Excellent news! Barack Obama "is quite literally moving swaths of the DNC to Chicago to create a unified organization with the sort of party-wide message discipline that has eluded Dems in the past."
TPM cites this as an example of what Obama is doing to avoid the split between his campaign and Terry McAuliffe's DNC in 2004, but it has other benefits. DC is a weird place, where rumors and obsessions with personality conflicts tend to dominate the conversation, and the actual feelings of the voting public can get lost in the shuffle.
Two years ago, I said:
If any candidate for DNC chair had proposed moving DNC HQ to Columbus, Ohio, or to Wichita, KS, I'd have gone door-to-door to back him. The Wichita Eagle or the Columbus Post-Dispatch tell different stories than the Post or the Times (of either Washington or New York). Too many of the wonks out there get caught up in the latest Beltway trends and lose track of what people actually discuss at dinner tables.
Chicago is a great city, and being there, reading the Tribune or Sun instead of the Post or Times, and listening to what people talk about in line at the grocery store, will give the DNC staff a better sense of how to reach voters across the country. I hope that a few of those staffers decide to stay in Chicago when the campaign ends, and that the DNC lets that be a branch office. It'll be good for the party, and good for the country.