DNC retains leadership, with a tweak

Obama adding top strategist to assist Dean

Charles Edwards, 95, shook hands with Senator Barack Obama yesterday after presenting him with a handmade walking stick during a town hall meeting at Virginia High School in Bristol, Va. Obama hopes to wrest the state from Republicans in November. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Barack Obama moved quickly yesterday to put his imprint on the national party, eager to reinforce its fund-raising operation and pursue an aggressive general election campaign.

Howard Dean will remain as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, an affirmation by Obama of Dean's bottom-up rebuilding of the party across all 50 states. Still, Obama is installing one of his top strategists to help expand the DNC staff and oversee party operations.

The move puts Obama's ample fund-raising machine at the party's disposal. In so doing, Obama imposed on the DNC the same ban on money from federal lobbyists and political action committees that he has placed on his campaign.

Further uniting the party behind Obama, nearly two dozen members of the New York congressional delegation came out en masse yesterday to declare him the nominee and laud Hillary Clinton's planned formal endorsement tomorrow of Obama.

"We come here collectively to endorse the decision by our fearless leader," Representative Charles B. Rangel told reporters. "We're so proud of her."

Rangel has been among Clinton's most loyal supporters, but on Wednesday he publicly called out the New York senator for not acknowledging that Obama had won the nomination. After hours of consternation from Rangel and other key backers, Clinton's campaign issued a statement Wednesday night about the endorsement event.

In a message to supporters yesterday, Clinton said she will "extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy.

"This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans," she wrote in the e-mail. "I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party's nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise."

Obama told reporters yesterday that he doesn't plan to be at the event tomorrow where Clinton will endorse him.

Instead, he plans to spend the weekend with his family. "My sense is that at some point this weekend, I will have the opportunity to reflect on the journey we've traveled that will help me chart a course for where we're going to go over the next five months," he said.

By keeping Dean as party chairman, Obama ended up taking sides in a long-running dispute between Washington-based Democratic Party leaders and state party officials. Although Obama campaign officials have expressed concern in the past that the party did not have enough money, Obama shares Dean's goal of building the party from the ground up, even in states where Republicans dominate.

Dean, a former Vermont governor and a 2004 presidential candidate, welcomed Obama adviser Paul Tewes to the DNC, saying he would help the party transition to the general election. Party officials say they expect the DNC staff to quickly expand to run an aggressive campaign.

The fund-raising change will give the party and the candidate a consistent position.

"We are going to change how Washington works. They will not run our party. They will not run our White House. They will not drown out the views of the American people," Obama said at a town hall meeting yesterday in Bristol, Va.

Obama is pressing his case that McCain is under the influence of special interests because of his advisers' lobbying ties. McCain's senior advisers are former lobbyists, including campaign manager Rick Davis. McCain was stung last month by the disclosure that two advisers worked for a firm that had represented the military junta in Burma, which has restricted foreign assistance for cyclone victims.

The Arizona senator instituted a new lobbying policy that says no campaign staffer can be a registered lobbyist, resulting in three more departures from his campaign.

Obama's ban on lobbyist money is not ironclad. He accepts money from lobbyists who do not do business with the federal government and from spouses and relatives of lobbyists. He has had unpaid advisers with federal lobbying clients, and some campaign officials previously had lobbying jobs.

The new policy is not expected to hurt the DNC's fund-raising ability because lobbyists and PACs do not constitute a major source of money.

DNC officials said yesterday they had raised $4.7 million in May and had $4 million in the bank at the end of the month, bringing the total raised this election cycle to $82.3 million, but only $2 million from PACs.

While Obama has a clear edge over McCain in campaign cash, the DNC is lagging behind the Republican National Committee, which said yesterday it had raised a total of $166 million so far this cycle and had $53.6 million in the bank at the end of May.