Donna Brazile: I considered replacing Clinton with Biden
as 2016 Democratic nominee
By Philip Rucker
Donna
Brazile at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 26, 2016.
(Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Former Democratic National Committee 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.”
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
process of removing Clinton and running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (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 (N.J.), the
duo she felt most certain would win over enough working-class voters to defeat
Republican Donald Trump. But then, she writes, “I thought of Hillary, and all
the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her. I could
not do this to them.”
Brazile paints a scathing portrait of Clinton as a
well-intentioned, historic candidate whose campaign was badly mismanaged, took
minority constituencies for granted and made blunders with “stiff” and “stupid”
messages. The campaign was so lacking in passion for the candidate, she writes,
that its New York headquarters felt like a sterile hospital ward where “someone
had died.”
Brazile alleges that Clinton’s top aides routinely
disrespected her and put the DNC on a “starvation diet,” depriving it of
funding for voter turnout operations.
As one of her party’s most prominent black strategists,
Brazile also recounts fiery disagreements with Clinton’s staffers — including a
conference call in which she told three senior campaign officials, Charlie
Baker, Marlon Marshall and Dennis Cheng, that she was being treated like a
slave.
“I’m not Patsey the slave,” Brazile recalls telling them,
a reference to the character played by Lupita Nyong’o in the film, “12 Years a
Slave.” “Y’all keep whipping me and whipping me and you never give me any money
or any way to do my damn job. I am not going to be your whipping girl!”
Brazile’s book, titled “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins
and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House,” will be released
Tuesday by Hachette Books. A copy of the 288-page book was obtained in advance
by The Washington Post.
Perhaps not since George
Stephanopoulos wrote “All Too Human,” a 1999 memoir of his years working
for former president Bill Clinton, has a political strategist penned such a
blistering tell-all.
In it, Brazile reveals
how fissures of race, gender and age tore at the heart of the operation — even
as Clinton was campaigning on a message of inclusiveness and trying to assemble
a rainbow coalition under the banner of “Stronger Together.”
A veteran operative and
television pundit who had long served as DNC’s vice chair, Brazile abruptly
and, she writes, reluctantly took over in July 2016 for chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The Florida
congresswoman was ousted from the DNC on the eve of the party convention after
WikiLeaks released stolen emails among her and her advisers that showed
favoritism for Clinton during the competitive primaries.
Brazile describes her mounting anxiety about Russia’s
theft of emails and other data from DNC servers, the slow process of
discovering the full extent of the cyberattacks and the personal fallout. She
likens the feeling to having rats in your basement: “You take measures to get
rid of them, but knowing they are there, or have been there, means you never
feel truly at peace.”
Brazile writes that she was haunted by the still-unsolved
murder of DNC data staffer Seth Rich and feared for her own life, shutting the
blinds to her office window so snipers could not see her and installing
surveillance cameras at her home. She wonders whether Russians had placed a
listening device in plants in the DNC executive suite.
At first, Brazile writes of the hacking, top Democratic
officials were “encouraging us not to talk about it.” But she says a wake-up
moment came when she visited the White House in August 2016, for President
Obama’s 55th birthday party. National security adviser Susan E. Rice and former
attorney general Eric Holder separately pulled her aside to urge her to take
the Russian hacking seriously, which she did, she writes.
That fall, Brazile says she tried to persuade her
Republican counterparts to agree to a joint statement condemning Russian
interference but that they ignored her messages and calls.
Backstage at a debate, she writes, she approached Sean
Spicer, then-chief strategist for the Republican National Committee, but “I
could see his eyes dart away like this was the last thing he wanted to talk to
me about.” She asked RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, too, but “I got that special
D.C. frost where the person smiles when he sees you but immediately looks past
you trying to find someone in the room to come right over and interrupt the
conversation.”
There would be no joint statement.
The WikiLeaks releases included an email in which
Brazile, a paid CNN contributor at the time, shared potential topics and
questions for a CNN town hall in advance with the Clinton campaign. She claims
in her book that she did not recall sending the email and could not find it in
her computer archives. Nevertheless, she eventually admitted publicly to
sending it, believing her reputation would have suffered regardless.
At the Oct. 19 debate in Las Vegas, with the email
scandal simmering, the Clinton campaign sat Brazile not in the front row —
where she had been at the previous debate — but in bleachers out of view of
cameras. She recalls watching the debate with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, “among
others whom they had to invite but wanted to tuck away.”
Brazile describes in wrenching detail Clinton’s bout with
pneumonia. On Sept. 9, she saw the nominee backstage at a Manhattan gala and
she seemed “wobbly on her feet” and had a “rattled cough.” Brazile recommended
Clinton see an acupuncturist.
Two days later, Clinton collapsed as she left a Sept. 11
memorial service at Ground Zero in New York. Brazile blasts the campaign’s
initial efforts to shroud details of her health as “shameful.”
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.
After Clinton’s fainting spell, some Democratic insiders
were abuzz with talk of replacing her — and Brazile says she was giving it
considerable thought.
The morning of Sept. 12, Brazile got a call from Biden’s
chief of staff saying the vice president wanted to speak with her. She recalls
thinking, “Gee, I wonder what he wanted to talk to me about?” Jeff Weaver,
campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called, too, to set up a call
with his boss, and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley sent her an email.
Brazile also was paid a surprise visit in her DNC office
by Baker, who, she writes, was dispatched by the Clinton campaign “to make sure
that Donna didn’t do anything crazy.”
“Again and again I thought about Joe Biden,” Brazile
writes. But, she adds, “No matter my doubts and my fears about the election and
Hillary as a candidate, I could not make good on that threat to replace her.”
Brazile writes that she inherited a national party in
disarray, in part because President Obama, Clinton and Wasserman Schultz were
“three titanic egos” who had “stripped the party to a shell for their own
purposes.”
Brazile writes that she inherited Wasserman Schultz’s
office — with “tropical pink” walls that she found hard on the eyes — and
“ridiculous” perks, such as a Chevrolet Tahoe with driver and a personal
entourage that included an assistant known as a body woman.
In her first few days on the job, Brazile writes that she
also discovered the DNC was $2 million in debt and that the payroll was stacked
with “hangers-on and sycophants.” For instance, Wasserman Schultz kept two
consulting firms — SKDKnickerbocker and Precision Strategies — each on
$25,000-a-month retainers, and one of Obama’s pollsters was still being paid
$180,000 a year.
The outgoing president no longer needed to assess his
approval ratings or his policy decisions, at least not when the Democratic
Party was fighting for its survival against a hostile foreign power,” she
writes.
Brazile also details how Clinton effectively took control
of the DNC in August 2015, before the primaries began, with a joint fundraising
agreement between the party and the Clinton campaign.
She said the deal gave Clinton control over the DNC’s
finances, strategy and staff decisions — disadvantaging other candidates,
including Sanders. “This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it
compromised the party’s integrity,” she writes.
An excerpt of this chapter — titled “Bernie, I Found the
Cancer” — was published Thursday in Politico, sparking discord and
recriminations through the party.
As she traveled the country, Brazile writes, she detected
an alarming lack of enthusiasm for Clinton. On black radio stations, few people
defended the nominee. In Hispanic neighborhoods, the only Clinton signs she saw
were at the campaign field offices.
But at headquarters in New York, the mood was one of
“self-satisfaction and inevitability,” and Brazile’s early reports of trouble
were dismissed with “a condescending tone.”
Brazile describes the 10th floor of Clinton’s Brooklyn
headquarters, where senior staff worked: “Calm and antiseptic, like a hospital.
It had that techno-hush, as if someone had died. I felt like I should whisper.
Everybody’s fingers were on their keyboards, and no one was looking at anyone
else. You half-expected to see someone in a lab coat walk by.”
During one visit, she writes, she thought of a question
former Democratic congressman Tony Coelho used to ask her about campaigns: “Are
the kids having sex? Are they having fun? If not, let’s create something to get
that going, or otherwise we’re not going to win.”
“I didn’t sense much fun or [having sex] in Brooklyn,”
she deadpans.
Brazile writes that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook
and his lieutenants were so obsessed with voter data and predictive analytics
that they “missed the big picture.”
“They knew how to size up voters not by meeting them and
finding out what they cared about, what moved their hearts and stirred their
souls, but by analyzing their habits,” she writes. “You might be able to
persuade a handful of Real Simple magazine readers who drink gin and tonics to
change their vote to Hillary, but you had not necessarily made them
enthusiastic enough to want to get up off the couch and go to the polls.”
Brazile describes Mook, in his mid-30s, as overseeing a
patriarchy. “They were all men in his inner circle,” she writes, adding: “He
had this habit of nodding when you are talking, leaving you with the impression
that he has listened to you, but then never seeming to follow up on what you
thought you had agreed on.”
Brazile’s criticisms were not reserved for Mook. After
Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri challenged Brazile’s
plan for Kaine to deliver a pep talk to DNC staff at the party convention in
Philadelphia, Brazile writes, “I was thinking, If that b---- ever does anything
like that to me again, I’m gonna walk.”
Brazile writes with particular disdain about Brandon
Davis, a Mook protege who worked as a liaison between the DNC and the Clinton
campaign. She describes him as a spy, saying he treated her like “a crazy,
senile old auntie and couldn’t wait to tell all his friends the nutty things
she said.”
In staff meetings, Brazile recalls, “Brandon often rolled
his eyes as if I was the stupidest woman he’d ever had to endure on his climb
to the top. He openly scoffed at me, snorting sometimes when I made an
observation.”
Brazile opens her book by describing the painful days
following Clinton’s defeat. She received calls of gratitude from party leaders
but still felt slighted.
“I never heard from Hillary,” she writes. “I knew what I
wanted to say to her and it was: I have nothing but respect for you being so
brave and classy considering everything that went on. But in the weeks after
the loss, every time I checked my phone thinking I might have missed her call,
it wasn’t her.”
Finally, in February 2017, Clinton rang.
“This was chitchat, like I was talking to someone I
didn’t know,” Brazile writes. “I know Hillary. I know she was being as sincere
as possible, but I wanted something more from her.”
