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Tuesday, September 10, 2019

A historic cause to dislike the possibility of Joe Biden being the 2020 Democratic Party nominee. [UPDATED]

[error - see UPDATE] Keep it simple, by links, with readers who are interested trusted to follow them and read. Here and then here. The Debbie Wasserman Schultz dimension of the Biden persona. (Presuming the second link is the "scathing critique" mentioned without linking in the first). What Schultz did to Bernie in 2016 is unforgivable, both because Bernie would have won, and because Schultz was negligent or worse in doing her DNC job. History has its role in educating us in the present. Biden was okay with the DWS handling of the DNC, and more. Bernie got knifed in the back, and Biden did tub-thumping for the wielder of that knife.

__________UPDATE___________
The Biden campaigning linked to above was in 2014, as the Florida press item is dated, not after the 2016 Democratic Party Convention during which DWS stepped down was fired as DNC head.

The Politico linked item dated 2017 clearly is after that surrender of DNC leadership.

This report by TheHill, from Aug. 2016, is after DWS was discredited and forced out of DNC leadership during the Party nominating convention. But before the 2017 Politico report.

After what DWS did to Bernie she should have been cast adrift in a lifeboat with three days rations. Instead Biden overlooked her botched handling of the DNC job duty of fairness, showing bias instead, and yet Biden did his love-in bit for her against a progressive alternate Democratic candidate for the district DWS held and still holds.

The initial posting clearly got timeline things bolexed up grandly, but after getting the time frame straight the compelling fact remains that Biden in 2016 after the DWS firing did the same as he'd done in 2014 - drum beating for a DWS reelection.

There is party leadership and there is being a willing party hack in support of a party hack, and those are not the same thing. Biden, in effect, showed disdain for Bernie and every person in the nation during the 2016 primaries who'd supported Bernie as one who could have won 2016.


Call the DWS alliance at best a Biden failure of judgment. One with that kind of judgment should not become President.

Bernie would have won.

__________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Readers are strongly urged to read and think over the Donna Brazile book excerpt published by Politico. It is one person's story of events, but give Brazile credit for having the public courage to tell it. Is this the manner of political party operations you want a part of? Or is it less than reason would have things?

Go figure. From today's forward looking perspective. There are reform candidates besides the guy stuck in a rut of beating the Wasserman Schultz drum, no matter what. Who is your choice?

__________FURTHER UPDATE___________
An earlier Politico item linked to from the Politico presentation of the Brazile book excerpt. Was there a need to mop up major-scale corruption? Read, then decide.

__________FURTHER UPDATE___________
In closing the post, a quote from the Brazile book excerpt published by Politco, late in the excerpt:

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

It would have been great if Brazile had given us the date that determinative document was signed. At a guess, it was signed and agreed to sometime before Sunday, July 10, 2016.

Fleshing out but one brief part of the above quote, "with a copy to Marc Elias;" that's the lawyer. This lawyer.

Elizabeth Warren appears to many as close to the verge of becoming the nation's first female President; and it would be great for the nation if its first female President is one such as Warren, i.e., wholly free of any hint of corruption, of doing things the old way, depending on the old people with old habits, used to the old way.