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 Joe 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 removal of Clinton and running mate Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia from the ticket after Clinton’s Sept. 11, 2016, collapse in New York City.
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’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. Rarely 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.
A veteran operative and television pundit who had long served as DNC’s vice chair, Brazile 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 primaries.
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 Rice and former Attorney General Eric Holder separately pulled her aside quietly to urge her to take the Russian hacking seriously, which she did, she writes.
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.
At the Oct. 19 debate in Las Vegas, with the email scandal simmering, the Clinton campaign sat Brazile out of view of cameras.
Brazile writes that she inherited a national party in disarray, in part because Obama, Clinton and Wasserman Schultz were “titanic egos” who had “stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes.”
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