Almost twenty-five years to the day after Bill Clinton was first elected President of the United States, Donna Brazile brought the Clintons' control of the Democratic Party to an end in one fell swoop.
The revered veteran Democratic operative dropped a bombshell in the form of an excerpt in her new book about the 2016 presidential election, "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House." It seems that President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign left the Democratic Party in so much debt - to the tune of $24 million - that when Hillary Clinton agreed to put money into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), it came with strings attached. The party would get just enough money from contributors to stay afloat, with the bulk of it going to Hillary's campaign.
The plan, finalized in August 2015, worked like this: Once a person contributed the maximum $2,700 allowed by the Federal Election Commission for individual contributions to Hillary's Brooklyn-based campaign, he or she could then contribute an additional $353,400 to a joint fundraising committee that served as a sort of a clearinghouse for Hillary's campaign, the DNC, and 32 Democratic state committees. The joint committee was called - of course! - the "Hillary Victory Fund."
Brazile explains that the $353,400 contribution figure accounted for $10,000 to each of the 32 state parties who were party to this agreement, which totals $320,000, with the remaining $33,400 going to the DNC. "The money would be deposited in the states first," she wrote, "and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn."
This arrangement of such an organization seemed suspicious to Paul Blumenthal, a political reporter for The Huffington Post, who said that such agreements aren't made until a candidate has secured the nomination. The fact that it was put together so early in the process didn't seem to bother Democratic bigwigs, some of whom defended the agreement rather glibly. Raymond Buckley, the New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman, said that he didn't believe that it was ever "too early to start preparing to win the general election."
Already, Democratic leaders are insisting that Brazile's book is a bum rap and that Hillary couldn't have possibly rigged the primaries when the fund was meant for the general, not the primary, election campaign. Snooty Democratic establishmentarians are citing a memo, recently obtained by NBC News, making it clear that any "activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary." Besides, they say, Bernie Sanders signed a similar agreement, and Martin O'Malley certainly would have signed one if Debbie Wasserman Schultz had removed her boot heel from his neck long enough to let him. So where's the rigging?
But Paste.com's Walker Bragman - full disclosure, he's a friend of mine and I'm also friends with his mom - invites us to pay closer attention to the choice of words in this memo. "'Preparations for the General Election' does not necessarily mean 'during the General Election,'" he wrote. "Moreover, [there was] the provision about hiring the new DNC Communications Director from the . . . candidates 'identified as acceptable to HFA [Hillary For America, i.e. the Clinton campaign]: to occur by September 11, 2015' - long before the primary had concluded." To which I would add . . . long before the actual primary and caucus voting had even started.
And here's the kicker: Included in the agreement was a provision that the DNC would give the Clinton campaign "advance opportunity to review online or mass e-mail communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate." Also, the DNC was required to alert the Clinton campaign "in advance of mailing any direct mail communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate or his or her signature." As Brendan Fischer, the reform-program director at the nonpartisan voting-rights organization the Campaign Legal Center, wrote in a tweet, "How does anybody believe the DNC-HFA memo only applied to the general [election]? Clinton controlled every communication mentioning a primary candidate."
The agreement definitely put Hillary in charge when it came to the party's preparations for the primaries. The party had placed its ability to function in her hands, because it was so broke that it had no choice. This newly revealed information dovetails quite nicely with the decision to hold a small number of primary/caucus debates (more debates were added only after Martin O'Malley dropped out), the inconvenient scheduling of said debates, and Hillary's own disregard for down-ballot races. It also reveals a disconnected chairwoman in the form of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who pretty much let Hillary run amok with the party apparatus. Brazile admits that Wasserman Schultz was "not a good manager" and that "Debbie expressed little interest in controlling the day-to-day operations of the party."
The biggest culprit in all this, surprisingly, is not Hillary or Wasserman Schultz but President Obama. Obama was so insistent on remaining above politics that he paid no attention to the party and left it to its own devices. As a result, the party not only ended up in the red, it allowed a thousand elective offices to go red - those House, Senate, gubernatorial, and state legislative seats that went Republican. And when Donald Trump turned the White House Republican red, that was the GOP's nice red cherry on the top. Obama was a good President overall, but his neglect of the party's problems was a denial of his responsibility as a Democratic President. Which begs the obvious question: If he didn't like politics, why did he get into politics? And here's another question: If he was so concerned about his legacy, why didn't he help build up the party to ensure that his achievements would survive his Presidency?
Last night's gubernatorial victories for Democrats Ralph Northam in Virginia and Phil Murphy in New Jersey have given the Democrats a new lease on life in this Age of Trump, as has the approval of Medicaid expansion in Maine, but the party still has a long way to go before it can return to anything resembling a position of power on the national stage. A candidate like O'Malley, who can appeal to both the mainstream and progressive wings of the Democratic Party if only more Democrats knew who he was, can move the party forward as its 2020 presidential nominee, but not a candidate that appeals to only one group or the other; Mike Lupica, speaking on MSNBC, said that DNC chairman Tom Perez has to be scared to death at the idea of another Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy (and Sanders isn't even a party member), and another campaign from a Clinton or a Clintonista, I would add, would be equally distressing. Donna Brazile herself must have known just how much of a predicament the party was in back in 2016 when she discovered what Hillary had done and had to tell Sanders, er, what happened.
Brazile telephoned Sanders and told him of the Clinton agreement in September 2016, two months before the election. "I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee," she wrote in her new book. "Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election." Sanders, Brazile says, took all of this calmly and asked for his opinion. She admitted that she didn't trust the polls showing a Hillary victory, finding a "lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere."
"I urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his supporters into the fold with Hillary, and to campaign with all the heart and hope he could muster," she writes. "He might find some of her positions too centrist, and her coziness with the financial elites distasteful, but he knew and I knew that the alternative was a person who would put the very future of the country in peril. I knew he heard me. I knew he agreed with me, but I never in my life had felt so tiny and powerless as I did making that call. When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to."
And given how much she, like so many thinking people, feared a Trump Presidency, it's easy to see why she gave Hillary debate questions in advance to give her an inside advantage. Or why she wanted to replace Hillary with Joe Biden.
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