Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover.

Today's guest, Tom Perez, the chair of the Democratic National Committee,

who today becomes the first person I brought to you twice.

The first time was almost exactly a year ago.

We were in a bar in St. Louis, and he was in the final week of his campaign to be elected chair.

It's a pretty unexciting job and usually not a prominent one, but the race had gotten intense and tribal, and Bernie Sanders was backing Keith Ellison, and Obama had recruited Perez into the race.

Go back and listen to that episode if you want, but you can hear that Perez had lost his voice, and I can tell you, from looking across the table at him that night, he was on the verge of collapse.

But he won, and the prize was getting to run an institution that itself was on the verge of collapse.

I spent a lot of time covering the DNC, and I can tell you that though a lot of people out there

got consumed by the allegations of rigging and other machinations, what was going on in that building for the last few years

didn't resemble so much a meeting of the Illuminati as a meeting of the Muppets.

Then there was the Russian hacking.

Then there was a year of finances being drained and people quitting.

Perez told me in another conversation we had just before Christmas that I knew it was a turnaround

job when I ran, but I undeniably underestimated the depth of the turnaround job.

There's a story I wrote up on our website right now about how everything at the DNC is coming

together or isn't, and I'd encourage you to read that. But there's also the story of Perez,

who is a guy I've known since he was Labor Secretary and can be a wonky guy who gets caught up in awkward lines that he thinks come off a lot smoother than they do.

You'll hear some of that in the podcast, but can get intense behind the podium.

Like he did in a speech, I heard him give at Al Sharpton's National Action Network Breakfast here in D.C. for Martin Luther King Day,

railing against what he calls the appalling silence of the Republican Party. So, easy task for Perez.

He's got to bring the DNC back from near death, oversee efforts for the midterms for a party

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