This is insane:
Former DNC head Donna Brazile “writes in a new book that she seriously contemplated replacing Hillary Clinton as the party’s 2016 presidential nominee with then-Vice President Biden in the aftermath of Clinton’s fainting spell, in part because Clinton’s campaign was ‘anemic’ and had taken on ‘the odor of failure,’” the Washington Post reports.
“In an explosive new memoir, Brazile details widespread dysfunction and dissension throughout the Democratic Party, including secret deliberations over using her powers as interim DNC chair to initiate the removal of Clinton and running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) from the ticket after Clinton’s Sept. 11, 2016, collapse in New York City.”
“Brazile writes that she considered a dozen combinations to replace the nominees and settled on Biden and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), the duo she felt most certain would win over enough working-class voters to defeat Republican Donald Trump. “
That would have been the craziest move we’d ever seen in politics.
“WashPo book excerpts“
Donna has an axe to grind, a plethora of maliccious accusations at many targets at DNC and Clinton campaign staff, real sht stirring.
Apparently HRC and others had her number, hurting her delicate fee-fees by not swooning at her whacky proposals.
So who leaked that Donna gave HRC a head up on the debate questions? Me thinks that’s when this war started.
Question. Singular.
And any 9th grade debate team would have independently worked out that it would come up. Between rounds.
The water crisis in Flint wasn’t some obscure topic.
Yup.
But not necessarily entirely untrue.
AG
What axe though? She’s a DNC/establishment person through and through. She’s not a Sanders person by any stretch. And Perez just reappointed her to some important DNC committee. Interesting that she decided to burn the boats and bridges now.
Yeah Brazile claims that a primary process where Sanders got 43% of the delegates with 40% of the votes was rigged against him, whines about it extensively –
And then thinks it would have been fine to replace the nominated candidate with somebody who didn’t even run. Oh, and replace the VP nominee while she was at it. What excuse did she have for that?
In order for her plan to replace HRC with another candidate post pneumonia-related collapse to have any sense to it, the inevitable replacement would need to be Sanders given his success in the primaries. That said, it strikes me that it would have been a logistical nightmare involved in swapping out a candidate for another with less than two months til election day, getting the new candidate up and running, and able to take on Trump. It really would have been an extremely crazy move in what was already a psychotic election season.
There’s nothing in the bylaws that would allow her or anyone in her position to do this. This excerpt alone should disqualify her from ever being hired on in another campaign, the DNC or a media outlet. The election was not about you Donna.
Sure feels like a major case of CYA. Which – you’re right – will anyone have anything to do with her, aside from perhaps some Sanders partisans?
Brazile quite obviously aims to be the last one standing during the coming transition away from the Clinton Club version of the DNC.
She may succeed. She has certainly succeeded in further greasing the skids under the remnants of that group…not that they hadn’t greased them well enough already.
Watch. If there’s no really effective counterpunch aimed at her from the Clintonistas, she may outlast everybody.
AG
P.S. I loved that little bit about having rats in the basement.
Establishing her ghetto creds. The only rats she’s had in her various basements for at least the last 40+ years have been DemRats…and possibly some RatPublicans as well. Witness that championship-level bipartisan hustler couple James Carville and Mary Matalin for all you really need to know about that. Hell…they’re all in the same business, right?
P.P.S I also loved the Biden/Booker thing and how in the space of two paragraphs she patted HRC in the back and then shivved her royally. She’s got talent, this woman.
Nice.
Biden and Booker. A good political calculation; a terrible idea for the future wellness of the country itself. 8, 12 or possibly even 16 years of those two? A neocentrist’s dream.
Maybe she’s just running that idea up the flagpole to see who salutes. Who knows with these people. She is most certainly covering her ass with all of that pro-Sanders stuff, though.
We shall see…
Soon enough.
Won’t we.
P.P.P.S. Believe nothing that you see in the mainstream media. If it was true, they wouldn’t cover it.
Except possibly with a sheet.
Wanta wager that no Republican VIPs didn’t have similar “crazy” thoughts to dump Trump? It did seem to go further than thoughts when the Access Hollywood tape appeared and Priebus (iirc) told Trump to drop out now.
Also doesn’t seem so “crazy” to those that were around in ’72 when Democratic elites dumped McGovern by proxy. Knowing full well that McGovern wouldn’t find a viable VP replacement nominee. (Eagleton was fine — had been fine for years — and continued to be fine as a US Senator for another fourteen years — and lived an active life for another two decades after that.)
Not everyone viewed Clinton’s episode as being a bit woozy nothingburger. Did anyone within the ranks of VIP elites know enough to be confident that another such public episode wouldn’t happen again? If not, why take such a high risk without a contingency plan (not that Brazile’s was a great plan)? (Recall, that Kaine came up way short in his “debate” with dumbass/nutcase Pence.)
more and more stuff comes out as false, especially the HRC & DNC fundraising agreement and now this craziness, what is she doing? Why split Democrats before an important midterm? Is it just the money from the book or something else?
We live in times of constant conspiracy theories and everyone is suspicious, apparently with good reason. Why indeed release this pack of lies immediately before the midterms?
Years ago I watched the Sunday morning political gabfests and Donna Brazile was often the only voice of sanity, and represented the Democrats against three times as many Republican talking heads. But now she sounds just as loony as they are.
What “pack of lies” are you referring to? The viral tweets of MSM reporters and Democratic operatives?
It’s nearly a year until the mid-terms. Hardly immediately. Now is the time to be hashing this stuff out, and get it over and done with.
RE:
I thought I had heard/read (NPR?) that the (signed iirc?) memo formalizing that fundraising agreement had been made public.
If so, that’s primary-source documentary evidence.
Does it contradict Brazile’s account of what the agreement entailed? If so, I’ve not seen that reported. Got link to such? Or other factual support for that bolded bit of your statement?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-dnchfa-agreement-donna-braziles-growing-pile-of-nonsense
Perhaps this coda to her political career is to be expected from someone whose career highlight was foisting Joe Lieberman on the Democrats as a VP candidate.
Second craziest.
I will await the book’s lightning arrival on the remainder tables, but claims like this would require some pretty serious documentation, as well as naming the names of those party elites in meetings (emails?) whereby the Biden/Booker ticket was “finalized’.
When the first part of the narrative is that the DWS DNC rigged the nomination for Clinton, it seems somewhat incongruous that Part II opens with the claim that Donna’s DNC was ready to replace Her Royal Highness with two candidates who never ran. Talk about power being fleeting! This beggars the word “unprecedented”, haha. Some real plot twists in this little mystery, Donna…
First question that anyone, media or not, should ask is,
“Who else was in the meeting?”
.
As long as we’re talking about poorly substantiated information meant to support the poisonous “rigged” claim, let’s add this as grist for the conversational mill:
Inside story: How Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails
By RAPHAEL SATTER, JEFF DONN and CHAD DAY
Yesterday
WASHINGTON (AP) — It was just before noon in Moscow on March 10, 2016, when the first volley of malicious messages hit the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The first 29 phishing emails were almost all misfires. Addressed to people who worked for Clinton during her first presidential run, the messages bounced back untouched.
Except one.
Within nine days, some of the campaign’s most consequential secrets would be in the hackers’ hands, part of a massive operation aimed at vacuuming up millions of messages from thousands of inboxes across the world.
An Associated Press investigation into the digital break-ins that disrupted the U.S. presidential contest has sketched out an anatomy of the hack that led to months of damaging disclosures about the Democratic Party’s nominee. It wasn’t just a few aides that the hackers went after; it was an all-out blitz across the Democratic Party. They tried to compromise Clinton’s inner circle and more than 130 party employees, supporters and contractors…
…Later that month Guccifer 2.0 began directing reporters to the newly launched DCLeaks site, which was also dribbling out stolen material on Democrats. When WikiLeaks joined the fray on July 22 with its own disclosures the leaks metastasized into a crisis, triggering intraparty feuding that forced the resignation of the DNC’s chairwoman and drew angry protests at the Democratic National Convention.
Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and DCLeaks ultimately published more than 150,000 emails stolen from more than a dozen Democrats, according to an AP count.
The AP has since found that each of one of those Democrats had previously been targeted by Fancy Bear, either at their personal Gmail addresses or via the DNC, a finding established by running targets’ emails against the Secureworks’ list.
All three leak-branded sites have distanced themselves from Moscow. DCLeaks claimed to be run by American hacktivists. WikiLeaks said Russia wasn’t its source. Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be Romanian.
But there were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta’s inbox , according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
The official said the word “CONFIDENTIAL” was not in the original document.
Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention…
Also, too:
Chris Hayes
@chrislhayes
Again, if you think what Russia did had no impact, you should publish your entire inbox to the internet & see if it changes your life.
6:48 AM – 3 Nov 2017
Head trauma.
And the need to raise money to treat it.
I lived in the Washington DC Metropolitan area in the 80s and 90s; and, I can only remember Brazile being connected with then disgraced Mayor Marion Berry. Don’t remember anything of consequence regarding Ms. Brazile.
I lived far enough outside the beltway at the time and was so preoccupied by other things (work, family, etc.) that I would not have made that connection about her. I merely know her as someone who has presided over the DNC before and done poorly. When she’s appeared on talkshows (to the extent that I can tolerate CNN), my impression of her was that she was way in over her head, no matter the topic. What we seem to be witnessing is an incompetent political player at the end of an embarrassingly awful career lashing out.
My immediate reaction is that Donna Brazile has not been associated with winning efforts, which was confirmed by a quick trip to Wikipedia.
I don’t think she coordinated very well with her ghost writer.
Did she believe the ghost writer when they said that “they got this.”
I may be pissing in the punch at this party — so what! — but this is more fiddling while Rome burns. Brazile’s book does serve to throw another log on that fire.
That said, no reasonable person can honestly claim that the democratic process wasn’t, if not “rigged” than favored towards a pre-desired outcome by party “leaders.” Let’s ask someone with proximity, real experience and insight. Here’s Martin O’Malley:
“MINNEAPOLIS – Martin O’Malley had one clear chance to make waves within the Democratic National Committee, and he seized it, delivering a fiery speech Friday that condemned his party’s leadership for what he called a process ‘rigged’ to help Hillary Rodham Clinton — namely, curtailing the number of presidential primary debates.”
“Accusing party leaders of trying to keep Democratic ideas hidden as the Republican presidential candidates spew ‘racist hate’ from their debate lecterns, Mr. O’Malley, the former Maryland governor and mayor of Baltimore, questioned the decision to hold ‘four debates and four debates only’ before the first four states finish voting.”
“‘This is totally unprecedented in our party’s history,’ Mr. O’Malley said. ‘This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before. Whose decree is it exactly? Where did it come from? To what end? For what purpose? What national or party interest does this decree serve? How does this help us tell the story of the last eight years of Democratic progress?'”
In anticipation of the trashing of O’Malley, which falls in line with the general thrust of things, i.e. O’Malley didn’t win, therefore has no standing to speak to anything and thus any utterance therefore is invalid or “wrong.” However none of it makes his observation incorrect.
I will say that the timing of Brazile’s book is not good, however neither was Clinton’s. The two books make perfect bookends for the disaster that is the democratic party.
The fact that Brazile’s stone in the water created a ripple and a response and a coming internal party civil war told me something I would not have believed in January.
The party leadership was seriously more fragmented and on the take than even I thought in January.
Why exactly would Biden have agreed with Brazile? Why did that possibility go away?
Now we have a whole lot of journalistic and spin lines to ask “where did that come from?” Did the Clinton campaign get intelligence about what Brazile was up to?
Does anyone at all in that groups of people who speak for the Democratic Party care one whit about the lives of actual voters?
It seemed in September 2016 and it still seems that the media refused to take at face value what the candidate said about her health, something the media routinely takes at face value for everyone not named Clinton.
What has people upset with the Democrats in this past cycle is that the kingmaking was damn fricking obvious. for all factions of Democrats.
And the media was in the tank for Trump the moment he appeared.
Brazile just had the misfortune to be named interim chair of the DNC.
Who knows? She might have just actually been the most capable person to have that job at that time. That’s a comment about the Democratic bench beginning in the summer of 2016. That Brazile was the far-and-away best qualified for the role as chair of the party.
And that the chair of the party structurally was the place that was least capable of exerting the right kind of pressure on the pols, consultants, and media flaks.
And that not one person anywhere around that mess had a freaking clue.
Bollocks.