Hacks

by Donna Brazile

  I learned two things from the students. One was that they disliked identity politics. They thought that Hillary spent too much time trying to appeal to people based on their race, or their gender, or their sexual orientation, and not enough time appealing to people based on what really worried them—issues like income inequality and climate change. The other takeaway was the misogyny of the media, something we had talked about every week in class. And we talked about the Electoral College. And then I finally said to the students, 2016 will be remembered for how the playbook changed on how to run for President.

  My class ran from 3:30 to 6:00 p.m., but at 5:15 I dismissed class early. This was the only time in my life that I thought I would fall asleep at the wheel driving home. I went to get Chip at Betsy and Mia’s, and to say hello to Kai. When Chip and I got home, the feel of the house was eerie. There were no more hang-up phone calls on my landline, and no death threats or racial or sexist insults shouted into my voice mail. Just a message from Martin O’Malley and one from David Simas, Obama’s political director, checking in. Chip knows my routine is to sit in front of the television and watch Rachel Maddow, and he has his place on the sofa where he watches, too, but I didn’t have any more tolerance for politics that night. Bernie called to see how I was doing, and to ask me if I intended to stay on as chair. I certainly did not.

  I had a speech to give in Florida that week. I’d agreed to speak, thinking I’d be in a good mood to address a crowd about how Hillary won, but I had to change to looking toward 2018 and 2020. My heart wasn’t in it at all. When I arrived in Florida I got a call from Suze Orman inviting me to come join her and her wife, Kathy Travis, for dinner at their home and not talk about the election. My CNN buddy Ana Navarro was right when she told me after a defeat like this you find out who your friends are. Suze and KT invited me to stay the weekend, but I really wanted to be home.

  In the months after the election, closing things out at the DNC was a full-time job that demanded all my energy. Besides my work to arrange the Future Forums, I wanted to make sure steps were made to build the DNC infrastructure back up. To do that I had to have some tough negotiations with Brooklyn about the ownership and use of the DNC voter data. I hired my best friend, Betsy Marvin, to represent me personally in my capacity as the interim chair because I had become uncomfortable with some of the agreements that were consummated before I took on that role. Namely, the agreement that gave the Clinton campaign control over the party’s finances before Clinton was the party’s nominee. To me this seemed shady enough that it might produce a lawsuit and I wanted to be fully protected. Ultimately, the negotiations were amicable, albeit time consuming, but the end result gave me peace of mind that the DNC was well positioned to grow into the organization it once was.

  I finally was able to address my problems with Brandon, but it was a soft kind of firing. Like other staffers, he was laid off as it was the end of the campaign. I did not want his family to have a rough landing, and I also wanted to make sure they had health insurance, so I kept him on staff for one more month.

  The world I had around me had something of a surreal quality to it. Many of the things that I had learned in the FBI briefing in August about the Russian interference in the election were now becoming headlines. On December 16, at his last press conference, President Obama said about the Russian hacking of the election that he had told Putin to stop it, and that Putin had stopped. I knew Putin and the Russian intelligence services had not stopped until Hacker House gave us a way to fight back.

  On January 6 President Obama ordered the director of national intelligence to declassify a report about Russian interference with the election. The report said our intelligence agencies were certain that Putin had mounted a campaign to influence the election and had chosen as his clear favorite Donald Trump. The report detailed the hacking of the DNC, the trolls, and the well-timed and carefully chosen leaking of the DNC emails, which were intended to disrupt Hillary’s progress. It even talked about hacking the voting machines in several states, but would not say that this affected the outcome of the election.

  I didn’t have that feeling of relief that overtook me in October when the Department of Homeland Security said essentially the same thing. I knew saying this would have no impact, as it hadn’t then. Sure enough, Donald Trump and his crowd did not take this as a warning that something should be done to secure our electoral system. He railed against the report’s conclusions, saying it was just a partisan attempt on the part of the outgoing administration to delegitimize his victory. He even accused Obama of tapping his phone to distract from the content of the report. When he did things like that to me it was a sign that he knew, better than the intelligence agencies were willing to admit, how much the Russians had helped open the door for him to enter the Oval Office.

  Later in November Seth Rich’s parents, Mary and Joel, came to town so that we could fulfill a promise we made to each other when I visited them in Nebraska in October. We had pledged then that we would not allow Seth’s death to become another DC police cold case.

  We met with Mayor Muriel Bowser and that weekend we put up flyers on light poles all around Bloomingdale/LeDroit Park offering a $20,000 reward to anyone who came forward with information. The day was cold and blustery, but we were determined to remind people of the beautiful soul Seth had been. Some Trump supporters were promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Seth had been murdered by the DNC because he was the one who had leaked our emails to WikiLeaks.

  One of Trump’s supporters hired a private detective who was describing this theory on Fox News, and it was getting some airplay. Each time it died down they found some reason to pump it up again, despite the fact that there was no evidence to support it. At first I couldn’t believe that these people were so cruel that they would not leave these grieving parents to heal. Then I did believe it, because of what I knew of the character of my former opponents. The thing I could not believe was that we were going to have to endure four years of this.

  As the Rich family and I made our way around the neighborhood, my heart filled up with some hope that our country would survive this. Despite the cold weather, people on the street who saw what we were doing wanted to help. When the tape we were using proved to be too weak to get the flyers to stick to the light poles in the wind, people went home and brought us duct tape. They took handfuls of flyers to put up in their grocery stores and cafés. When we finished our work that day I was reminded of the fundamental decency of most Americans, how they want the best for each other and that most of us are more human than we are Republican or Democrat. That was the country I wanted back.

  A month after I stepped down as chair of the Democratic Party, I went to Nebraska to attend a fund-raiser for a summer camp Seth had attended when he was a young boy and where his parents were setting up a memorial fund. At home I sat Chip down, and we had a talk about the newly quiet life we were going to lead. I told him Momma was putting away her two-day suitcase and her one-week suitcase. She wasn’t traveling anymore. She was going to set things right here at home.

  I was not reading about politics in the two newspapers I got every morning. I was looking in the style section and on the sports pages for the first time since I was a child. February had been unusually mild, giving me hope that soon I’d be able to work in my garden again, but March turned up chilly and snowy, creating a yearning in me to get my hands back in the earth. I knew that once I had my garden going again, I would have a sense of rebirth.

  There was one matter I had to settle that month to clear the way for a peaceful and productive spring. I had to make my amends for the scandal that erupted over the leaked email showing I gave the death penalty question to Hillary before her March 2016 town hall with Bernie.

  I wrote an op-ed for Time magazine that reviewed the many bad actions the Russians had taken to skew the election in Trump’s direction. I also wrote about how the leaks had thrown our campaign strategy off course and explained how we never got it back. I de
scribed the way WikiLeaks chose the emails to do the maximum damage at precise moments in the campaign and how the trouble those caused sidelined key actors like John Podesta and me. My intent was to write a call to action that we never let this happen again, but also I wanted to take responsibility for the damage that leaked email with the question had caused the Hillary campaign. Even if I couldn’t remember sending it—and couldn’t find it in my online files—there was no proof that I had not sent it. The best course was for me to apologize, and I did:

  Sending those emails was a mistake I will forever regret. By stealing all the DNC’s emails and then selectively releasing those few, the Russians made it look like I was in the tank for Secretary Clinton. Despite the strong public support I received from top Sanders campaign aides in the wake of those leaks, the media narrative played out just as the Russians had hoped, leaving Sanders supporters understandably angry and sowing division in our ranks. In reality, not only was I not playing favorites, the more competitive and heated the primary got, the harder DNC staff worked to be scrupulously fair and beyond reproach. In all the months the Russians monitored the DNC’s email, they found just a handful of inappropriate emails, with no sign of anyone taking action to disadvantage the Sanders campaign.

  The press reported the apology as an admission of guilt, and I knew that was what they would do. I just wanted this episode to be over. After a few moments in the news cycle it was. I took another whipping, with the hope that this would be sufficient, but the issue follows me still and seems to be one that will forever.

  You know, fuck ’em. I have a playful side, but I also have Delores, the part of me that is spitting mad and not afraid to fight. If people look at all I have done in my life and define me by that one questionable incident, they are no friends of mine. At this point in my journey on this earth I no longer care what they think of me.

  I had to take time to heal from the PTSD of that crazy campaign. Kai was still crawling, but he was trying to get up on his feet to walk. I told Betsy and Mia that they could count on me for babysitting any time. I bought a crib for Kai and put it in the room next to my bedroom. I even had Chip on alert. Kai was a bit too rough with the dog, so Chip knew when it was his cue to find a place to take a nap. When I looked out at my garden, I started planning what I would plant with Kai and Chip in mind.

  In April, when it was only a few days before I could start to dig in the dirt of the garden, I took Chip for his annual wellness exam. They wanted to give him his rabies and distemper shot. I resisted because the dog was thirteen years old, and I thought he didn’t need that kind of thing again. They insisted, but Chip balked. He’s not a whiner, but he did whimper when the needle went in.

  That afternoon when I came home from the grocery, Chip met me at the back door and led me over to his bed where there was blood on his mattress. I asked Libby, Betsy and Mia’s dog who often stayed at my house, if she had bitten Chip, but she just looked confused. She’s not a biter. Chip gave me a look of sadness. I called the vet and told her Chip was bleeding and she said to bring him right in.

  After taking a look at him she asked, “Did he eat poison?”

  I said, “No. Chip wouldn’t even eat steak unless I put it on a plate.”

  She drew his blood but then she noticed that the problem was that it was not clotting.

  “Why?” I wanted to know.

  “I don’t know, but he might have had poison,” she said.

  “No, Libby’s the one who goes hunting, but Chip never goes hunting. Chip eats off his plate. And the plate has to be above the floor.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to draw more blood from the jugular vein,” she said.

  He didn’t cry. He was always stoic. As I was bringing him home, he threw up blood and then he excreted blood. I called Betsy.

  “He was fine this morning when I got Libby,” I said. “He wanted to play ball.”

  She rushed home from work and when she saw him she said, “I think Chip is dying.”

  We took him over to Friendship Animal Hospital, where they gave him a blood transfusion and drugs to get his blood to clot. His blood platelet count went from 47 when he arrived to 22. I feared he would have a stroke. We decided about six in the morning that we did not want Chip to suffer. His last act was to kiss Betsy on the nose, where he would always kiss her, as if to wipe away her tears. We took turns holding him until he passed, and it was the lowest moment that I’d felt in a long, long time.

  That April I did plant my garden, and it is beautiful now as I write this in the summer of 2017, but the house is not the same and neither am I. I said to myself that I would never let politics break my heart again, and there it went ahead and did, and worse this time than any of the others. Donnie Fowler Jr. has been counseling me that I need to get back out in the mix. “You have to bring us to that mountaintop like you always do, Donna,” he said to me last time we spoke. He wanted me to speak of the goodness I see in people’s striving to make their lives better and the hope that grows inside them and me and the communities all around this land.

  For now, though, I have to consider what politics can be for me and for us as a country going toward 2018. My heart was not the only one that was broken by the election of 2016, and if we are going to heal this partisan divide we need to find a way different from any we have devised before.

  EPILOGUE

  Choose Hope, Choose Action

  April was my month to break down because I didn’t know how to get up, and I had no urgency to do so. I lost my dog, I lost my voice, and then it felt as if I had lost everything. After fourteen consecutive years of teaching, I took a leave from Georgetown in the spring semester. I gave up my consulting clients when I took on the job as interim chair, so I had no work to go back to, but it wasn’t like I was sleeping in. I had lost my place in the world, my sense of my country, and it seemed as though the things I valued were not what my fellow citizens valued anymore.

  Before I took the job at the DNC, I was giving speeches and making appearances at forums and events several times a week. I had a checklist for every day of my life. I had a weekly column to write, or a television appearance, or a class to teach, or I was helping candidates raise money. After Election Day my phone didn’t ring much at all. In the silence, I started to doubt myself. Had I been too cocky taking on the job of running the DNC? I thought that, with my instincts to guide me, this job was not going to be hard, but it was harder than anything I’d ever faced. Maybe those boys in Brooklyn had been right about me. I did not want to show anyone how frightened I had become and how weary I felt from the constant bombardment of people wishing me nothing but bad luck. And I was disheartened worrying that this was a feeling that would never go away.

  As April turned into May, I came to appreciate how I was not alone in feeling like this. In a way I want to thank Donald Trump for bringing me so low, because in that state of mind I was connected to my fellow Americans. Before the 2016 campaign, I had been doing well for a good long while, and then—poof!—it was over, and there was reason to think that it might not start up again. I know many of Trump’s supporters felt the same about their lives.

  This election burned it all down—broke all the rules and destroyed the traditions of civility—but after a firestorm passes what comes up first is hearty and strong. As a country we are back down to the fundamental questions: Who are we? What do we value? Can we find a way to trust again and not just see each other as partisan enemies? Can we remember that we have more in common as Americans than the issues that divide us?

  Most Americans work hard every day to try to make a life out of the things that matter. They get up, get their kids off to school, get to work, come home, and try to live within their means. Everyone dreams of a better life for themselves and for their children, while at the same time so many of us feel as forgotten, as my sister and her neighbors did begging for some Hillary yard signs. We have been trained not to ask anybody for anything and to be a little ashamed when we have a need
that we cannot meet on our own. We have pride and we cherish our independence.

  Donald Trump is an extraordinary salesman. He knew how to exploit those grievances by deepening them instead of finding a way to address them. He put his supporters in this huge box, cut them off from the rest of the country, and said, “We are going to make America great again because everyone else but you has abandoned those American values. They have put other people’s interests before your interest, and I’m going to take care of you. I alone can fix it.”

  As I write this, we’re well into President Trump’s first year in office, and he has not been able to fix anything. He and his supporters are getting a lesson in real time about how in this country no person alone has the power to “fix it.” In America we don’t let others fix things for us. The best solutions, the best connections to each other, come from working together. It’s never been clearer that all voices need to be heard as we look toward the future.

  After I was taken down by the election, I knew I had to go back to the basic values that drew me into politics. From the very beginning I have been interested in protecting and expanding the right to vote. In this election our democracy was weakened by multiple forces. Republicans, Democrats, and independents became convinced that the election was rigged. Elections have been rigged right from the beginning against people who did not own property, slaves, women, minorities of all kinds, and sometimes against a party by gerrymandering. Never had I seen a candidate who promoted this in his stump speech, but then again no one had ever seen anyone like Donald Trump.