It was inexcusable for a major political party to give the nomination to someone as unfit for high office as Hillary Clinton. There were times in which news reports indicated that party leaders had reservations about her being the candidate, but they came down to only concern for whether she could win, not her suitability for the position. The second major revelation from Donna Brazile’s upcoming book is that she had actually contemplated removing Clinton from the ticket, although not for the right reason. From The Washington Post:
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 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 process of removing Clinton and running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) from the ticket after Clinton’s Sept. 11, 2016, collapse in New York City.
Brazile writes that she considered a dozen combinations to replace the nominees and settled on Biden and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), the duo she felt most certain would win over enough working-class voters to defeat Republican Donald Trump. But then, she writes, “I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her. I could not do this to them.”
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.”
There were many reasons to consider taking Clinton off the ticket, but her isolated fainting spell was among the more trivial. On the other hand, Brazile’s assessment of her campaign as being badly mismanaged is consistent with other reports.
Brazile’s intended replacement ticket of Biden and Booker would have been a much stronger ticket than Clinton/Kaine and probably could have beaten Donald Trump if they had won the nomination through the primary system. It is hard to say what would have happened if the replacement was made at the last minute. Sanders supporters would have questioned why the runner up in the nomination battle was not made the replacement, especially in light of how the party rigged the nomination for Clinton. They would probably have had even more difficulty keeping the votes of Clinton voters considering how twenty-five percent of Clinton supporters voted for McCain/Palin after Clinton lost the 2008 nomination to Barack Obama.
While there was plenty of previous evidence of the party violating its bylaws and rigging the nomination for Clinton, Donna Brazile’s confession of this in another excerpt from her book has again raised the issue. As expected, Clinton supporters have been trying to twist the facts again. They ignore the fact that there was already significant evidence that the party was violating its rules for remaining neutral. They claim that the agreement only affected the general election despite it beginning in 2015 and going through the primary season including multiple matters affecting the primary battle. They claim that Bernie Sanders had a similar agreement when the fund raising agreement offered Sanders was substantially different. They ignore how Clinton used this to starve down ticket candidates of money in a scheme which appears like money laundering and evasion of campaign finance laws.
The bottom line in 2016 was that Clinton was a terrible candidate who could not win a national election fairly. Hillary Clinton could not beat an unknown like Barack Obama in 2008. She could not beat someone as atrocious as Donald Trump in 2016. She could not beat an unlikely challenger like Bernie Sanders in 2016 without massive intervention by the party to rig the nomination for her. The consequence of the DNC rigging the nomination for a candidate who could not win the nomination on her own was having a weak candidate who could not even beat Donald Trump.
Update: Glenn Greenwald has subsequently posted, also debunking some of the false claims from Clinton supporters I mentioned above, along with some bogus attacks being made regarding Donna Brazile and the DNC email.
