneys general to coordinating with allied groups.


“We have this opaque, top-down, Al Haig command-and-control structure in which DNC members are chronically under-utilized. We’ve ignored wide swaths of America. We don’t have an every ZIP code strategy,” Perez said over IPAs in an interview for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast.

Cold War references are on his mind a lot these days. His favorite cartoon character is Rocky the squirrel from “Rocky & Bullwinkle”— because “he was a little faster” than the moose, Perez explained—but he's been thinking more about Boris & Natasha, the cartoon's Russian spies. “What Donald Trump and [Vladimir] Putin have in common is that they have no moral compass,” Perez said. “Their whole being is about themselves.”

Perez described the Trump phenomenon “a dumpster fire from the get-go, and his entire administration has been, you know, chaos and carnage.”

But in Trump’s wake, the race to lead the Democrats’ official party structure has morphed into an extended, nationalized battle for the party’s soul among a collection of candidates who, even three-and-a-half months and 10 debates in, remain largely unknown to the 447 party members who will cast ballots.

Perez has only been on the ballot once before himself—for county council president in Montgomery County, Md.—though he was kicked out of the state attorney general in 2006 on a technicality. He dismisses the idea that experience as a candidate is important to running the national Democratic Party apparatus, especially when the party is in the wilderness.

“I think our recent history in the DNC would suggest that that’s not an indicator of success,” Perez said, referring to the previous chairwoman, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned last summer after Wikileaks published hacked emails of DNC staffers.

Perez, though, pointed to several other problems in Wasserman Schultz’s leadership, and pointedly pledged to set a primary debate schedule before knowing who the candidates are, to avoid the apparent conflict of interest the former chair came under fire for among people who felt she tilted the 2016 schedule toward Hillary Clinton.

Perez said he’s alarmed by the degree to which casual voters and big donors alike seem to dismiss the Democratic Party. “Tom, I hear you’re running. Good luck, and by the way, you know, we don’t really don’t think much about the Democratic Party. We’re sort of on our own,’” he recalled a member of the liberal megadollar group Democracy Alliance telling him recently.

But he's not interested in finding any kind of silver lining in Trump’s win, despite the outpouring of left-wing activism since his inauguration. “Donald Trump is anathema to America,” Perez said. “Donald Trump is anthema to all of the values of America and we are going to wake up and we have woken up every single day.”

The elections in 2018 and 2020 still look frightening for Democrats—and the energy surrounding marches and protests, Perez said, mask how difficult it is to win races.

“I met a person on my rural tour in northwest Wisconsin who said to me, ‘I feel politically homeless.’ And we need to re-engage that person,” Perez said.

When I asked if he’s worried that Trump’s reshaping of the Republican Party around populism has driven a permanent wedge between Democrats and what used to be reliable parts of their base, like the working class voters who made clear last November that they felt Hillary Clinton had left them behind, Perez tried for optimism: “Not if we do our job right.”