Red Alert: Brazile Sounds the Alarm

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Michael Geiger

On the morning of November 2nd, the Democratic Party made it official: the witch is dead. In anexcerpt from her upcoming book,Donna Brazileleft scorch marks on the campaign that was run by Hillary Clinton and clearly established Bernie Sanders as the future of the party. The piece, while laughably self-aggrandizing, provided some information on what the inside of the Democratic Party looked like during the last several years.

Brazile’s piece highlights the extent to which Obama screwed the Democrats. By the time the 2012 campaign had wrapped, Obama had saddled the DNC with roughly $24 million of debt. The Clinton campaign and DNC were forced to pay back much of that, and it left the party in dire financial straits. After the Democratic National Convention, the party was over $2 million in debt and was forced to take out a large loan just stay afloat.

Brazile pushed former chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz under the bus, claiming, “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.” Brazile continued to shift the blame away from the party and took calculated shots at the Clinton campaign. She wrote, “[Gary Gensler, CFO of the Clinton campaign] described the party as fully under the control of the Clinton campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp.”

The dismantling of Hillary Clinton’s campaign didn’t stop there, as Brazile went on to expose the arrogance of the One Who Persisted. According to Brazile, Hillary’s campaign took control of the party’s Victory Fund, which is intended for state races and the party’s nominee, nearly a year before she secured the nomination. The move put Sanders’ campaign at a huge disadvantage and played a huge part in keeping the Clinton Machine running.

The irony of this mea culpa was Brazile’s failure to mention her own role in undermining the Sanders campaign. Of course, during the primaries Brazile twice sent future town hall questions to the Clinton campaign. She later called it, “a mistake that I will forever regret.” Apparently, Brazile’s memory experienced a lapse as this apparently heartbreaking mistake wasn’t mentioned in her chronicle of Democratic foibles.

The entire piece leads up to Brazile’s climactic phone call admitting all of this to Bernie Sanders himself. Brazile apparently addressed the senator with this doozy of a line, “Hello Senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer, but I will not kill the patient.” Brazile was then asked by Sanders to give him her assessment of Clinton’s chances. It is here in which the article goes from informative to comedically self-serving. Brazile allegedly writes, “I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said… I found a lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama coalition and about millennials.”

Apparently, on the Democratic side, Donna Brazile and Donna Brazile alone forecasted Hillary Clinton’s struggles in the upcoming election. Ignoring the obvious ass-covering, however, it is clear now that the Democratic Party is moving forward with Bernie Sanders as the face of the party. This change in strategy is disturbingly rational, as it shows the party might have learned from the massive failures of the Obama-Clinton coalition. As incriminating as Brazile’s piece was, it may end up steering the party back towards political relevance, something especially worrying with the 2018 elections less than a year away. Donald Trump and the Republicans must resist the urge to sit on their laurels and press their advantage before it’s too late. If they do not, the current Republican majority in a few years will look like ancient history.