The Chris Moeller Archives

Another break-in at the DNC

Sometime during the last year and a half, or maybe during the 12 years before that, you might have read me referring to the Democratic National Committee as bought and paid for by the Clintons. But good lord amighty, I didn't think it was literally true.

I'll be damned. Donna Brazile has jumped from the boat and in order to sell some books to the growing horde of reformed progressive voters, she's disclosing a memo that has evidently weighed heavily upon her conscience. It seems that in August 2015 the DNC was on the verge of bankruptcy and blowing through money at a clip of about three to four million dollars a month. President Obama didn't care a lick about it. He had taken his 2008 army of small donors and basically told the troops to stand down during each one of the two-year election cycles that followed. A program of attacking conservative Democrats in primary races threatened to alienate conservative Democrats and discourage them from funding the winning campaigns that were not being won. Obama, the de facto head of his party by virtue of being the United States President, put Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-Clinton, a woman he didn't particularly care for, in charge of the DNC and he left her there for six years. Obama was re-elected in 2012, but the party lost 1,000 state and federal seats nationwide between his first and his last day in office.

You almost have to wonder-- at least I do-- if he did it on purpose. Did he want the Democrats to be lost without him in the same way Michael Jordan wanted the Chicago Bulls to implode after the sixth title in 1998 in order to further prove how great he was? Barack turned "Obama for America" into "Organizing for America," then starved it. He abandoned Howard Dean's 50-state strategy for the party. He sucked up to corporate Democrats while alienating progressives. The only action he took in relationship to the DNC after putting DWSC in charge of it in 2010 was to wait until after last year's presidential race was lost, and then put his labor secretary Tom Perez in charge when it looked like Bernie backer Keith Ellison from Minnesota was going to get the post.

Anyway, back to Brazile and the summer of 2015. So the DNC is worse than dead broke one year before their nominating convention. They're in the red and there's a Hillary election party to pay for. By Brazile's account, the hole was 24 million dollars deep. They secretly put themselves up for sale, and there was only one bidder-- the well-heeled Hillary Clinton for President campaign. That bunch swoops in, keeps the juice running to the light switches, and then-- get this reveal from Brazile-- their staffers take over all of the positions in the party's national committee. They handle all of the day-to-day operations. So when we say that Hillary was "coronated," or-- with less adornment-- that the DNC showed partiality towards her in her primary race against Sanders, we're not even really referring to what is traditionally known as the DNC. The DNC now is the Clinton campaign. I'm being totally serious. Can anybody confirm if this is mentioned in Hillary's book? I haven't read it.

It's traditional for the party's nominee to take over responsibility for the debt of the national committee. Candidates, because they are personalities, do a much better job of raising money than does the committee, which is a rather vague-seeming yet vitally-important mechanism. The thing is though that none of this is supposed to happen until the nominee actually becomes the nominee. In this case, it happened 15 months prior to. See what we've been saying? Coronation.

Brazile already admitted months ago that she had handed over debate questions to Clinton during the primary race when the Clinton/Sanders drama was at its thickest and the politico was moonlighting at CNN between DNC assignments. And now this thought just entered into my mind for the first time-- presidential candidate Martin O'Malley really didn't have a chance.

So now I see what Hillary's supporters meant when they said Bernie wasn't a real Democrat. His opponent was the party apparatus. That's tough to compete with. You can't be more Dickensian than Dickens. All along, Bernie's raising money and his campaign contributions go to the DNC, where much it is spent on Hillary's campaign. Sanders voters have been trying to tell us this but they've gotta shout real loud to be heard. Remember when we heard about the alleged violence caused by Bernie supporters at the Nevada state convention? Remember the lobbyists serving as superdelegates? Remember the lawsuits filed by Sanders supporters citing collusion and the RICO statutes? Remember the suppression of Ellison and other Bernie supporters when they attempted to secure post-election positions with the committee? Remember the DNC emails that were not hacked by the Russians, but rather leaked by one or more disgruntled Bernie supporters? Oh, did I just take it one step too far?

None of it was illegal. Within a wide range of reason, political parties can do what they want with their money. It's only yours up until the point you give it to them (and so good luck to you if you're drawing up that blueprint for your personal budget). They can make strategic financial and political decisions as they see fit. And this is the contagion you wind up contracting when you swim in the foul cesspool that is the Democratic Party. It's what you get when you try to reform an institution that is far past the capacity for reform. And they still don't get it. Go online tonight and read the defense of the misdeeds by the apologists-- Bernie wasn't a real Democrat so he shouldn't have expected a fair fight. Ok, were O'Malley, Lincoln Chafee, and Jim Webb real Democrats? Is the next move to purge the party of all independent voters as well? More Democrats still voted for Hillary in the state-by-state primaries. True, and I weigh 220 pounds with your foot added to the scale. As I suggested before, the most recent purge of progressives with the committee took place after election day. The superdelegate system, complete with voting lobbyists, has been affirmed for 2020. Among elected officials, all but four of them in the Senate voted for the National Defense Authorization Act on September 18th, the military appropriations bills whose financial commitment to the war machine exceeded even that laid out by President Trump (and one of the dissenting votes was not cast by liberal hero Elizabeth Warren). They ain't learned nothing. In fact, the power brokers now have greater cause to tighten their grip on the handle.

Fear not, though, oh lovers of peace and equal opportunity. This is what it looks like when it's all collapsing. Keep your eye out for more books to be published.

posted by CM @ 8:01 PM