Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile is coming out with a new tell-all book about the chaos at the DNC during the 2016 campaign. On Thursday, she revealed a section of it at Politico. What emerges from the excerpt is a picture of Brazile as heroine (of course), Hillary Clinton as villainess, Debbie Wasserman Schultz as incompetent and lazy, and Barack Obama as the unnamed cancer that ate away at the center of the party.
Ouch.
Here are 7 revelations from Brazile’s piece:
1. Brazile Is Rather Self-Aggrandizing. Brazile portrays herself as a Hercule Poirot sussing out malfeasance at the DNC, then steeling herself with God and soul to inform the unfortunate Bernie Sanders that he had been jobbed. “Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music,” Brazile writes. “I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.” This comes from the same lady who leaked debate questions to Hillary Clinton to disadvantage Sanders.
2. Wasserman Schultz Was A Disaster Who Turned Over The Party To Hillary. Here’s Brazile:
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.
According to Brazile, Wasserman Schultz outsourced all operations of the party to Hillary’s headquarters in 2015 — long before the start of the primaries.
3. Obama Cleaned Out The Party. Brazile writes that by the time she took over, the Democratic Party was “broke and $2 million in debt.” According to Brazile, Obama “left the party $24 million in debt” — hey, sort of like the country! — and his campaign wouldn’t pay off that debt until election year. Furthermore, Wasserman Schultz had grown staff and allowed the DNC to pick up the check for Obama consultants.
4. Hillary Ran The Party. Hillary used that debt to pick up power — they pledged to fill in the funding gap for the DNC so long as they got to run operations. Gary Gensler, CFO of the Hillary campaign, apparently “described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house.”
5. Hillary Essentially Laundered Campaign Money Through The DNC. Hillary raised an enormous amount of money for the DNC, but virtually all that money went to Hillary’s campaign. Less than half of 1 percent of all money Hillary raised from her fundraisers went to the states. Brazile explains:
When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.
6. Bernie Got Jobbed. The party ran as an adjunct to the Hillary campaign long before the primaries, meaning that Bernie was at a severe disadvantage. Brazile admits as much:
The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead.
7. Brazile — And Everyone Else — Sees Bernie As The Future Of The Party. Sanders may have lost the battle, but he won the war: if he’d won the nomination, he may have lost to Trump, but in losing to Clinton, he stamped himself as a fallen hero. Now, he looks like an anti-corruption fighter who was willing to take the hit in order to defeat Trump, since Brazile writes that he was a good soldier even after finding out the DNC cheated him.
The Democratic Party is in disarray, thanks to all the same players the media cheered incessantly for years. But that means that the power in the party is now located at a Ben and Jerry’s in Vermont.