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Donna Brazile, the former interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, is in search of absolution. In a cloyingly self-pityin excerpted from her upcoming book, she reveals the extent to which the DNC willingly surrendered control of the organization to Hillary Clinton’s campaign well before Clinton became the party’s presidential nominee.
In the article, Brazile scolds her predecessors at the DNC and scolds President Obama and his allies for allowing the party’s fundraising apparatuses to atrophy. But most of all, she attacks Hillary Clinton.
Brazile alleges that the joint fundraising agreement the DNC signed with the Clinton campaign in August was “unethical,” a claim ?lang=en) by DNC Chairman Tom Perez. And she confesses to being disturbed by her inability to confirm that the DNC was not trying to “throw the primary” to Clinton.
Finally, Brazile reveals that she knew all along that the polls couldn’t be trusted, even if the had no idea. “I found a lack of enthusiasm for her (Clinton) everywhere,” she confessed to Bernie Sanders alone.
Brazile could endure the shame of secretly relaying Democratic primarto Hillary Clinton when the Clintons were the powers that be. But those days are over. Now it’s Bernie Sanders’ party, and Brazile is surely hoping her offering to the new overlords will be satisfactory.
It’s not necessary to buy every detail of Brazile’s account to see the writing on the wall. When asked about Brazile’s confessional and whether that meant that the primary was rigged against Sanders, progressive darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., flatly, “yes.”
This is no country for a Clinton.
Brazile’s self-serving effort to expose the Democratic Party’s skeletons is a step toward recovery. It demonstrates that the party’s efforts to avoid conducting an “autopsy” on its failed effort in the 2016 election can only be suppressed for so long.
Democratic lawmakers and party insiders have gone to great lengths that any postmortem on the 2016 race is kept under wraps. But rather than controlling the direction in which the party’s post-2016 debate will flow, the Democratic Party has inadvertently let activists and pollsters perform the dissections on the party’s 2016 corpse.
A study conducted by the Democratic political research firm Global Strategy Group, for example, found that the Democratic Party’s base voters actually did turn out to vote. But the problem for Democrats was that many of them turned out to vote for Donald Trump.
“Those Obama-Trump voters, in fact, effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost,” the
Another study conducted by the super PAClearned that voters in swing states, including many Democrats, thought the Democratic Party was more likely than the GOP to favor the wealthy, and voted accordingly.
It’s all rather confusing and often conflicting. Now, nearly a year later, the Democratic Party is awash in competing narratives. In a comprehensive [New York Times Magazine]) piece, Robert Draper examines a party at war with itself – not over policy, but over tone and tactics.
For example, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel helped engineer a Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006 by hunting for conservative Democratic prospects to run in conservative districts.
“When I was recruiting candidates, I’d get yelled at,” Emmanuel confessed. “‘Why is he getting all these sheriffs and military guys?’ It’s because they were running in red districts!”
Emmanuel is still getting yelled at. Progressive Change Campaign Committee founder Stephanie Taylor attacked Emanuel’s “50-state strategy” for, of all things, only being able to maintain control of the House for four years. Had the party run true-blue progressives in those red districts, she said, the Democrats might have enjoyed more “lasting success.”
The impulse to impose ideologically progressive homogeneity on the Democratic Party is evident in how the progressive activist base responded to Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie’s foray into immigration-related issues.
Gillespie’s decision to make the matters of the MS-13 gang and sanctuary cities an issue in the Virginia gubernatorial campaign has offended the sensibilities of his Democratic opponents. They claim, correctly, that MS-13’s presence in Virginia is, while not negligible, numerically modest. They add that there are no sanctuary cities in Virginia.
To even raise this issue is to inflame cultural tensions toward no higher purpose than dividing the electorate against itself and stoking racial anxieties. But it wasn’t until the Democratic candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, confirmed that he would sign an anti-sanctuary city bill if one crossed his desk that the progressive left truly revealed its capacity for inchoate rage.