Hi, I'm Isaac Dover and welcome to Off Message.

So the race for DNC chair, the person who's officially in charge of the Democrats' party apparatus,

has become this extended, nationalized fight for the Democrat's soul.

At a moment when the Democrats are really at the bottom, they don't know what to do, they don't

have a lot of time to fix things, and they don't have any clear leaders.

And it's all been channeled into this really strange, extended battle for who's going to be the chair of the DNC,

of all things, which to many Democrats and even many party operatives is pretty much irrelevant

and has been irrelevant for a number of years.

Tom Perez is a leading candidate for the job.

He's the former Labor Secretary for Obama's second term, ran the Civil Rights Division

of the Justice Department for Obama in the first term. I have known Tom Perez for a couple of years,

covered him in a number of different situations.

The first came onto my radar when I was covering the Obama White House and I just noticed

that all the time people were talking about Tom Perez, things that were coming at the labor

department, it became clear that in a lot of ways Obama's second term domestic agenda was

really running through the labor department. A lot of

those executive orders that, of course, we heard a lot about, were being taken care of by the

labor department by Tom Perez, whether it was the equal pay or LGBT non-discrimination executive

orders. Then there was this strange period during the 2016 campaign

where he actually emerged as a finalist for Hillary Clinton

to pick as her running mate.

That didn't work out.

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