Last Call For The Rivers Of Brazile

Rivers of tears, it seems.  Former interim DNC head Donna Brazile's new tell-all book is previewed in Politico Magazine this week, and the accusations against former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz and former Clinton campaign strategist Robby Mook are extremely ugly.

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call. 

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations. 

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.
By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt. 

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.” 

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance. 

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

Brazile goes on to say that not only did Clinton campaign assume the DNC's debt and pay it off, but that Clinton strategist Robby Mook had reached an agreement with Debbie Wasserman Schultz that Clinton would be calling the shots in the party from then on.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?” 

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse. 

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

It's not a pretty sight at all, although the fact that the Clinton campaign was paying off the DNC's debt was again broken by the Washington Post more than a year ago.  The Bernie folks long accused Clinton of rigging the party's committees to help Clinton, but the problem is joint fundraising agreements have been used by both parties for years.

It also means that the money Bernie did take from the DNC, well...80% came from Hillary.

Think about that.

The fact remains Bernie was crushed in the primaries, especially in the South and West Coast.  But I guarantee you that this is going to be used to deal more damage to the DNC and further rip it apart ahead of 2018.

It's shooting yourself in foot badly enough that you bleed out.

Reality though remains Trump has this country in a pit, and fighting over the DNC's finances isn't going to fix Trump at all.

Sure as hell will distract from it. And that's exactly what Brazile did.  She threw a pipe bomb in a china shop and the DNC just got blown to bits.  Where do Dems go in 2018?  I don't know, but they won't get help from the DNC.  How Perez and Ellison remain on the job after this mess, why would they want to?  Was this Brazile's plan all along, to just burn it all down in order to sell a damn book?

Unless Trump stumbles so badly the Dems win in spite of this mess (which can still definitely happen) 2018 might be a lost cause after this, and it's pissing me off.  For Brazile to do this days before the 2017 elections in Virginia and New Jersey is irresponsible as hell.

We'll see what happens, but this, as they say, is why Dems keep losing, and deserve to keep losing.

Brazile Nuts

I guess it was a requirement, but here we have Donna Brazile apologizing for the DNC's catastrophic screw-up in 2016 as the party still searches in vain for someone who manages to meet the bar of "not as much of a screw-up as Debbie Wasserman Schultz".

Donna Brazile, the outgoing interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, kicked off a series of “future forums,” which will select her replacement, by apologizing for the party's 2016 defeats.

“I'm not going to sugarcoat it: We failed,” Brazile said. “We made some serious mistakes and some strategic errors. We got cocky about our invincible blue wall, and then we saw it crumble because of just a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.”

Brazile was elevated to interim chair after the release of emails stolen from the DNC effectively forced Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) from the role. Wasserman Schultz, who was then facing a stiff primary challenge for her South Florida congressional seat, became a villain for supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who blamed her for a late-skewing and limited schedule of primary debates.

But the well-liked Brazile came under fire from another set of stolen emails, including two she'd sent to Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, informing him that CNN — where she was a political analyst — had shared possible primary debate and forum questions with her. That ended her time at CNN.

In her Phoenix remarks, Brazile defended the DNC employees who had spent the second half of 2016 being exposed by hacks.

“Let me just say how proud I am of the DNC and all the staffers who lived through that,” Brazile said. “They were attacked and harassed every day — often attacked by the people who should know better.”

Brazile also condemned the online conspiracy theory that Seth Rich, a young DNC staffer who was fatally shot last July in Northwest Washington, had been killed in a DNC coverup.

Russian hackers, she said, had ended up enlisting the media in a campaign of sabotage.

“We failed under extraordinary circumstances,” she said. “If you are an American, you are a victim of a hostile attack, a murderous dictator who wanted to affect the election. They hired an army of trolls to spread lies and distract from the real issues.”

Which is true, and as I've said before the notion that the DNC screwed up and the Russians helped the GOP can both be simultaneous factors in Clinton's loss.  But my benefit of the doubt for whoever replaces Brazile will at this point be zero.  Whoever does get her job will need to start delivering immediately on getting the Senate back in 2018, or we're not going to have a country much longer.

The Next DNC Chair Up Is In The Air

I don't honestly know who the next chair of the Democratic National Committee will be, but I can tell you who it won't be: Howard Dean has been kicked to the curb already, and Rep. Keith Ellison's national career is all but over.

Keith Ellison came to Colorado seeking to cement his position as the front-runner for Democratic National Committee chairman. But the Minnesota congressman ended the week in worse shape than when it started.

Just hours after Ellison’s role as the favorite was thrown into question by a stinging condemnation of his past statements about Israel by the Anti-Defamation League — a move Ellison and his allies vigorously rebutted — former Chairman Howard Dean dropped his comeback bid and bowed out of the race, scrambling an already complicated contest.

The three remaining announced candidates for the chairmanship — Ellison, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley, and South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison — spoke to state party officials from across the country for nearly two-and-a-half hours here at the Association of State Democratic Chairs meeting, exhaustively laying out their hopes for a rejuvenated party in displays that appeared to leave the DNC membership just as unsure of its next leader's identity as when it entered the room.

The result is a race that’s even more of a muddle, with the likelihood of additional candidates jumping in prior to February’s vote. Ellison himself appeared to recognize his tenuous position, and pledged in his strongest terms yet to consider giving up his House seat if he gets the chair’s role. He pleaded with attendees to keep an open mind as he insisted the DNC would be his top priority, while the other candidates — and Dean, in his pre-recorded video — insisted over and over that the decimated party needs a full-time chair.

I know "Dems in disarray!" is the obvious joke here, but it's not a joke.  There aren't any real candidates for the job at this point.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz was an unmitigated disaster. Donna Brazile lost all confidence with Clinton's defeat.  The state party chairs who are running haven't shown themselves to be exactly competent.  Honestly, South Carolina? New Hampshire?  These are early primary states who think they should be running things, not actual leaders.

It's a mess, and it's going to be a long time before the Dems can get their act together.  Which is too bad, because a united front to resist Trump is absolutely needed in order to keep the country in one piece.

Last Call For Debbie, Done

For better or for worse, I've been calling for the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chair since leading the Dems' disastrous midterm efforts in 2014 resulting in the lowest election turnout in modern history and the loss of the Senate to Mitch McConnell and the GOP, and this week's events finally proved too much to save her position.

The controversial chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, announced she would resign at the end of her party’s convention this week, a victim of her toxic relationship with peers and a trove of embarrassing internal emails.

“Going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals [of winning the presidency for Hillary Clinton] is to step down as Party Chair at the end of this convention,” Wasserman Schultz said in a written statement. “As Party Chair, this week I will open and close the Convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans.”

Donna Brazile, a Democratic Party stalwart, is expected to run the DNC through the election, according to multiple sources briefed on the plan. Brazile, who briefly served as chair in 2011, is a CNN contributor, and must forgo that contract to take the reins of the DNC. And she's still subject to a party vote this week in Philadelphia.

President Barack Obama paid tribute to her in a statement: For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful."

And that she was fired, of course.

The WikiLeaks story was the last straw in a string of screw-ups.  It's easy to blame the Russians or Assange over this, and yes, it was the mother of all dirty tricks, but Schultz botched the handling of the leak from hour one, and let's not forget that she sandbagged President Obama on the Iran nuclear deal last year, which was when I started calling for her resignation.

Again Donna Brazile will be taking over, and I believe she's infinitely more competent than Schultz at this point (and I think she should stay on.)

This is something that should have happened early last year after the midterms, and now the Dems can correct it and move on.  Not thrilled about Schultz joining the Clinton campaign as an adviser, but I guess that was the price of her stepping down.

We'll see how this goes.