The book by Donna Brazile, the DNC's former interim head, was supposed to cast light on what went wrong. And it's certainly doing that. But not least of the things that went wrong is Donna Brazile.
Brazile emerges as an angry Hillary critic who, we are supposed to believe, even wanted to remove her.
Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile writes in a new book that she seriously contemplated setting in motion a process to replace 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 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."
Nonsense.
Trying anything like that in an organization run by the Clinton campaign would have led to a vicious civil war. And I doubt very much that Booker, an ambitious careerist, would have wanted to take that risk.
And Biden wouldn't have done it without getting approval from Obama. And Obama continued to back Hillary. He's also curiously absent from many of these accounts.
But more than that, Brazile wants us to believe that Hillary's people were thoroughly running the DNC in every aspect, but her appointment. And she wants us to believe that she passed on debate questions to Hillary, yet wasn't part of the rigging.
Pull the other is the right response.
Brazile wants to shed the stench of Hillary. And she's picked a direct way to do it. But no one with any sense will believe a word of it. Donna Brazile was Hillary's woman. Until Hillary lost. But that doesn't mean she wasn't stewing with her own grievances. And most of those seemed to concern a perceived lack of respect and power.
As one of her party's most prominent black strategists, Brazile also recounts fiery disagreements with Clinton's staffers - including a conference call in which she told three senior campaign officials, Charlie Baker, Marlon Marshall and Dennis Cheng, that she was being treated like a slave.
"I'm not Patsey the slave," Brazile recalls telling them, a reference to the character played by Lupita Nyong'o in the film, "12 Years a Slave.""Y'all keep whipping me and whipping me and you never give me any money or any way to do my damn job. I am not going to be your whipping girl!"
Cheng, the campaign's national finance director, did not participate in this call, according to a senior Clinton campaign official
Brazile describes Mook, in his mid-30s, as overseeing a patriarchy. "They were all men in his inner circle," she writes, adding: "He had this habit of nodding when you are talking, leaving you with the impression that he has listened to you, but then never seeming to follow up on what you thought you had agreed on."
Many of Clinton's senior staff were women, including Mook's chief of staff, as well as campaign co-chair Huma Abedin.
Brazile's criticisms were not reserved for Mook. After Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri challenged Brazile's plan for Kaine to deliver a pep talk to DNC staff at the party convention in Philadelphia, Brazile writes, "I was thinking, If that b---- ever does anything like that to me again, I'm gonna walk."
Brazile writes with particular disdain about Brandon Davis, a Mook protege who worked as a liaison between the DNC and the Clinton campaign. She describes him as a spy, saying he treated her like "a crazy, senile old auntie and couldn't wait to tell all his friends the nutty things she said."
In staff meetings, Brazile recalls, "Brandon often rolled his eyes as if I was the stupidest woman he'd ever had to endure on his climb to the top. He openly scoffed at me, snorting sometimes when I made an observation."
All this makes Brazile seem erratic and unreliable. Which she probably is.
It doesn't mean she's wrong. It does mean that she is rewriting her own part of the history out of spite and ambition.
Brazile writes that she inherited a national party in disarray, in part because President Obama, Clinton and Wasserman Schultz were "three titanic egos" who had "stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes."
As she traveled the country, Brazile writes, she detected an alarming lack of enthusiasm for Clinton. On black radio stations, few people defended the nominee. In Hispanic neighborhoods, the only Clinton signs she saw were at the campaign field offices.
But at headquarters in New York, the mood was one of "self-satisfaction and inevitability," and Brazile's early reports of trouble were dismissed with "a condescending tone."
True. But this is why defeat is an orphan. In retrospect everyone knew what was wrong, but no one would listen to them. It was everyone else's fault.
Hillary was of course a terrible candidate. And I predicted she would lose years before the election even happened.
Hillary lost in 2008 because she was too busy building an inevitable candidacy to give people a reason to vote for her. And now she's making the same mistake all over again.
There will come a time when the awards will stop, when the empty quotes about how she is running because she cares about girls will run out and when she will actually have to give real answers to difficult questions. And that isn't Hillary's strong suit.
As a debater, Hillary is rigidly unimaginative. As a politician, she's vacant. And her charisma doesn't exist. The only way that she can get through her own party's primaries and a national election is by scaring away every potential rival by being the inevitable candidate.
But she was the terrible candidate of a terrible establishment. And that's what Brazile's book reminds us. What Brazile forgets to mention though is that she was just as terrible as the rest of that establishment. The establishment spent all its time scaring away alternative candidates. Now it wants to rewrite history, not because it was wrong, but because it lost.