Debbie, Donna, and the DNC = Dirty^3

Former interim DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile's act of confession today may be one single act of decency in a career that was based on complete political cynicism. (Wiki Commons)

We witnessed today a display of total commitment, but not true altruism, because first of all that does not exist and then we have to bear in mind who we're talking about. By telling her account of discovering an arrangement that effectively reduced the Democratic presidential primaries to an expensive and shameful charade, Donna Brazile has ensured that she will now be banished forever from the ranks of the Democratic elite circle. Based on the statements she made in her now viral article in Politico, she may have also thrown a match into a coal mine of Democratic Party internal politics. The idea that there would be party unity after the farcical administering of the primaries in 2016 was already laughable. With that in mind, let us break down what are the most significant issues brought to the surface by Brazile's account and what it changes. Let's understand also that as juicy as these details are, Brazile's book excerpt in Politico must still be taken with skepticism due to the rest of the players mentioned in it (the Clintons, Barack Obama, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Robbie Mook et al). 

Can we believe Brazile?

Many of the details contained in this bombshell have already been either alluded to or stated explicitly in the emails leaked to Julian Assange known as the "DNC Leaks" and are therefore old news. So why does this change anything? 

Brazile is unfortunately known as a particularly pernicious and unscrupulous liar. In October 2016 she denied on Fox News to Megyn Kelly that she had leaked a debate question to the Clinton campaign while working for CNN. This March she admitted that she had in fact done that, thereby validating revelations made by Wikileaks that she had previously called "crap". Brazile has also been known for a far longer reaching  record of byzantine political moves that make her the quintessential insider; she has never run in an election yet has always been involved in them since 1984. In 2016 former CNN financial reporter Allan Chernoff, technically Brazile's colleague, claimed that she had floated in 2008 a false confidential tip that her former boss Al Gore was considering running for president again. In 1988 she was fired from the Michael Dukakis presidential campaign for saying that his opponent Vice President George HW Bush had to "fess up" about allegations of having an affair. As of today, though some other funky stuff about the elder Bush has been revealed there has been no evidence of him having an affair during the period in question. 

What could be the ulterior motive in this case for Brazile to tell all or perhaps not tell the truth? This initial cannonball of an excerpt was likely published in order to drive her book sales up. 

Magnitude of the revelation

This is the FIRST public acknowledgment by a member of the Democratic National Committee, which Brazile was the chairwoman of two times and a member of continuously since 2008, that the Democratic primaries were not conducted in good faith, and on the contrary were structurally completely dependent on the goodwill of the campaign of one of the candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Until now the media had ignored the revelations made by the Wikileaks emails as well as the DNC fraud lawsuit in which the DNC's attorney Bruce Spiva argued that the DNC was not obligated to run a fair contest. Yet most major news networks continued to report under the ad hoc assumption that Hillary Clinton and the DNC could not have been proven to have colluded in order to rig the contests. Working on the assumption that Brazile's accounts of speaking with  Clinton campaign CFO Gary Gensler, Bernie Sanders, and others are true, the Democratic  Party must now acknowledge that its candidate selection process had been completely corrupted way before the primaries even occurred and that they basically staged an elaborate hoax on the entire Democratic and broader left wing electorate.

The Democrats are now forced to either admit that Brazile's statements are true, or to fight back by claiming that the woman that served twice as interim DNC chair and was recently renominated to the committee by successor Tom Perez is lying.

The nature of the manipulation

Until now the DNC's rigging of the primaries, which we will still call an "allegation" as of right now no matter how small of a doubt remains, was assumed to have been accomplished by means of placing Clintonian insiders or Obama allies in strategic positions on the DNC. Examples of this included Debbie Wasserman Schultz's longstanding insistence that their would be only six primary debates and often they were scheduled for nights when there would be low audience turnout.  Schultz deflected by claiming that the timing was geared to "maximize exposure" a statement that even the notoriously anti-Donald Trump Politifact deemed "False". The actions of Brazile and other DNC members were also revealed by Wikileaks to have shown a structural prejudice in favour of Hillary Clinton. 

With Brazile's book excerpt being published today, the mechanism of this prejudice is now revealed to have also been financial, meaning that not only were pro-Clinton officials placed at senior levels of the DNC and other party institutions, but also that the DNC had effectively been mortgaged to the Clinton campaign due to an agreement by which Clinton's campaign would pay down debts accrued by the DNC under Obama and Schultz. Not only were Schultz and by extension the rest of her colleagues completely tanking the primaries for Clinton, apparently they to some extent had little choice because they were dependent on the Clinton donor apparatus to keep the party financially solvent.

The collateral damage

It has been widely mourned on the left and celebrated elsewhere that under Barack Obama the Democrats lost over 1,000 elected positions on the federal and state level, yet Brazile's account apparently shows why that happened. Under Schultz, Obama consultants were often paid by DNC funds, and rather than shed staff between presidential elections she had the DNC retain them and their massive fee schedules. This drained the party coffers and left little for state and local parties. Unfortunately, in order to get the party out of debt Schultz agreed for the Clinton campaign to put it on what was effectively an austerity plan that gave the lion's share of donor money from both the Clinton campaign and DNC back to the Clinton campaign. Keep in mind that this arrangement occurred before the primaries had even begun. With such a reality in their minds, it now seems impossible that Schultz could have in good faith stated that the primary process was fair to all candidates.

Also perhaps just as damaging for Bernie Sanders is the claim made by Brazile that she told him about the rigging prior to the election, yet he went along with the Clinton campaign anyway and has since then not taken any action or made any statement to acknowledge the fight waged by his supporters to force the DNC to admit wrongdoing and pay back his donors.

The coming civil war

Given all of the new dirt dug up today by Brazile, it seems inevitable that there will be a major bout of Democratic infighting every step of the way leading up to the 2018 midterm elections and 2020 presidential contest. Until now the main parties to the conflict had been the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters; to this we must now add the erstwhile untouchable Obama camp whom Brazile blames for running the Democrats into such a huge debt that they would end up making a pact with the Clintons that hopelessly compromised the primary nomination process. The Clinton and Obama camps had previously been solidly if grudgingly on the same side. Now the finger pointing has commenced and there's no telling who will be the next person to reveal something embarrassing to either camp. Stay tuned.