Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Brazile rips Wasserman Schultz as inept manager of Democratic Party
Donna Brazile, who was enlisted to lead the Democratic National Committee last year after chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned under fire, delivered a withering takedown Thursday of her predecessor’s management of the party.
Brazile describes Wasserman Schultz as an inept manager and fundraiser and said she effectively outsourced fundraising and other decisions to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — long before Clinton had secured the nomination. The account supports many of the criticisms leveled at Wasserman Schultz by Clinton’s primary
foe, Bernie Sanders, and his supporters.
Brazile’s version of events was contained in a lengthy passage from her new book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House,” which comes out next week. Brazile’s account was published by the Politico Magazine website as part of the book rollout.
Hachette Books, the publisher, describes the book as “equal parts campaign thriller, memoir and roadmap for the future.” A feature common to political postmortems after an election loss is placing blame for failure on someone else — in this case Wasserman Schultz and the Clinton campaign.
Wasserman Schultz, who is serving her seventh term in Congress representing parts of Broward and Miami-Dade counties, was chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee from May 2011 through July 2016. She resigned as last year’s Democratic National Convention was starting after stolen party emails showed party staffers favored Clinton over Sanders during the nominating process.
Brazile, who was the manager of Al Gore’s losing 2000 presidential campaign and a cable TV political commentator, was a DNC vice chairwoman and became interim party chairwoman after Wasserman Schultz’s departure.
Once there, she wrote, she became “livid” at discovering the extent of “this mess I had inherited.”
“I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising,” wrote Brazile, who had been an officer of the party under Wasserman Schultz.
But the reality was worse once she took over as interim chairwoman and reviewed the party’s operations, she said.
“Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party — she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was,” Brazile wrote.
There didn’t appear to be any ill will between Brazile and Wasserman Schultz — at least not until Thursday, said Mitch Ceasar, former chairman of the Broward Democratic Party who was also a member of the Democratic National Committee’s executive board for 10 years. “I never believed there to be bad blood. I don’t think anyone came in with bad blood. That was never my impression.”
Even after Wasserman Schultz said she was resigning and Brazile was designated to take over, Brazile appeared on national television and said Wasserman Schultz “deserved” a chance to gavel the national convention to order given all the effort she’d put into organizing the event. Wasserman Schultz later decided to relinquish the role of the ceremonial gavel to order.
In a response to Brazile’s comments, emailed by her spokesman, Wasserman Schultz said: “It was a tremendous honor to be asked by President Obama to serve as chair of the DNC. I am proud of the work our team did to support Democrats up and down the ballot in the 2016 election and to re-elect the President in 2012. With Donald Trump in the White House, Democrats must stay focused on enacting a progressive agenda to protect our citizens, our values and our democracy and remain united toward our goal of electing Democratic congressional majorities in 2018.”
Sean Foreman, a political science professor at Barry University, said Brazile’s account is a searing indictment. “It’s extremely clear who’s the target and that’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz — to blame for poor leadership, lack of transparency and leaving a mess behind after her tenure as head of the DNC.”
Foreman said Brazile’s take isn’t helpful to Wasserman Schultz, but it may not hurt her in next year’s congressional primary against Tim Canova, who ran against the incumbent in 2016 and is challenging her again. People who don’t like her or the way she ran the DNC are already supporting Canova, he said.
“It’s more damning information against Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her reputation. But that story might already be saturated for the people who care. The Tim Canova folks already have a hardened, negative view of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. So this doesn’t change anything,” Foreman said.
The excerpt from “Hacks” also serves to bolster criticisms many Democrats have expressed about President Barack Obama, who picked Wasserman Schultz to lead the DNC but never showed much interest in bolstering the party. Under Obama’s presidency, his party suffered massive losses in the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, governorships and state legislatures.
After Brazile took over as interim chairwoman, she wrote that she learned the party was broke and in debt.
Brazile said Wasserman Schultz didn’t cut the size of the party staff after the 2012 presidential election. Instead, she added lots of consultants to the DNC payroll and used the DNC to pay Obama consultants, Brazile wrote.
The 2012 Obama cam- paign left the party with $24 million in debt. A Clinton campaign fundraising operation had paid off most of the debt and “placed the party on an allowance.”
With a Democratic president during Wasserman Schultz’s time as chairwoman, the DNC operated under the White House. Much of her party time was spent raising money. In 2014, a party spokesman said the party had raised more than $120 million for the 2013-14 election cycle and retired $20 million of the debt from the 2012 campaign. Her political travel schedule, much of which involved fundraising, brought her to 99 cities in 37 states leading up to the last midterm election.
Brazile was unsparing toward Wasserman Schultz, who, she wrote, “had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.”
Because the Clinton campaign had bailed out the party, Brazile said she was told the party was “fully under control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp.”
Brazile described the Clinton campaign’s control of the DNC as a “cancer.”
Brazile said she was shocked because Wasserman Schultz had not let other party leaders know what was going on.
“That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking [of the emails] only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news,” Brazile wrote.
Ceasar said he “had no knowledge” about the extent of the Clinton campaign’s involvement in the DNC fundraising and operations before she had amassed enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee. “I don’t think anybody on the executive board of the DNC did,” he said. Reflecting on what was happening at the time and his reading of what Brazile wrote, he said he believes what she’s saying. “I
actually thought about this. Does this sound the way things were? Yes.”
“I have to say the actions were inappropriate, meaning the takeover of the DNC by someone who hasn’t reached nominee or presumptive nominee status. I never dreamed that was occurring and have never heard of that occurring other than when there was an incumbent president.”
Brazile concluded that the fundraising arrangement between the DNC and Clinton campaign wasn’t illegal but it “compromised the party’s integrity.” Money from the Clinton campaign was raised using a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC. She wrote that the Sanders campaign had a similar fundraising agreement with the DNC but he and his campaign “ignored” it.
Brazile’s own integrity took some hits last year. The hacked DNC emails showed, and she later admitted, that during the period she was a CNN commentator, she forwarded likely topics for upcoming CNN candidate events to the Clinton campaign.
CNN ended its ties with Brazile over the breach in journalistic ethics.
Brazile will be in South Florida on Nov. 15 for a joint appearance with Republican commentator Ana Navarro at the Miami Book Fair.
Foreman and Canova said Brazile’s account vindicates what Sanders and many of his supporters said during the course of the Democratic primary campaign. “But the big problem is there’s nothing they can do,” Foreman said. “While Sanders supporters can feel vindicated, it’s very bittersweet.”
Canova, a Sanders supporter, has long been critical of the way Wasserman Schultz ran the national party.
“I do feel a bit of vindication,” he said. “We took a lot of hits for calling her out. And I believe that Donna Brazile provides vindication, not just for me but for many, many people who have been calling out Wasserman Schultz.”
Canova said he would prefer to focus on policy differences with Wasserman Schultz before the August primary, not the way she ran the DNC. “We want to talk about the issues that are mattering to people in the district: jobs, jobs, jobs.”