Donna Brazile Sells Out, A Sad Way To End A Career

Her new book will only hurt the party she claims to love.

Only a few weeks ago I signed a petition to keep Donna Brazile on the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I defended her as a good Democrat who worked hard over the years to elect Democrats. What a difference a few weeks make.

Today I am sorry for signing that petition. She has not only bought into the Bernie Sanders campaign story for profit, selling her book, but has hurt the Democratic Party she claimed to love when she spent years as vice-chair of it.

Brazile is too smart not to know releasing her book now wasn’t going to be used by Republicans to block out everything wrong they are doing from tax cuts for the rich to covering up the disgusting behavior of Trump and his campaign. She knew she was going to set Democrat against Democrat once again and for that many will never forgive her.

What is amazing to me is in trying to trash Hillary Clinton for saving the Democratic National Committee she actually throws President Obama under the bus. He was president and controlled the party operations after 2012. He left it millions in debt and owing money to banks. He left Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) in charge knowing she was a disaster, just look at the mid-term elections. He could have changed the leadership of the Party at any time but didn’t want to bother. As early as 2008 he started Obama for America as the way to go around the Party. Now all that is known but did Brazile have to throw him under the bus for it now when he is finally working in tandem with Eric Holder his former Attorney General to raise money to rebuild state parties and win legislative seats for Democrats fighting gerrymandering.

Let’s start with facts. The DNC, which Brazile claims rigged the primary for Clinton, was the organization saying to states it was OK for Sanders to run in their primaries even though he was not a Democrat. Sanders himself said were he not allowed into the Democratic Primary he couldn’t have run. “He was deemed “extremely disgraceful” by Donna Brazile, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, when he said “In terms of media coverage, you had to run within the Democratic Party,” he observed, adding that he couldn’t raise money outside the major two-party process. The DNC shared its voter lists with him and he knew that was the only way to get them he could afford. In the middle of the primary he fired some staff for stealing Hillary’s voter information from the DNC. Both campaigns signed agreements with the DNC to raise money. They both had the right to set conditions in those agreements with how the money they raised would be spent especially considering how the DNC was broke and had a record of squandering its money under Wasserman Schultz. Sanders really didn’t care about that as clearly he never had any intention of raising a nickel for the party. One fact that people need to remember is Clinton won the primary by nearly 4 million votes. There was no way to rig that. Sanders’s goal was always to tear down the party and that is obviously still his goal if you listen to the leadership of Our Revolution, the group he started after the campaign.

So what does Brazile accomplish by having Politico release a snippet from her book? Maybe she hopes Sanders supporters will run out to buy it? Maybe she hopes Republicans who hate Hillary and Obama will buy it? Maybe she hopes to get hired now that she has trashed the DNC, Obama and Clinton. Whatever it is she has effectively ended her career as a Democrat.

Over the years I have crossed paths with Donna Brazile many times at Democratic events. We were never friends but acquaintances and she would occasionally comment on columns I wrote or comments I made in the press. I don’t expect to hear from her after this column.

What she has done as we move toward the 2018 elections for Congress, governors and state legislatures is try to reignite the fire between the Clinton and Sanders wings of the Democrat Party and re-litigate the 2016 election hurting the Democratic Party which is just beginning to recover. I see that as a career-ending move, even if she makes a few shekels from her book.

Democrats have a real chance to move forward beginning with wins next Tuesday in New Jersey and Virginia. We have a slew of great candidates who announced they are running for Congress next year and great candidates running in the 36 state governor’s races, as well as for state legislature. While the DNC is still struggling to raise money, individual Democratic candidates are doing well, as are the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). The DNC has hired Jess O’Connell as CEO and she comes with a strong record of accomplishment from EMILY’s List. So despite Brazile’s nasty and from the excerpts I have seen half-truths, Democrats will prevail. The Democratic Party and our candidates will stand up to Trump, McConnell, Ryan and Steve Bannon and the hate they spew. Grassroots Democrats will be working hard to ensure decency, equality and telling the truth will once again prevail in the government of the United States.

This column first ran on HuffPost.