DEMOCRATS ELECT NEW PARTY CHAIRMAN, TOM PEREZ.

Icheoku says unable to shake off their monkey of entrenched and establishment party politics and political lineal patronage; continuing their culture of rewarding only party insiders and royalists and keeping insurgents at bay; coupled to their penchant for recycling old and disused party operatives, the Democratic Party has elected one of their own real insider as their new party chairman. 

A man whose middle name might as well pass for the establishment culture that breeds corruption within the Democratic Party, a former Secretary of Labor under the now gone President Barack Hussein Obama government, Thomas E. Perez, backed by the entire Democratic Party hierarchy as well as the apparatchik, defeated Keith Ellison by 235 votes to 200 votes. ICHEOKU says Keith Ellison did well, the mountain of opposition and backers of the victorious Perez considered. it is akin to during the primaries when the whole establishment was on Hillary Clinton's side against Bernie Sanders leading to leaked questions and internal memos to work against Bernie Sanders. Thanks to WikiLeaks the world became aware of Donna Brasile's leaking of debate questions to Hillary Clinton ahead of scheduled debates to confer undue advantage to her. Whether this election was similarly rigged and several arms twisted to achieve a stated objective is a great possibility, their record of fixing election results considered. 

The troubling thing with the Democratic Party is that they are impervious to correction and seemed not to have learned anything from the shellacking of last November 8, 2016. They also seemed not have introspected on why they have been losing so many elections this past eight years and why so many of their younger voters flocked to Bernie Sanders. Instead, they are continuing the same party politics of patronage which their voters have rejected and which sent them into political doldrums and near a political abyss. A practice which alienated a lot of their voters and which saw the party losing more than 1000 seats nationwide, now have only 18 governors and controls non of the three top political offices in Washington DC - the presidency, the senate and House of Representatives. So why continue with the same mindset and pattern of administration which supervised such huge loss of grounds, one would ask? But it is the Democratic Party and inside the party, there is really no democracy strictly speaking as they are democrats in name only. 

Icheoku admonishes that a thinking and forward-looking party with interest and intent to reposition the party and make it competitive again, would have taken the message of these past elections very seriously and forged ahead with fresh set of eyes and brains to see if their fortune could improve. But to be stuck on the mire that sent them down the drain of the current political near irrelevance where they currently inhabit, suggests that they are a "deaf and dumb" party, which is not listening to its constituents or have move on without their electorates. But hey, Keith Ellison's loss is loss for the party as the insurgent Bernie Sanders supporters will not come home simply because Tom Perez was elected to lead the party or told them so. These disinterested democrats were looking for a reason to come back home to the party; they were looking for a new leader they can gravitate to; but Tom Perez is definitely not it, his Hispanic ancestry notwithstanding. Anyway, like Jesus said, let the dead bury themselves and on this note, Icheoku says congratulations to Party Chair Thomas E. Perez and may your term help Democrats recover at least some of their severely lost grounds.