Why Donna Brazile's Story Matters - But Not for the Reason You Might Think
Published on
Tuesday, November 07, 2017
by
Rolling Stone
Why Donna Brazile's Story Matters - But Not for the Reason You Might Think
Everyone knew the primary was rigged. The real question is: Why did they
bother, when they would have won anyway?
by
Matt Taibbi
Donna Brazile, then-interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, is
seen on the floor of the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on the
final night of the Democratic National Convention, July 28, 2016, at which
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton addressed the crowd.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post previewed passages from former DNC
chair Donna Brazile's much-anticipated "blistering" tell-all book about the
2016 presidential campaign, Hacks. The piece written by Phillip Rucker
originally included a passage that read as follows:
"Whenever Brazile got frustrated with Clinton's aides, she writes, she would
remind them that the DNC charter empowered her to replace the nominee. If a
nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee the
process of filling the vacancy."
Later, the paper changed this and other passages, originally without an
editor's note. The new passage read:
"Whenever Brazile got frustrated with Clinton's aides, she writes, she would
remind them that the DNC charter empowered her to initiate the replacement
of the nominee. If a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair
would oversee a complicated process of filling the vacancy that would
include a meeting of the full DNC."
This was a significant change. It meant the difference between Brazile
claiming she had unilateral power to change nominees, and claiming she had
the power to start a discussion about changing nominees.
Hurricane Twitter naturally ran with the story about Brazile mistakenly
believing she had unilateral power. There are countless examples, but for
instance: here, here and here.
This became one of the key points of attack against Brazile, who is being
loudly booted out of the Church of the Blue Establishment, mostly via social
media condemnations.
There were other methods. Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson penned a
denunciation on Medium that included his expression of disappointment that
Brazile would allow herself to be used by our foreign enemies.
The "open letter" from the Clinton campaign was signed by about a gazillion
people, in the style of one of those academic letters of disavowal that have
become popular tools against professors with "problematic" ideas. It read:
"We were shocked to learn the news that Donna Brazile actively considered
overturning the will of the Democratic voters... It is particularly
troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false
Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponent,
about our candidate's health."
This has become a popular meme: That even paying attention to some of the
core charges in Brazile's book is tantamount to aiding the Russians.
Markos Moulitsas tweeted as much by way of an analysis of @SecureDemocracy's
"Russian propaganda tracker," the social media tool of the Alliance to
Secure Democracy. (The Alliance is itself part of a groundbreaking effort to
build a bridge between modern Dems and Bush-era neocons, but that's another
story).
When it came out that eight out of the top 10 trending topics on the
"tracker" this weekend were about the Brazile-fueled DNC scandal, this is
what Moulitsas said: "If you're letting the Right and the Russians drive
your agenda, then it's time to rethink your approach."
The use of rumors and innuendo to gin up furious emotional responses through
a community before facts and corrections can catch up; the use of letters of
denunciation; the reflexive charge that dissenting thoughts aid a foreign
enemy - does no one recognize this? Has no one out there read a history
book?
The headline revelations in Brazile's excerpt in Politico were interesting.
She wrote that she had promised to get to the bottom of whether or not, as
leaked/hacked DNC files suggested, the 2015-16 primary race against Bernie
Sanders had been "rigged."
The excerpt starts off with Brazile anxiously preparing to call Sanders to
share the bad news: "I had found my proof, and it broke my heart.";
Actually, what Brazile found were things we mostly already knew. The worst
had originally been reported on by Ken Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf (then of
Politico). The story among other things described how the national Clinton
campaign used funds that by rule should have redounded to state Democratic
Party offices.
Politico described this situation back then as "essentially. money
laundering."
I wrote about this, too, after the DNC leak, believing that details about
this were among the only significant things to emerge out of the otherwise
tedious DNC leak.
The emails seemed to give weight to the charges in the Vogel-Arnsdorf story,
which amounted to the Clinton campaign using state funds to make up for a
shortfall at a time when Sanders was still viable and raising a lot of
money.
But the idea that Brazile's book amounted to a smoking gun that the primary
was "rigged" against Sanders is "problematic" in its own right, for two
reasons:
1) That the DNC had things stacked against Sanders from the start wasn't
secret. After all, the DNC wouldn't even let Sanders use their headquarters
as a venue to announce his candidacy, way back in April of 2015. As the book
Shattered explains it, DNC officials felt it was inappropriate to "give
Sanders the imprimatur of the party." He made his announcement on a strip of
grass outside the Capitol. He was never treated by the DNC as a real
candidate, not from the first minute of his campaign.
2) But it didn't matter! Clinton would almost certainly have won the
nomination anyway. As her proponents have repeatedly pointed out, the race
wasn't that close. Even as a Sanders supporter, I concede this.
But that is what's so weird. Why bother monkeying around with rules, when
you're going to win anyway?
Why not welcome Sanders and the energy he undoubtedly would (and did) bring
into the party, rather than scheme to lock him and others out?
There are a lot of people who are going to wonder why so much time is being
spent re-litigating the 2016 campaign. It sucked, it's over: Who cares?
It does matter. That race is when many of the seeds of what will be the
defining problems of our age first began to be sown.
The rise of Trump and the crypto-fascist movement that crushed establishment
Republicans is half of the story. The sharp move among many white middle
American voters away from Beltway Republicanism toward something far darker
and more dangerous crystalized in 2015-16. So it has to be studied over and
over.
But there is an ugly thing on the other side that also began at that time.
This is when establishment Democrats began to openly lose faith in democracy
and civil liberties and began to promote a "results over process" mode of
political thinking. It's when we started hearing serious people in
Washington talk about the dangers of "too much democracy."
This isn't about Hillary Clinton. It's about a broader movement that took
place within the Democratic establishment, and spread rapidly to
blue-friendly media and academia.
It's a kind of repeat of post-9/11 thinking, when suddenly huge pluralities
of Americans decided the stakes were now too high to continue being queasy
about things like torture, extralegal assassination, and habeas corpus.
In the age of Trump, we're now throwing all sorts of once-treasured
principles - press ethics, free speech, freedom from illegal surveillance -
overboard, because the political stakes are now deemed too high to cede
ground to Trump over principles.
But this distrust of democracy began before Trump was even a nominee. As
Brazile notes, it started within the ranks of the Democratic Party near the
outset of the campaign.
It would have been a huge boon to Clinton's run if the DNC had welcomed not
only Sanders but other serious candidates into the race, in the true spirit
of what the primary process is supposed to represent - the winnowing of many
diverse views into one unified message.
But the attitude in Washington is now the opposite. Primary challengers are
increasingly seen as reprobates who exist only to bloody the "real"
candidate. So they should be kept down and discouraged whenever possible.
As the campaign continued, and we saw both Trump's rise and results like
Brexit, the "too much democracy" argument began to emerge even more, along
with the embrace of techniques that would have horrified true liberals a
generation ago.
In the last year, we've seen the blue-state establishment celebrate the use
of the infamous FISA statute against American citizens, and the use of
warrantless electronic surveillance against the same.
We've seen the ACLU denounced for defending free speech and we've seen sites
like Buzzfeed celebrated for publishing unverified and/or slanderous
material, usually because the targets are politically unpopular.
Liberals used not to believe in doing these things not only because they
understood that they would likely be the first victims in a society stripped
of civil protections (a school district forcing the removal of Black Lives
Matter stickers is a classic example of a more probable future in a world
without civil liberties).
No, they eschewed these tactics because they genuinely believed that debate,
discussion, inclusion and democracy brought out the best in us.
The point of the Brazile story isn't that the people who "rigged" the
primary were afraid of losing an election. It's that they weren't afraid of
betraying democratic principles, probably because they didn't believe in
them anymore.
If you're not frightened by the growing appeal of that line of thinking, you
should be. There is a history of this sort of thing. And it never ends well.
C 2016 Rolling Stone
