Hacks

by Donna Brazile

  For me it was hard to get a perspective on how much these three short weeks had affected me, but Elaine saw it right away. I got off the ferry in Hyannis, and the look on Elaine’s face was as if I had aged ten years. We’ve known each other since the Carter-Mondale campaign, and we don’t hide anything from each other. She took me home, poured me a glass of wine, and we sat out on her deck looking out at the sea until I felt settled enough to speak freely.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t feel free with Elaine; it was that I didn’t know how to tell the story of what was happening. What could I say? What was I not supposed to say? The fear created by the hacking had thrust me into a world that I’d never had contact with before, and I struggled to describe what that experience felt like. Around a good friend like Elaine I could express what I was feeling, but it was hard to know what I was feeling.

  She didn’t press me too much as we sat on the deck. I think she wanted to leave the space open for me to start when and where my thoughts led me. I started with Seth.

  Only to Elaine could I say that I felt some responsibility for Seth Rich’s death. I didn’t bring him into the DNC, but I helped keep him there working on voting rights. With all I knew now about the Russians’ hacking, I could not help but wonder if they had played some part in his unsolved murder. Besides that, racial tensions were high that summer and I worried that he was murdered for being white on the wrong side of town. Elaine expressed her doubts about that, and I heard her. The FBI said that they did not see any Russian fingerprints there, but they promised to look into the case. I didn’t feel comfortable enough to ask more than that first question, but his death continued to tear me up inside.

  After that came the fear for the staff. This hacking had released demons in the world. I had been harassed online by people who disagreed with something I wrote in one of my columns. Attacks on me had escalated dramatically now that I was working for a female candidate. In this campaign it was as if whatever constraints that had kept people from expressing the worst aspects of their characters had been lifted, and now they were free to take to social media to humiliate, degrade, and harass with no shame, no feeling that this is not what one does in a polite society. Were we no longer civil? Had this campaign unleashed something dire and dark within us? I feared for the country, and I feared that this was no longer a fair fight.

  Elaine allowed me to pour out all these emotions, and then she flipped the script. Normally when I stay with her she has big parties, but this time she did not schedule any. Elaine said she had sensed from my voice on the phone that what I needed was to decompress. She made us a New England lobster dinner, served with more delicious wine. We put on I Am Cait, Caitlyn Jenner’s reality television show, and laughed until our sides hurt. We had to put it on pause to recover when Jenner got all these other trans people together and decided that the best thing that they could do after they all got their nails done was go out and ride dirt bikes. What woman wants to ride dirt bikes after she gets her nails done?

  I know this was silly, but it was just what I needed: to be away from it all. In the mornings Elaine would go to the barn where she had her office, and I would sit on the deck with my coffee. Cocktails were at four.

  One afternoon we went to Provincetown, where I was to do the meet and greet for a Hillary fund-raiser that featured Cher, whom I’ve known for twenty years, and comedian Kate Clinton. I contemplated whether I should take Hillary aside and share with her my concerns about how the campaign was running and what she might improve, but I remembered that when I managed Gore’s campaign, I always protected the candidate.

  You do not give the candidate bad news, particularly in a public place like a fund-raiser. You want them to project confidence, to feel like a winner. Hillary and I greeted each other and talked about her grandchildren, and then I steered Elaine her way. A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Elaine is a policy wonk just like Hillary. Elaine even worked for a few years in the White House when Bill Clinton was president. It was only a few seconds before her and Hillary’s heads were inclined close together, deep in a discussion about some aspect of governmental regulation. This was my gift to both of them, in a way. Hillary escaped for a moment the crushing responsibility to always be trying to get more money to do something she enjoyed.

  My next stop was New York. Before I left, Elaine said she had someone she wanted me to speak with. This man, she said, was very plugged into the national security community. He had worked there for many years, and he was still connected to the deepest part of that darkness. He was a good man, she said, and he was likely to be able to make sense of some of what I had been told. Intrigued, I gave Elaine the go-ahead to call him. He agreed to speak with me.

  The morning before I left after four days with Elaine, I got on the phone with the man who I referred to from then on as my Spook, but he was not as reassuring as I had hoped he would be. If anything, he was the opposite. He was less interested in the hacking and the Russians, which he seemed already to know something about, than he was concerned about my personal safety.

  Where did I live? Did I live alone? What kind of security system did I have at home?

  I didn’t have any security system, I said. Just good locks on the doors and sturdy windows.

  He said I needed to have more systems to protect myself. I needed motion-sensitive lights and a power backup system in case there was an outage so that I could be protected even if someone cut the power. He wanted me to prepare for the worst. There was a tone in this conversation that put me right back into the fearful world I had been trying to avoid with this escape to Cape Cod. He was not telling me everything he knew, but he was implying that whatever I was experiencing now was sure to get worse. He didn’t want to be too explicit over the phone, he said. We agreed to meet when I got back to Washington, DC.

  Knowing that I needed all of these things made me feel that I needed to also do things like this to protect the DNC. I was not just worried about myself but about the kids. Seth Rich was never very far from my mind.

  Home was still a ways away, though. I’d be in Brooklyn, home for a minute, and then on my way to campaign in the battleground states of Florida and Colorado.

  NINE

  The Smell of a Loss

  While I was in Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, Wiki-Leaks, and its distribution partners Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, had kept busy. I don’t know if Guccifer is a man or a woman or a robot, but it was releasing these private items from the Democrats in a manner that seemed very attuned to the rhythm of the United States election. Before I left for Martha’s Vineyard, Guccifer released cell phone numbers and passwords from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee so that those candidates would not begin their campaign season undistracted. Less than a week later, documents describing voting turnout models for Florida and Pennsylvania and a few other battleground states appeared online, along with some private emails from Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s staff.

  After I left Elaine’s on August 23, my destination was Brooklyn. I would finally see HQ, the high-rise epicenter of campaign power. I was eager to see it, not just because I wanted to be face-to-face with the people who had been blocking my efforts. I love the atmosphere of a campaign around Labor Day, when everyone is ramping up for Election Day. I’ve worked on many presidential campaigns, and one of my fondest feelings is walking into the bustle of the campaign office and hearing the phones ringing and seeing the staffers and the volunteers rushing around, people in intense conversations in the hallways, making decisions on the fly. My taxi pulled up in front of the towering brick office building at One Pierrepont Plaza and I hopped out.

  Security was tight. I had to be escorted up from the lobby to the offices on the tenth floor, where I felt some of that campaign energy I craved. By contrast, on the executive floor, where Hillary’s top staff worked, it was calm and antiseptic, like a hospital. It had that techno-hush, as if someone had died. I felt like I should whisper. Everybody�
��s fingers were on their keyboards, and no one was looking at anyone else. You half-expected to see someone in a lab coat walk by.

  In campaigns, it’s not just about electing a candidate. It’s about getting citizens more engaged in their democracy and giving them a voice. The campaign succeeds when it makes supporters feel that they hold in their own hands the power to change the country. When you have that feeling, you usually aren’t too quiet about it.

  When I was tiptoeing around the muffled Clinton headquarters I thought of what my friend Tony Coelho used to ask me about my campaigns. He’d always ask, “Are the kids fucking? Are they having sex? Are they having fun? If not, let’s create something to get that going, or otherwise we’re not going to win.”

  I didn’t sense much fun or fucking in Brooklyn.

  Look, I really respected a lot of people in that building. They were my old friends. But I could see in that visit that it was run only by analytics and data, which is only part of what you need to win an election. Robby Mook believed he understood the country by the clusters of information about voters he had gathered.

  I remember saying to him, after he described this very smart way he had determined which candidate people in a particular neighborhood were likely to vote for, that he was neglecting the whole story.

  “If we’re not talking to new people, how are we going to register new voters?”

  We were talking in his corner office with a view of Brooklyn and Manhattan, a private space that I do not think he used much. I saw him as most comfortable out at a table with the others who understood his love of data. He has a cool gaze of someone who has a determined sense of values and judges everyone by those principles. That inner cool makes someone like me who runs hot feel as though I’m bouncing off the walls when I talk. Perhaps that was something he’d agree with me on, because he was not agreeing with me about the need to spend more money to encourage the Obama coalition to vote.

  Even when Clinton squeaked by in the Iowa caucuses and when she took a drubbing in New Hampshire, Robby was unwavering. He had a plan and he was sticking to it. That plan was the perfect opposition to Clinton’s campaign in 2008, when she lost to Obama. She nearly ran out of money in February, but this time she was cash rich and laser-focused on gathering and controlling that money. Her campaign had been riven with divisions, public arguments, and policy disputes. Robby had a campaign tightly controlled from the top, and even when things contradicted his assumptions, he always stuck to his plan. That plan did not include giving more money to me.

  For Robby, everything had a sense of a scale. I had seen a little bit of this in the Obama campaign, but he was a different kind of candidate. His candidacy lent itself to microanalysis-based targeting because the support for him, and for his message of hope, was organic. The data helped bring Obama’s message to an audience of people who might be receptive to his message but did not know about him.

  By contrast, Hillary was a well-known candidate, on the political scene for decades. People still had doubts about her and Trump was very effective at validating and inflaming them, which discouraged enthusiasm for this familiar face. The attitude in Brooklyn was that Hillary was such a superior candidate that she had already locked up the race. Clinton’s campaign needed people to call and remind them: Hillary needs you today to go out and talk about her plan to create jobs. Or, Hillary needs you today to go out and talk about how she is going to protect children and child health. I did not see that. I heard them saying that they only needed to register five new Hillary voters in this neighborhood, and seven over here.

  Why five? Why not ten? Or why not fifty?

  Well, that was the precise number of people we needed in order to win a precinct.

  “Well, good, but you better get five more so you can go to bed thinking that you really have a margin that will win,” I told Robby and his team.

  They were so precise, they made me feel as though this style of politics I had learned in my forty years was about to be put out to pasture. My world was the lost art of touching people, reaching people where they live, where they eat, where they played and where they prayed.

  They did understand that I had some skills to lend to the campaign effort at headquarters, and that was to bring emotion into the room. Robby asked me to address the staff and volunteers, and I gave a speech off the cuff that was designed to remind them of the reasons we do this. How we see a better future for ourselves and for our families and we want to do everything we can, sacrifice our evenings, weekends, and holidays to bring this message to the world. Campaigns offer us a rare opportunity to live our values in our daily lives, to be patriotic and honorable in a way that few things we do allow. I could feel that I had the crowd with me as I spoke, and I hoped that I left them feeling better, more enthusiastic, and able to push harder to get Hillary into the Oval Office.

  I did not leave Brooklyn feeling enthusiastic, though. They saw me only as someone who could rouse up the emotions, but they were not interested in my practical advice. My feeling was that data was a tool for engagement, but there was no substitute for that human touch. This was a message that sunk to the carpet in the antiseptic rooms in Brooklyn.

  And into this hushed atmosphere, week after week, WikiLeaks dropped stolen emails, thousands at a time, with the clear purpose of distraction. Every time emails were released, the press stopped dead in its tracks to paw through them and see what they could find that would embarrass the candidate or the campaign. With the damaging information contained in the leaked emails, and the antics of the GOP nominee covered hour after hour by the cable stations, it was as if Hillary was not even campaigning. She was always reacting, rarely advancing.

  I had planned my trip to Florida so that I could gather evidence about how Hillary was capturing the voters there. I have an intimate knowledge of every part of Florida, which I earned in 2000, when we spent thirty-seven days scrutinizing ballots in every county of that state trying to get a win for Al Gore. I’m fortunate that I have black skin, or the scars from those thirty-seven days would be visible at just a glance. I know the politics of Florida from the swanky streets of Miami Beach to the bodegas and barrios of Little Haiti in the western part of Orlando. That was where I was headed on this trip. We had a Senate seat up for grabs as well as several Congressional seats. There would be a lot there for me to take in so that I might understand the way things were going in the campaign. Were they active and energized by the campaign? Or had the steady stream of distractions sapped the energy there, too?

  The first appointment was a telephone town hall with millennials. Many of their questions were about how to find a way to sell Hillary to their peers. They were having a hard time converting Bernie supporters to Hillary supporters. They liked Hillary in a lukewarm way, but many were still yearning for Bernie. I took as many questions about him as I did about Hillary. Then one young man asked me how he was going to talk to his family. All of his relatives were voting for Trump.

  I had heard this question before. Hearing it in Florida made me realize for this election I was fast becoming a family therapist. “First, don’t start an argument with them, because that will only harden them,” I advised. “Here’s what you have to tell them. Take a look at Donald Trump’s life. I know people are enamored of him that he’s a businessman and people think that he’s successful, but there is nothing in his history that indicates he will help people like your family. Remind them that he has stiffed so many workers, the people who have helped him build his huge hotels and casinos. Rather than pay them, he has stiffed them. Why do they think that he would not treat the country the same way?”

  I felt good after that answer. I hoped the young man on the phone felt that it was a good answer, too. I was making an attempt at talking about Trump in a way that did not entangle me or them in his crazy statements and outrageous tweets. If people would pay attention to Trump’s record and his behavior instead of Hillary’s, this might be a fair fight.

  I also visited black radio statio
ns, where the hosts would take calls from listeners. They were not encouraging. People on the ground in Orlando said no one was talking about Hillary on the radio, and those who wanted to support her didn’t have any literature to hand out or yard signs to display. Everywhere I went when I was canvassing with volunteers people were asking for the same things. They wanted a way to show their support for Hillary, and I did see a few Trump signs here and there. Nowhere did I see any visible support for Hillary.

  The only signs I saw were in the campaign headquarters. I walked down blocks and blocks of Little Haiti. I did not notice one campaign sign. Brooklyn told me that the battleground states had signs. Then they said, “Don’t worry about signs.” They believed signs were not as important as data. Signs are an indication that there’s activity. And where there’s activity, there’s passion. Where there’s passion, there’s purpose. Yet I saw none of that in these neighborhoods that should have been for Hillary.

  I had scheduled an appearance on a Haitian AM radio station program, Morning Glory with Bishop Victor T. Curry. These Haitian stations play gospel and speak in Creole, but they do a lot of talking and some of it is about politics. The listeners are not millions of people, but the thousands that do listen have the radio turned on for hours every day. The radio brings the community together, and it costs very little to advertise there. When the bishop asked me when the campaign was going to start a dialogue with his audience, I knew what he meant by that. When were they going to spend a few hundred dollars in advertising there, which would encourage him to urge his followers to get out and vote?

  I wasn’t trying to rewrite Brooklyn’s strategic plan and I really wasn’t interested in being the campaign manager, but it was hard to hear these complaints directly from people and not relay it back to someone. I texted Marlon Marshall, Robby’s lieutenant, and the director of state campaigns and political engagement, my impressions and suggestions to make sure to convey them while they were fresh in my mind. I thought this was valuable information. We were still eight weeks out from Election Day, so there was time to correct this situation. At least the campaign should be encouraged that so many people wanted to find a way to help. Marlon dismissed my report with a condescending tone in his responses. He and Robby didn’t appreciate challenges to their strategy.