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Denis McDonough, best known for serving as President Barack Obamas chief of staff (though cinephiles may also recall John Hamms portrayal of McDonough in The Report, which depicted his effort to slow-walk the release of information related to the CIAs torture program) also made the cut. Appointed as co-chair to the platform committee, McDonough also sits on the vultures perch at Rework America Task Force, a bipartisan leviathan of corporate interests attempting to, unsurprisingly, remake Americas workforceall with the help of its dedicated founding partners at Walmart, Boeing, Kaiser Permanente, McKinsey, and Microsoft. Danielle Gray, senior VP and chief legal officer for Blue Cross Blue Shield, holds a vice-chair seat on this committee, alongside Jake Sullivan, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton and the former national security adviser to Joe Biden.

Other notable committee appointments went to former senator Heidi Heitkamp, who now sits on the board of the hawkish neoconservative (John) McCain Institute; former Obama official Carol Browner, who voted down radical climate change initiatives in 2016; Harold Ickes, described by the Times as Bill Clintons Garbage Man, for both selling access to the president and whipping support after the Gennifer Flowers incident; Alex Padilla, accused of suppressing progressive independent voters in California; and Michael Steed, founder of the Paladin Capital Group, which settled with the state of New York in a pay-to-play scheme involving a New York pension fund. Paladin Capital has also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a homeland security fund headed by a former CIA leader and an assortment of military generals.

Regardless of committee members explicit or covert preference for presidential candidates, the corporate affiliations of these appointees and their outspoken refusal to cede any ground to progressive policy positions are wildly at odds with the preference for integrity valued by the majority of Democratic voters. Additionally, Perezs appointment strategy introduces a slew of risks ahead of the inevitable general election showdown. For a political party that has presented the electoral defeat of President Trump and the greed and corruption he embodies as its highest priority in 2020, champions of democratic transparency and corporate accountability are few and far between on the DNCs latest roster.

Moreover, health care reformthe issue consistently ranked as most important among Democratic votersgets short shrift in this roster of appointments, outside of the former health care industry lobbyists who have steadily moved up within the DNCs ranks. Climate change, also consistently ranked as a top issue for voters, has few advocates among these committee appointments. The movers and shakers of a nascent labor resurgence, fighting for fair compensation and workplace protections, are also found in short supply. With the Sanders campaign painting itself as the vanguard against the forces of corporate concentration and machinelike party rule, Perezs appointments seem as though they were engineered to fan those flames, instead of neatly defanging the Vermont senators argument.

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Tom Perez Stacks the DNC Deck Against Progressives - The New Republic