A shot of Brazile (center) and the DNC rules and bylaws committee above Florida election returns on CNN.
A shot of Brazile (center) and the DNC rules and bylaws committee above Florida election returns on CNN.
In order to "save" the Democratic Party, Brazile resolved back in 2003 that she might have to destroy it first. And who better to help her in this lofty pursuit than her new best friend, the man neoconservatives call "The Architect".
July 24, 2008 (revised)
Note: Print out in PDF format is recommended.
BY ROSEMARY REGELLO
It's not every activist politico who gets to write a post in the Washington Times that begins like this: "As I sat by my window and staring out at the wonderful Washington, D.C., landscape, my office announced a phone call from Air Force One."
Evidently, Donna Brazile was reminding all the little people on Capitol Hill that she had friends in high places. In the summer of 2007, Karl Rove wasn't answering any subpoenas from Congress, but he didn't mind talking to her. From his perch at 20,000 feet, seated beside the President, Rove informed Brazile that it was time for him to get out of Dodge.
“Mr. Rove's resignation is not a retirement,” the Democratic strategist reassured readers of the right-of-center newspaper. “It's just another opportunity for him to create that lasting Republican majority he envisioned years ago and to spend his waking days doing what he so enjoys — beating Democrats in the alleys and gutters. Just ask Sen. Hillary Clinton, Mr. Rove's target when he called in to speak to Rush Limbaugh. He couldn't help it. Mr. Rove just had to take one last shot before riding out of town. More to come, Team Clinton.”
Brazile's breezy account confirms what many have long since suspected - that Rove’s claim to be sitting out the 2008 race is hogwash. The mastermind of today's unraveling U.S. Constitution is in no position to kick back, down gin fizzes and watch the country collapse under a regime he put into office twice. The list of crimes that Bush's top henchman could potentially be charged with - ranging from obstruction to war crimes - should be enough to keep him and his fellow Sopranos in hair-trigger mode until the next president gets sworn in. And the notion that he'd leave the choice of commander-in-chief in less capable dirty hands than his own requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief. It requires medication.
That's why the Rove-Brazile tryst merits further exploration. They first hooked up some time in 2002, according to the New York Times. The connection might have been a means for Brazile to expand her clientele, but she dismissed that angle in an interview, implying she had bigger fish to fry. It was the Democrats' lackluster relations with African Americans and poor track record in elections, she said, that led her to start trailblazing new frontiers. In her view, the Republicans had a better machine.
''The idea is to re-energize the African-American electorate and revive the Democratic Party at the same time,'' she told Times reporter Katharine Seelye, ''I want to revitalize the party from the grass roots up. We're losing voters.''
With that noble cause in mind, she and Rove began to "chirpily exchange e-mail, chat on the phone and write letters, indulging in their shared zeal for the inner workings of politics," Seelye wrote.
Rove said he’d sometimes call Brazile before a press appearance to get feedback on various Bush policy angles he planned to discuss. In exchange, he furnished Brazile’s clients with access to White House social events.
"People think I'm crazy talking to Karl Rove," the strategist confessed to the Washington Post a month after the Times story appeared, "but there's something about this guy."
Yes, there certainly is something about Karl Rove. In cooperation with members of our fourth branch of government (a.k.a.Vice-President Cheney's office), he is widely believed to have personally outed Valerie Plame's C.I.A. identity over a flap about uranium in Niger. Three years later, those subpoenas were overflowing his in-box because he'd told Alberto Gonzalez to fire nine U.S. Attorneys for political reasons. More recently, this Jack the Ripper of American politics was outed himself for an entrapment scheme that put Alabama Democratic Governor Don Siegelman in prison doing hard labor.
Those Republicans sure do know how to close the deal. Basking in the Architect's dapper charm and irresistible company, Brazile also opened diplomatic ties across town with another above-average swindler, Grover Norquist. Norquist heads one of Jack Abramoff's favorite charities, Americans for Tax Reform, and is famous for his remark that he’d like to see federal government crippled to the point where he can take it home and drown it in his bathtub. For a brief window of opportunity the archconservative set aside that morbid fantasy to help one of Brazile's closest friends, Eleanor Holmes. The D.C. Congresswoman welcomed some new legislation that would increase revenues in her district.
According to the same Times article, “Mr. Norquist said he and Ms. Brazile, both Washington residents, were devising a plan to urge Congress to allow the city to raise the height limit on buildings as a way to broaden the tax base and improve schools.”
Undoubtedly, 2003 was an action-packed year for the District of Columbia. Holmes also teamed up with local officials there to schedule an unauthorized, nonbinding earlybird presidential primary for 2004. While Brazile didn't object, DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe did, ordering the candidates to boycott it. One of them, Howard Dean, refused to comply, sweeping like gangbusters into D.C. to gobble up almost as many endorsements as another candidate, Rev. Al Sharpton. Who needed those arcane DNC rules, anyway?
The Brazile Factor
At the time of these contentious political developments, Brazile chaired the DNC's Voting Rights Institute, a program set up after the Florida recount debacle in 2000. During that episode, she'd experienced firsthand Karl Rove's unscrupulous knack for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Now she was tasked with brainstorming new strategies to prevent any future gaming of the electoral system.
In the meantime, Dean scrapped his presidential bid after the Wisconsin primary and Kerry lost the general election. (This time, Rove generated his extra thousands of Bush votes in Ohio precincts where only a few hundred Republicans lived.) Naturally, Brazile remained unimpressed with her party, and submitted an essay to that effect to the left-leaning website Slate.com. Slate was sponsoring a thought-provoking series its savvy and sophisticated editors called “Why Americans Hate Democrats – A Dialog”.
Hard as it must have been to top that inspirational title, Brazile managed with her piece “Tapping the Obama Factor”. The Chicago politician had just been elevated to the U.S. Senate, but instead of offering an introduction to him, she mostly dwelled on her own life story - rising up from poverty in Louisiana, listening to her grandmother recite scripture, etc. etc. Eventually, the essay worked its way back to the stated topic.
"This is a new moment to identify and recruit better messengers," she wrote. "Perhaps it's time to tap into the ‘Obama’ factor: Scour statehouses for young, energetic, inspiring, and emerging leaders with the ability to connect the head and heart. Too many of the old Democratic guard have stayed in Washington, D.C., too long to fully recognize how most Americans live their lives."
It was a novel way to spin the Illinois election. Obama did score a landslide victory that year, but it had little to do with his age, energy level or the obsolete nature of the Democratic Party establishment. His campaign manager David Axelrod ran the classic Rovian smear campaign, first accusing Obama’s main primary contender, Blair Hull, of sexual impropriety. After disgracing that fellow out of contention, Axelrod used the same device against the G.O.P. primary winner, Jack Ryan.
Of course, this is where things get interesting. House Speaker Dennis Hastert decided he must stick his oar into the matter, calling on Ryan to end his senate bid. The candidate dutifully bowed out, and in his stead, the Illinois Republican Party fielded an unknown, African American bible-thumper from Maryland named Alan Keyes. Clearly, the G.O.P. wanted Obama to win that election. No other explanation can account for the party punting away a senate seat to a (supposedly) liberal Democrat who'd (supposedly) spoken out vehemently against the Iraq War in 2002.
A Hollywood script writer couldn't have come up with this storyline. Within a year of arriving in Washington, Brazile’s rising star – the product of a globe-trotting Kansas woman and a philandering tribal leader in Kenya - had launched his presidential exploratory committee. The Internet fundraising team of Howard Dean signed on for the ride. So, too, did some of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, corporate law firms, and energy giants. (And we all know what a great record on affirmative action these outfits have.) By the end of 2007, Obama would post a record-breaking haul of $100 million in campaign contributions. And all while he was still "introducing himself", as Brazile and other analysts put it, to the American public.
Who exactly brought the banks and oil companies to the table still remains to be ferreted out, but it wasn't Dean or Brazile, or even the man who placed Obama on the speaker's list at the 2004 Democratic Convention, John Kerry. It's more likely that Karl Rove huddled with top Bush fundraisers to set that gravy train in motion. Among the candidate's money bundlers were George Kaiser and Robert Cavnar, both oil industry executives. Other Bush campaign pioneers joined the bandwagon soon afterward.
Now Brazile was impressed. Judging from another one of her My Day installments, this one penned in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, she'd been born again:
“While my family was hurting, when they were on the edge feeling left to fend for themselves, the last thing I wanted to do was whine. I got into the groove quickly and contacted Ken Melhman, Chairman of the Republican National Committee and an old friend, Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff for the White House.”
Then she started tossing out the cupcakes: “President Bush, who promised to rebuild the Gulf coast in a speech at Jackson Square, invited some African American leaders over to the White House on December 7th to discuss a broad range of issues…To my great surprise, the meeting with President Bush was cordial and candid. The President listened intently and reassured us that his Administration would not drop the ball.”
Funny how such innocuous fluff takes on a new and sinister meaning when read in hindsight. Yet even from the perspective of a contemporary audience, those claims were a stretch. When the levees broke, Sec. of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was attending a conference on bird flu, the President relaxing on his Crawford ranch. Back in Brazile's home state, over a thousand people drowned during three days of waiting for rescuers to reach their homes. Several million other residents survived, homeless, only to face a second disaster known as FEMA. The Katrina ball had already been dropped.
But Brazile didn't let facts on the ground spoil her picnic. Continuing her upbeat dispatch, “Since then, I have met once more with President Bush and other leaders who are committed to working together to restore the lives and the communities devastated by these two hurricanes…I can tell from the meetings that the rebuilding of Louisiana remains high on his list of priorities.”
Preparing for Battle
One can only speculate on Brazile’s motives in streaming out that hallucination. As she would mention in the Washington Times article two years later, her “old friend” of four years had hit the ground running with the start of the 2008 election cycle, appearing on talk shows to bash frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Behind the scenes, G.O.P. rank and file activists were organizing crossover voting drives to knock Clinton out of the race before November. In the red states, they could easily outnumber Democrats at the caucuses, enriching Obama’s delegate count and allowing him to boast later “I’ve won more states.”
To recruit additional foot troops for this effort, New Hampshire G.O.P. leader Stephen DaMaura started the Facebook website “Stop Hillary Clinton (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary).”
On the Democratic side, it became Brazile's job to smooth over Obama’s path to the nomination. That required manipulating the primary calendar. Picking up on the diversity argument of Eleanor Holmes and the D.C. coalition, she pressed for an earlybird South Carolina primary and a Nevada caucus to augment the Iowa and New Hampshire dates.
While the advantages of South Carolina were obvious, by necessity the second contest required a less obvious, more covert action plan to avoid any accusations of stacking the deck. Although the Clinton camp didn’t realize it at the time, a caucus in Nevada (like a caucus anywhere) would naturally benefit Obama, since her base of blue-collar, older and non-English-speaking supporters would not be driving across town to attend some meeting run by disorganized volunteers. On the other hand, motivated Republicans could be counted on to show up, especially if the G.O.P. candidates could be persuaded not to campaign in the state. (They didn’t.)
Nevertheless, the reason for adding more earlybird contests in the first place centered on ethic diversity, so selling the DNC (and the public) on Nevada required some tweaking of those caucus parameters. That's why arrangements were made to allow the state’s casino workforce of some 60,000 predominantly Latino workers to attend caucus sites set up just for them.
But wouldn’t this huge Hispanic voting block put Clinton over the top in Nevada? Not necessarily. It turns out that the union representing casino employees, S.E.I.U., would be backing Obama, just as they supported Dean in his presidential bid. So those voters could now be added to the Obama column.
Thus, with caucuses scheduled in Iowa and Nevada, a primary in South Carolina with its near majority African American demographic, and the New Hampshire Republican brass on the job in that state, the chance of Clinton heading into Super Tuesday at cruising altitude had spectacularly diminished.
``Including two more states will not only be good for our country, it will be good for our party and good for our nominee," Brazile told the Los Angeles Times in August 2006.
Sounding an early portent of doom, the South Carolina delegate on the DNC rules and bylaws committee said in the same article, ``If you campaign in a state that is outside the rules, then you're not entitled to delegates from that state."
A year later, that scenario unfolded like a bad dream for the DNC. Over the objections of Florida’s state Democratic Party, a Republican-controlled legislature moved its primary to January 29, 2008, one week before the official February 5th cusp adopted by both the Republican National Committee and the DNC.
On August 25, 2007. the DNC rules committee met to adjudicate this unspeakable crime. State party chair Karen Thurman testified at the meeting, walking the committee through the chronology of her long and fruitless battle to overturn the date switch. The Republicans had attached it as a rider to another bill, one authorizing the replacement of electronic paperless voting equipment with more traditional optical scanners. Unable to defeat the rider on a partyline vote, the Democrats begrudgingly approved the larger measure.
Anyone who has watched the re-broadcast of those DNC proceedings on CSPAN can’t help but be dumbfounded by the discussion that followed Thurman's presentation. A slam-dunk case for a rule waiver turned into a shameless bout of piling on, as committee member Brazile and several others accused the state party of not trying hard enough to change the date. (One also noticed from the broadcast the unusually high number of African Americans on the 30-member committee, as opposed to near invisible representation for other minorities.)
When asked by Brazile why she hadn't made any plans to hold a caucus in place of the primary, Thurman balked. The logistics and $8 million price tag, she said, were beyond comprehension, given that Florida boasts 4 million Democratic voters.
Thurman might just as well have been talking in Greek. "I understand how states crave to be first,” Brazile blustered in a Washington Post interview the next day, ignoring the entirety of Thurman's testimony. “I understand that they're envious of the role that Iowa and New Hampshire have traditionally played, The truth is, we had a process . . . We're going to back these rules."
Later, the head of the DNC Voting Rights Institute published an op-ed in the same newspaper, “Why We Stood Up to Florida”. With the cockiness that was fast becoming her trademark, Brazile griped, “It was hardly an extraordinary act, although you wouldn't know it from the furious reaction that ensued in some quarters…Why the uproar? It's simple: state envy.”
She went on to list all the economic benefits coveted by states vying to hold early primaries, again diverting from the core issue of Republican meddling in Democratic affairs. The press coverage of the showdown also overlooked the G.O.P.'s role in moving up the primary date, suggesting a premeditated scheme of complicity in misleading the public.
The same week the rules committee stripped Florida of all its convention delegates, Michigan’s state legislature voted to move up its primary to January 15th. Both states could have easily been pegged as Clinton strongholds, making their exclusion from the election cycle suspect. Michigan is an industrial blue-collar enclave with few of the upper-middle-class voters and college students that represent Obama's base. Florida's Hispanic population is huge, and combined with an abundant supply of New York retirees, would likely also resist the tantalizing allure of Obama Girl.
Moreover, using Republican crossover voting to shave points off Clinton's victories posed problems in both states. In Michigan, native son Mitt Romney had a significant campaign apparatus in place, while Rudi Giuliani was expecting to draw his line in the sand in Florida. Where these battleground territories were in play, neither gentleman would appreciate Rove and DaMaura siphoning away their voters. Better just to invalidate the primaries on the Democratic side. That way, Clinton's delegate lead could be held in check on Super Tuesday.
"Seeds of Doubt"
With the votes of the country's fourth and eighth largest states thus consigned to the junk heap, Brazile turned to other pursuits as the primary season commenced. Hired as a paid election analyst for CNN, she carried on a double life - one as an official DNC spokesperson, the other as an unofficial campaigner for Barack Obama. In February, when best-guess estimates gave Clinton the support of two-thirds of the superdelegates, she declared, "If 795 of my colleagues decide this election, I will quit the Democratic Party."
If party leaders were as worried about negative fallout and damage control then as they claimed to be a month later, they might have reeled in their contract employee at this point for a heart-to-heart chat. That didn't happen. Brazile just reloaded her pistol and repeated her empty threat to all who would listen. On another occasion, she accused former President Bill Clinton of being a racist. It was inexcusable, she said, that during a speech he referred to Obama as a "kid" and suggested his presidential bid amounted to little more than a "fairy tale".
"And I will tell you," Brazile bristled with emotion, "as an African American I find his words and his tone to be very depressing."
To be sure, Clinton said Obama's evolving position on the Iraq War was a fairy tale, not his candidacy. As for alluding to his youth, Brazile and other cheerleaders for the Illinois senator had been doing it themselves for the past four years. It was a classic example of the Mark Twain quip that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has put its shoes on. Only CNN's presence in the equation gave the adage literal meaning. Surely, the DNC would intervene now that Brazile had insulted a former Democratic president on national television. But nothing.
Notwithstanding the 24/7 character assassination, Sen. Hillary Clinton persevered, scoring big wins in the Texas, Rhode Island and Ohio on March 4th. On March 5th, Brazile accused her of engaging in a “negative” campaign designed to "destroy" her adversary.
“Despite Obama's impressive victories in February, Clinton's comeback is based on sowing political seeds of doubt,” the uncommitted superdelegate informed the Associated Press that day, “If these attacks are contrasts based on policy differences, there is no need to stop the race or halt the debate. But, if this is more division, more diversion from the issues and more of the same politics of personal destruction, chairman Dean and other should be on standby."
In response to the call to arms, Dean petitioned Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to intervene in the protracted race, while Senators Dodd, Richardson and Leahy made the rounds of the news shows, demanding that Clinton end her candidacy for the good of the party.
Now this sounded familiar. Somewhere inside a bar along Skid Row, Jack Ryan must be chuckling to himself between shots of rot-gut whiskey. In Washington, Reid promised that “things will be done” to determine a nominee before the convention. Pelosi told George Stephanopoulus on his Sunday talk show that the superdelegates should not overturn “the will of the people”, but denied she was warning members of Congress that Clinton, if nominated, would be a "drag" on their own campaigns. As the Adams Family cabal was thus occupied in their hand-wringing and sharing of apocalyptic visions, Clinton pressed ahead, winning 9 out of the final 13 primaries. In three of these contests certified by the secretary of state, she eclipsed the already Chosen One by more than 30 points.
But no sooner was the sunlight shining down again upon Clinton's twinkling eyes and invigorated step than the other shoe dropped. Her massive gains in the popular vote were not being matched by her delegates earned, and it had something to do with Idaho, Nebraska, Kansas and other must-win, do-or-die territories that Democrats haven't won in the general election since 1964. One would not have expected Obama, the candidate who supports drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants and meetings with dictators, to clobber the darling of Reagan Democrats along the bible belt. Yet clobber her he did. Even more bizarre, Clinton's booty in the population-rich states, where millions of votes were being cast, paled by comparison. It made no sense.
In late May, disability activist Peniel Cronin appeared on scene to sort out the mystery of the delegate Bermuda Triangle. According to Cronin’s study of the voting results, nearly all of Obama’s 138-pledged delegate lead over Clinton could be traced to discrepancies arising out of the 12 mostly red-state caucuses he won. With the exception of Iowa and Nevada, Obama typically won these contests by vast margins, despite polling in each case showing a much tighter race. In Idaho, for instance, with its scant African American population, few colleges and handful of Starbucks outlets, he captured 15 of the state's 18 delegates. (The Rove/DaMaura crossover drive also apparently kicked in to help Obama. According to IowaPolitics.com, before that state's caucus, Clinton and Obama polled evenly among Democratic voters. It was non-Democrats who eventually tipped the balance, with G.O.P. winner Mike Huckabee receiving only half as many votes as Clinton, who finished third behind Obama and Edwards.)
The gap between caucus results and reality swelled to even greater dimensions in Washington state. On February 9th, Obama earned a whopping 52 of the available 78 delegates there after a 36-point victory in the caucus. Over 240,000 eligible voters were reported as casting ballots. Yet a week later, just ahead of a February 19th state-run primary, polling data showed that Clinton might actually win the election. Some 650,000 ballots were cast in the primary, with Obama eking out a 5-point victory, hardly the grand canyon recorded in his party-run caucus romp. Unfortunately, the primary was non-binding and didn't impact the delegate allocation.
If that lack of fair reflection wasn't exasperating enough for proponents of representative government, the votes of caucus-goers appear to have counted for 5-10 times more than any votes cast in certified primaries. In Texas, for example, Clinton won the primary by 4 points with a 100,000-vote margin, but gained only 4 delegates for her trouble. In Washington, Obama picked up his 26 extra delegates from an 89,000-vote margin.
Paltry as it was, Clinton would have to sacrifice even her Lone Star purse, since a caucus held the same evening netted Obama 9 more delegates than she received. You may recall the news video of this caucus, with voters languishing for hours at various locations, many lining the hallways outside overfilled rooms with their children in tow on a school night. (The state party brass cheerily refers to this back-door delegate snatch as the "Texas Two-Step".) The next day, a Clinton attorney reported on a litany of rules violations and fraudulent acts aimed at rigging the returns. At least 2,000 voters submitted individual complaints, and the campaign asked state party officials to delay assigning convention delegates until they fully investigated what happened. Yet despite his 4-point, 100,000-vote loss in the primary, Obama left Texas with 5 more delegates than Clinton.
The following table reveals the Orwellian math at work in the dispersal of pledged delegates. The last column shows the delegate gain for the winner.
2008 Democratic Presidential Preference Election © 2008 P. Cronin
----------------------------
Even in the Nevada caucus that Clinton won, she ultimately lost. There, the S.E.I.U. endorsement of Obama had dissolved into wishful thinking when the casino workers broke heavily for Clinton, giving her an overall 6-point victory. A few months later, at Harry Reid's state convention. Obama received more delegates. The New York senator couldn't seem to win for winning.
Photo by Craig Fritz/AlbuquerqueTribune
Hand-wringing in New Mexico. Poll workers Roy Steriet (center) and Janice Saxton tell the crowd of Democratic voters at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Bernalillo that there are too many to serve. "The good news is we ran out of ballots," Steriet said, adding, "The bad news is we ran out of ballots."
Cronin's analysis doesn't include the New Mexico caucus, which was run like a primary but under the auspices of the Democratic Party. With its large Catholic and Hispanic demographics, Clinton should have snared the lion's share of delegates in the state. However, "It was a mess: Overwhelmed polling places with long lines, some up to three hours. Too few ballots. Confusion over where to vote," USA Today reported. "In Rio Rancho, one of the state's largest cities, a single polling location where 1,900 people remain lined up at 7 p.m on election night". When the results were announced nine days later by the state party, Clinton had gained just two delegates over Obama.
In her capacity as chair of the Voting Rights Institute, Brazile should have called for an inquiry into the pattern of caucus vote suppression and fraud taken place. That didn't happen. One reason is that Howard Dean figures into the equation here, since a field campaign run by his brother in caucus states seemed to dovetail with Karl Rove's crossover drive to defeat Clinton. Like Brazille, Dean has been leading a double life over the past four years. In 2004, he and Jim Dean founded Democracy For America, a nonprofit group that trains field organizers and promotes progressive candidates. In May of that year, DFA named Obama one of "Dean's Dozen" and started working on his senate campaign. Three years later, the group endorsed him for president.
But the endorsement stirred controversy when the Dean brothers were accused of rigging a candidate preference poll of 154,000 activists last November. That's because Kucinich and Edwards were considered the progressive favorites, not Obama. Many of the rank and file were dubious about the freshman senator, since he voted for the 2005 Cheney energy bill and had already received over $100 million in corporate contributions. Nevertheless, both DFA and Netroots Nation - another Dean-inspired entity - put all their resources behind Obama. In Iowa alone, the DFA claimed it had 9,000 organizers on the ground.
According to a press release after that first victory, "The 675,000 members of DFA gathered tens of thousands signatures on a national call to action, wrote over 6,124 letters to Iowa DFA members, and plastered the Des Moines Register with an ad asking Iowa Democrats to not leave their caucus until a progressive wins their location." In an equally strident tone, the missive went on to take a swipe at Clinton. "'If you listened to people last year, it was as if there was no need to vote. There was all this talk about inevitability, but, tonight, Democracy for America’s members here in Iowa proved that primaries matter, progressive values are what make the Democratic Party strong,' said Jim Dean, Chair of DFA."
Throwing Mama Under the Bus
Speaking of primaries that matter, on May 31st, the DNC rules and bylaws committee reconvened to discuss a resolution for Florida and Michigan. It was the final act in Brazile's (or Rove's) Machiavellian drama, and in order to attach an air of legitimacy to the proceedings beforehand, the Democratic Party had its legal counsel weigh in on the dispute. Although by Brazile’s own account, the Supreme Court gives political parties wide latitude for determining how they pick their nominees, the lawyers claimed it would be unlawful to fully honor the certified votes of January 15th and 29th . The committee could do no more than restore half of the several hundred convention delegates up for grabs.
Always amenable to compromise, the Clinton campaign accepted that limitation but rejected a proposal for Obama to receive some of her Michigan delegates, plus those of all the other candidates in the Michigan primary. After all, the Illinois senator voluntarily withdrew his name from the ballot, then vetoed a re-do primary which Clinton donors raised $10 million to fund. In a sane world, one could argue that he forfeited the state and therefore deserved no delegates.
Former Governor of Michigan Jim Blanchard didn't present that line of attack. The Clinton spokesman stuck to the modest request that she receive delegates in proportion to the votes cast for her. When a few minutes later it was Brazile's turn to speak, the CNN analyst took the opportunity to congratulate herself for displaying restraint in the meeting up until that point. Then she repudiated Blanchard as if he were a child.
"My mama taught me to play by the rules and respect the rules...When you decide to change the rules, especially, in the middle of the game, it's called cheating."
Dispatching the governor to go stand and in a corner and contemplate the error of his ways, Brazile’s committee allocated the Michigan delegates according to a fruitcake-like recipe involving exit polls, ineligible write-in votes for Obama, the palm-reading of a psychic (just kidding) and the actual tally. In the end, Clinton gained a mere 4.5 delegates from the contest.
Any masochist following this charade of democracy knew by now Brazile had disregarded her own mother’s counsel. Both Michigan and Florida had regularly scheduled elections in August, when re-do primaries could be held, but the Democratic nomination was no longer about what voters wanted. Neither Brazile nor her co-horts lost any sleep over those thousands of caucus complaints. Voter intimidation, stacks of fabricated sign-in sheets slipped in with the legitimate records, bussed-in shock troops, phony declarations from Republicans about their intention to switch parties, votes delayed until deep into the night, inaccurate tallies called in by phone, and other alleged dirty tricks have yet to warrant an investigation by those who preach that playing by the rules represents a core value of the Democratic Party.
Even in the aftermath of her power grab, Brazile continues to denigrate those who challenge the rigged process. In a July 22nd post on Daryl Cagle's website, she groaned, "How many ways do these Hillary delegates, voters and supporters need to hear it before they get it? Sen. Barack Obama is the party's nominee. He won. He will get to choose his running mate. Obama sets the agenda for the convention, and, while I understand their passion in wanting Hillary to be on the ticket and to have a prominent role at the convention, it's not her decision... As much as we all would have loved to see a woman in the Oval Office, it wasn't Hillary's time. Period."
It’s ironic when you think about it. The DNC’s Voting Rights Institute was created to stop exclusionary practices and increase participation at the polling booth. Now its chairwoman is presiding over a campaign that's every bit as mean and underhanded as those newspaper trucks running over the boy scouts in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
"Mr. Rove proved you can win elections with rumors, fear, division and manipulation." Brazile wrote back in 2007, after that friendly exchange with Air Force One. "But you can't win hearts that way."
No, you can’t. But then, this influential political fixer no longer appears to have use for that particular organ. Which may be why she finds men like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist so appealing.
- Rosemary Regello editor@thecityedition.com
(For more on the G.O.P. manipulation of the Democratic Primaries, see our in-depth report Bamboozling the American Electorate Again). For more information on the 2008 Democratic Party caucuses, please see the website Caucus Fraud.
Copyright 2008 TheCityEdition.com
Other stories in our investigative series:
Still Under the Bus with Senator Clinton
Who is Nancy Pelosi? (PDF file)
Michael Moore Weighs In on the Primaries
Election 2008 Rogues Gallery of American Journalism
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