After a day of buffoonery and assorted hijinx the Democrats dodged a major bullet and nominated Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez to head the DNC.

US democrat party meets to decide which of 3 ineffectual ciphers will fruitlessly oppose Donald Trump oppression on cable news for 4 years.

— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) February 25, 2017

I say dodged the bullet because he narrowly defeated Keith Ellison. Ellison is a bigot, an anti-Semite, he’s had his travel funded by groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, the prospect of his being elected DNC chair caused Alan Dershowitz to vow to leave the Democrat party if he was elected chair. In short, if I had been given the chance to choose a DNC chairman it would have taken me less than a second to pick Keith Ellison.

Tom Perez is dangerous. He’s pretty much a run of the mill Stalinist with an ideology that is much more at home in the USSR of 1988 than in the USA of 2017. So that puts him pretty much in the mainstream of the Democrat party. These are the key takeaways. First, Perez is Obama’s buttboy. Obama lifted him from relative obscurity and his election ensures the Obama apparatus will keep control of the Democrat party. Perez is a huge TPP supporter and is viewed by the Bernie Sanders faction as a corporatist sell out, and with good cause. Perez is a committed and implacable ideologue.

The problem Perez faces is substantial. The Democrats are in disarray and have been reduced to regional party status.

https://twitter.com/omriceren/status/835505468571332608

From @ThirdWayTweet: Why Demography Does Not Equal Destiny. 'Democrats now resemble a regional, not national, party' https://t.co/sYWf7BbFQn pic.twitter.com/NDVMbf6s4z

— Byron York (@ByronYork) February 25, 2017

He’s facing off year elections that could, with only a tiny bit of bad luck, see the Democrats lose 9 Senate seats and they will struggle to lose less than 6. The people most likely to show up to vote in 2018 are those who supported the losing candidate and who aren’t very happy about it. If Trump is only moderately successful in his first two years, 2018 will be very ugly. His strengths — discipline and the ability to raise money from deep pocket interests — is at least off set by his weaknesses — slavish adherence to an ideology that failed mightily in 2014 and 2016.