Controversy of the week
Brazile reopens the 2016 wound
“That sound you hear is the primal scream of millions of Bernie Bros,” said in “They were right. The system was rigged.” Last week Donna Brazile, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, went public with explosive claims that the DNC effectively gave control of the party to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, months before the primaries even began. In an article in Politico.com, excerpted from an upcoming book, Brazile says that her predecessor at the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, cut a fundraising deal with the Clinton campaign that helped the DNC pay off $25 million in debt, in return for giving Clinton control over hiring and strategy. Since the debacle of 2016, the unifying horror of President Trump has enabled the Democratic Party “to paper over its internal divisions,” said Aaron Blake in WashingtonPost.com. But the rift between the pro-Sanders insurgent left and the proClinton party establishment was never resolved. What Brazile has just done “is the equivalent of taking the smoldering embers of the 2016 primary and throwing some gasoline on them.”
Sorry, said David Graham in TheAtlantic.com, but some of Brazile’s allegations just “don’t add up.” The fundraising agreement between Clinton and the DNC was known to Sanders and wellpublicized last year. It mostly applied to the general election, not the primaries. Besides, it’s hardly unusual for the party’s national committee to have a preference for an established, loyal Democrat of Clinton’s stature over an outsider like Sanders, who was a registered independent for decades. States, not the DNC, determine the timing of primaries and run them, and voters ultimately chose the nominee, giving Clinton 3.7 million more votes than Sanders. Brazile’s motives here are “patently obvious,” said Becket Adams in WashingtonExaminer.com. She “bet on the wrong horse in 2016,” even feeding primary debate questions to Clinton when she worked for CNN; now, with far-left heroes like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in ascendance, “she’s trying to rewrite history to ensure she survives the coming housecleaning.”
Refighting the 2016 election may feel like an “exercise in after-the-fact finger-pointing,” said Susan Glasser in NewYorker.com, but “the party remains in serious danger of another electoral catastrophe” unless it resolves why it lost. Democrats need to figure out “how to talk to the Trump base in the formerly Democratic states of Middle America.” Can white, workingclass voters be wooed back if the party moves left, and promises free health care and education and higher taxes on the rich? Or should the party hold the center and bet on Trump so badly damaging the Republican brand that there’s a major backlash? Democrats need to choose a path now, said Joy-Ann Reid in TheDailyBeast.com. Otherwise, they’ll enter next year’s midterms with “no discernible message, no recognizable plan, and no real response to Trump’s serial rending of basic decency and honor.”
Democrats have already decided on moving left, said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com, and Brazile knows it. The Clintonistas are done; all the passion in the party is for Sanders’ warmed-over hippie socialism and the “angry, sanctimony-besotted identity politics popular on college campuses.” Neither approach has much appeal to working-class voters in Middle America, so the Democrats’ best argument is, “We’re not Republicans.” Under Trump, Republicans are even more dysfunctional; neither party has a coherent message or inspiring leadership. In this era of crumbling institutions, it’s possible “both parties are doomed,” and “no one can say they didn’t have it coming.”