I believe
The City Edition is the best e-zine for feminist on the web - the political analysis is insightful, intelligent and in most instances, although not all, steps outside of both the patriarchal and leftist filters which is unusual.
This excerpt is here to convince you to read this article in The City Edition.com ,The Donna Brazile - Karl Rove Connection BY ROSEMARY REGELLO. The article starts with detailing the business connections between Donna Brazile and Carl Rove. Then goes on as follows
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Hard as it must have been to top that inspirational title, Brazile easily managed with her
piece “Tapping the Obama Factor”. The Chicago politician had just been elevated to the U.S. Senate, but instead of offering an introduction to him, she mostly dwelled on her own life story - rising up from poverty in Louisiana, listening to her grandmother recite scripture, etc. etc. Eventually, the essay worked its way back to the stated topic.
"This is a new moment to identify and recruit better messengers," she wrote. "Perhaps it's time to tap into the ‘Obama’ factor: Scour statehouses for young,
energetic, inspiring, and emerging leaders with the ability to connect the head and heart. Too many of the old Democratic guard have stayed in Washington, D.C., too long to fully recognize how most Americans live their lives."
It was a novel way to spin the Illinois election. Obama did score a landslide victory that year, but it had little to do with his age, energy level or the obsolete nature of the Democratic Party establishment. His campaign manager David Axelrod ran the classic Rovian smear campaign, first accusing Obama’s top primary contender, Blair Hull, of sexual impropriety. After disgracing that fellow out of contention, Axelrod used the same device against the G.O.P. primary winner, Jack Ryan.
Of course, this is where things get interesting. House Speaker Dennis Hastert decided he must stick his oar into the battle, calling on Ryan to end his senate bid. The candidate dutifully bowed out, and in his stead, the Illinois Republican Party fielded an unknown, African American bible-thumper from Maryland, Alan Keyes. Clearly, the G.O.P. wanted Obama to win that election. No other explanation can account for the party punting away a senate seat to a (supposedly) liberal Democrat who'd (supposedly) spoken out vehemently against the Iraq War in 2002.
A Hollywood script writer couldn't have come up with this storyline. Within a year of arriving in Washington, Brazile’s rising star – the product of a globe-trotting Kansas woman and a philandering tribal leader in Kenya - had launched his presidential exploratory committee. The Internet fundraising team of Howard Dean signed on for the ride. So, too, did some of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, corporate law firms, and energy giants. (And we all know what a great record on affirmative action these outfits have.)
By the end of 2007, Obama would post a record-breaking haul of $100 million in campaign contributions. And all while he was still "introducing himself", as Brazile and other analysts put it, to the American public.
Who exactly brought the banks and oil companies to the table still remains to be ferreted out, but it wasn't Dean or Brazile, or even the man who placed Obama on the speaker's list at the 2004 Democratic Convention, John Kerry. It's more likely that Karl Rove huddled with top Bush fundraisers to set that gravy train in motion. Among the candidate's
money bundlers were George Kaiser and Robert Cavnar, both oil industry executives. Other Bush campaign pioneers joined the bandwagon soon afterward.
Now Brazile was impressed. Judging from another one of her My Day installments, this one
penned in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, she a woman who had been born again:
“While my family was hurting, when they were on the edge feeling left to fend for themselves, the last thing I wanted to do was whine. I got into the groove quickly and contacted Ken Melhman, Chairman of the Republican National Committee and an old friend, Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff for the White House.”
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One can only speculate on Brazile’s motives in streaming out that hallucination. As she would mention in the Washington Times article two years later, her “old friend” of four years had hit the ground running with the start of the 2008 election cycle, appearing on talk shows to bash frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Behind the scenes, G.O.P. rank and file activists were organizing crossover voting drives to knock Clinton out of the race before November. In the red states, they could easily outnumber Democrats at the caucuses, enriching Obama’s delegate count and allowing him to boast later “I’ve won more states.”
To recruit additional foot troops for this effort, New Hampshire G.O.P. leader Stephen DaMaura started the Facebook website “Stop Hillary Clinton (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary).”
On the Democratic side, it became Brazile's job to smooth over Obama’s path to the nomination. That required manipulating the primary calendar. Picking up on the diversity argument of Eleanor Holmes and the D.C. coalition, she pressed for an earlybird South Carolina primary and a Nevada caucus to augment the Iowa and New Hampshire dates.
While the advantages of South Carolina were obvious, by necessity the second contest required a less obvious, more covert action plan to avoid any accusations of stacking the deck. Although the Clinton camp didn’t realize it at the time, a caucus in Nevada (like a caucus anywhere) would naturally benefit Obama, since her base of blue-collar, older and non-English-speaking supporters would not be driving across town to attend some meeting run by disorganized volunteers.
On the other hand, motivated Republicans could be counted on to show up, especially if the G.O.P. candidates could be persuaded not to campaign in the state. (They didn’t.)
Nevertheless, the reason for adding more earlybird contests in the first place centered on ethic diversity, so selling the DNC (and the public) on Nevada required some tweaking of those caucus parameters. That's why arrangements were made to allow the state’s casino workforce of some 60,000 predominantly Latino workers to attend caucus sites set up just for them.
But wouldn’t this huge Hispanic voting block put Clinton over the top in Nevada? Not necessarily. It turns out that the union representing casino employees, S.E.I.U., would be backing Obama, just as they supported Dean in his presidential bid. So those voters could now be added to the Obama column.
Thus, with caucuses scheduled in Iowa and Nevada, a primary in South Carolina with its near majority African American demographic, and the New Hampshire Republican brass on the job in that state, the chance of Clinton heading into Super Tuesday at cruising altitude had spectacularly diminished.
``Including two more states will not only be good for our country, it will be good for our party and good for our nominee," Brazile
told the Los Angeles Times in August 2006.
Sounding an early portent of doom, the South Carolina delegate on the DNC rules and bylaws committee said in the same article, ``If you campaign in a state that is outside the rules, then you're not entitled to delegates from that state."
A year later, that scenario unfolded like a bad dream for the DNC. Over the objections of Florida’s state Democratic Party, a Republican-controlled legislature moved its primary to January 29, 2008, one week before the official February 5th cusp adopted by both the Republican National Committee and the DNC.
On August 25, 2007. the DNC rules committee met to adjudicate this unspeakable crime. State party chair Karen Thurman testified at the meeting, walking the committee through the chronology of her long and fruitless battle to overturn the date switch. The Republicans had attached it as a rider to another bill, one authorizing the replacement of electronic paperless voting equipment with more traditional optical scanners. Unable to defeat the rider on a partyline vote, the Democrats begrudgingly approved the larger measure.
Anyone who has watched the re-broadcast of those DNC proceedings on CSPAN can’t help but be dumbfounded by the discussion that followed Thurman's presentation. A slam-dunk case for a rule waiver turned into a shameless bout of piling on, as committee member Brazile and several others accused the state party of not trying hard enough to change the date. (One also noticed from the broadcast the unusually high number of African Americans on the 30-member committee, as opposed to near invisible representation for other minorities.)
When asked by Brazile why she hadn't made any plans to hold a caucus in place of the primary, Thurman balked. The logistics and $8 million price tag, she said, were beyond comprehension, given that Florida boasts 4 million Democratic voters.
"I understand how states crave to be first,” Brazile blustered in a Washington Post
interview the next day, ignoring the entirety of Thurman's testimony. “I understand that they're envious of the role that Iowa and New Hampshire have traditionally played, The truth is, we had a process . . . We're going to back these rules."
Later, the head of the DNC Voting Rights Institute ...."
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"Seeds of Doubt"
With the votes of the country's fourth and eighth largest states thus consigned to the junk heap, Brazile turned to other pursuits as the primary season commenced. Hired as a paid election analyst for CNN, she carried on a double life - one as an official DNC spokesperson, the other as an unofficial campaigner for Barack Obama. In February, when best-guess estimates gave Clinton the support of two-thirds of the superdelegates, she declared, "If 795 of my colleagues decide this election, I will quit the Democratic Party."
If party leaders were as worried about negative fallout and damage control then as they claimed to be a month later, they might have reeled in their contract employee at this point for a heart-to-heart chat. That didn't happen. Brazile just reloaded her pistol and repeated her empty threat to all who would listen. On another occasion, she accused former President Bill Clinton of being a racist. It was inexcusable, she said, that during a speech Clinton referred to Obama as a "kid" and suggested his presidential bid amounted to little more than a "fairy tale".
"And I will tell you," Brazile bristled with emotion, "as an African American I find his words and his tone to be very depressing."
To be sure, Clinton said Obama's evolving position on the Iraq War was a fairy tale, not his candidacy. As for alluding to his youth, Brazile and other cheerleaders for the Illinois senator had been doing it themselves for the past four years. It was a classic example of the Mark Twain quip that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has put its shoes on. Only CNN's presence in the equation gave the adage literal meaning. Surely, the DNC would intervene now that Brazile had insulted a former Democratic president on national television. But nothing.
Notwithstanding the 24/7 character assassination, Clinton persevered, scoring big wins in the Texas, Rhode Island and Ohio on March 4th. On March 5th, Brazile accused her of engaging in a “negative” campaign designed to "destroy" her adversary.
“Despite Obama's impressive victories in February, Clinton's comeback is based on sowing political seeds of doubt,” the uncommitted superdelegate informed the Associated Press that day, “If these attacks are contrasts based on policy differences, there is no need to stop the race or halt the debate. But, if this is more division, more diversion from the issues and more of the same politics of personal destruction, chairman Dean and other should be on standby."
In response to the call to arms, Dean petitioned Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to intervene in the protracted race, while Senators Dodd, Richardson and Leahy made the rounds of the news shows, demanding that Clinton end her candidacy for the good of the party.
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There is much more. Read it and weep.
