La Donna Brazile Sings, on and off Key

This Donna is no novice to local and national party politics in the U.S.  She has long been an insider in Democratic Party politics.  She has been a regular contributor to newspapers and a political commentator on TV networks including CNN, NPR, and ABC.  She was campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000, making her the first black American to direct a major campaign.

She was appointed interim chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in spring 2011 and again from July 2016 to February 2017 in the Clinton campaign.  Her sole aria derives from that experience.  With the publication on November 7, 2017 of her new book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House, and public utterances about it and her activities in the 2016 presidential campaign, she is experiencing her 15 minutes in the national spotlight.

The emergence of Brazile in the limelight and the story she has been telling about the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and her own reflections on it has been astonishing – partly because of its forthrightness and partly because of its variation in substance from time to time.  As a story, it is titillating because it has everything: race, gender, flaming ambitions, moral corruption, and what she calls the "titanic egos" of leading Democrats: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton , and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the ill fated chair of the DNC, who was obliged to resign as a result of leaked emails showing Democratic Party officials trying to sabotage the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders.

Brazile pulls back the curtain on the electoral campaign with revealing insights, but at the same time, the problem is that the curtain is strained and partly torn.  There are a number of controversial aspects of the story.  Perhaps the central one in the book is that she found an "unethical" agreement between the Clinton campaign and the DNC.  This was a joint fundraising agreement of August 26, 2015 among the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.  It specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, the Clinton campaign would control the party's finances, strategy, and money raised.  The campaign would be consulted on staff appointments, budgeting, and data.  Brazile considers this agreement unethical because it was signed in August 2015, almost a year before Hillary was the official nominee of the party.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/11/la_donna_brazile_sings_on_and_off_key.html#ixzz4yEJxpq00