Photo by Tim Pierce | CC BY 2.0
You can’t tell a book by its advance press. Take Donna Brazile’s new 2016 campaign memoir Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House (released three weeks ago).
To say that Brazile brings an insiders’ view to the 2016 election is an understatement. She was named interim Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair to replace the noxious Clintonite hack Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as the Democratic Party held its national convention two summers ago. Brazile stayed in that position through the Electoral College triumph of Boss Tweet, which left her “depressed” but determined to” heal [the nation’s] partisan divide” and “fight for my country.”
Reading the pre-release coverage of Hacks, one might think the book was a great vindication of Bernie Sanders’ progressive-liberal challenge to the corporate Democrat Hillary Clinton. Press reports oohed and aahed at Brazile’s “revelation” – in a chapter bearing the evocative title “Bernie, I Found the Cancer” – that the DNC was under the explicit financial and programmatic control of the Clinton campaign well prior to Hillary’s securing of the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. The August 2015 “Joint Fundraising Agreement” (JFA) that Brazile unearthed weeks after becoming DNC chair specified that, in her words, “Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised.”…