The Democratic Party is broke, bleeding, and at war with itself. Don’t blame Ken Martin

On the presidential campaign trail in 1908, a man at the front of a crowd hurled a cabbage at Republican candidate William Howard Taft. He missed, despite the fact that Taft, who won the election, was a huge target, weighing around 300 pounds. The soon-to-be president coolly shot back: “I see that one of my adversaries has lost his head.” (Most likely this widely-told tale is apocryphal, but nonetheless cute.)The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, lost his head in early July, tossing his mobile phone at the desk of a junior aide. Why he upbraided a lowly employee remains a mystery, but it nearly cost Martin his job. The incident prompted a complaint to the human resources department. He survived with a slap on the wrist, in part, as the New York Times helpfully pointed out, because it was unclear “how aggressively the phone was tossed.”Martin, who took over the top spot at the DNC a few months after former Vice President Kamala Harris lost to President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, has a habit of shooting himself in the foot. During the opening days of summer in June, he released an “After Action Report” on the election. He had commissioned his friend, Paul Rivera, a political strategist, to write it. Before releasing it to the press, Martin and his staff annotated the autopsy report in red ink on almost every page pointing out its flaws. Very weird. Democratic speechwriter and host of Pod Save America, Jon Favreau, announced that Martin put an “incompetent friend in charge” of the report who in turn produced an “incoherent product.” The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and all the way down the media line trashed the autopsy. While flawed, it was not, as charged, poorly written, disorganized, devoid of sources, incoherent, or as former DNC chairman and 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean judged, “a piece of junk.” The critics of Rivera’s report are correct on the charge that it fails to mention anything about the contentious issue within the party on Gaza and Israel, doesn’t address former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity during his disastrous debate performance against Trump, fails to examine the decision to anoint Harris as the presidential nominee without any competition after Biden withdrew from the race, and ignores that an elite group of influential Democrats and donors stuck it to Joe even after he won all the primaries. To say all that in the autopsy would have been nothing more than to say what was and still is glaringly obvious.Along with the phone tossing and Rivera’s midnight ride through the streets of the nation’s capital shouting out “the autopsy is coming,” Martin also gets blamed for a cash crunch. Currently, the DNC is $2 million in debt, while the Republican National Committee is fat with cash — $128.5 million. However, the state of finances for the Democrats is not Martin’s fault, and the fiasco over the autopsy report was a petty matter played out in the media as blockbuster news. Martin is in trouble not so much for his own doings, but because he has antagonized important political players on both sides of the cash flow: billionaire-bashing free stuff socialists scrounging macaroni and cheese from the food bank, and wealthy Silicon Valley tech moguls along with their comrades, post-BA multi-degreed political professionals whose influence over the direction of the party has been waning under Martin, the former chairman of the Minnesota Democratic Party for 14 years. He is a grassroots guy seeking to empower county, city, and state leaders at the expense of national operatives in Washington, D.C. “It’s not easy bringing change or telling some folks that have been on the D.C. consulting gravy train that that’s not going to be the way it happens anymore,” Ray Buckley, chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, told the Wall Street Journal.Elected to a four-year term that runs through 2029, only the DNC membership of about 450 activist Democrats can give Martin the boot. These activists are well aware “voters don’t care about these squabbles” among the insiders, said Reyna Walters-Morgan, vice chairwoman of the DNC. “What they care about is how are we going to get rid of this administration.”For sure, but the Democratic Socialists of America cares very much about these squabbles since it is the force attempting to drive the party to the outer reaches of the left. A hopeful sign at the DNC’s summer meeting in Austin, Texas: one decision came down indicating the party’s moderate center may hold.SOCIALISM DIDN’T DIE WITH THE SOVIETS — MAMDANI JUST BROUGHT IT TO CITY HALLThe DNC reshuffled the nationwide primary calendar to thwart the DSA’s boring from within strategy. The 2028 presidential race will kick off in South Carolina on Jan. 22, followed by Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, and Virginia. All these states except Michigan are less prone to flirt with the DSA, despite its inviting smile, especially in the midnight hours.While the calendar is important, it will have little to do with Martin’s survival. He may be able to keep his job, but the combination of his own mistakes along with the forces out to nail him does not bode well for his future.Bob Armstrong is a contributing writer to Thursday Review, an online magazine, and the author of a memoir, No Exit from Vietnam.