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From the new print issue, Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein explain how Barack Obama has made the Democratic party his own:
Though Obama himself is a newcomer to Washington, the upper echelons of his Senate and campaign staff are populated almost exclusively by experienced Democratic Party operatives. Continuity with the established party infrastructure is a defining characteristic of the Obama campaign. When Hillary Clinton conceded the nomination, Obama’s first major staff change was not the incorporation of a former Clinton operative meant to heal the divisions of the primary, nor the elevation of a national-security graybeard meant to reassure general-election voters of Obama’s commander-in-chief credentials. Rather, it was to install Paul Tewes, the skilled organizer who served as the architect of Obama’s crucial victory in Iowa, at the DNC to head up the committee’s election-year efforts. A few weeks later, it was announced that the DNC would cease accepting contributions from lobbyists or political action committees.
Then it came out that much of the DNC was moving to Chicago. In the months that have followed, the Obama campaign has announced plans for training camps that will turn out thousands of new organizers dedicated to electing Democrats, and has signaled that it will spend millions in blood-red states where Democrats haven’t seriously invested in building party infrastructure for decades. The campaign has constructed a fundraising machine based around small-donors that promises to end the age-old competition for dollars between different wings of the Democratic establishment, enabling the creation of a unified electoral strategy. It has argued that “real change” requires the sort of legislative successes that only a strong congressional party can produce. In short, the candidate running on his exhaustion with traditional party politics has directed his campaign to build a new kind of Democratic Party—one that may put to shame anything that came before it.
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—The Editors
