Donna Brazile’s new book, Hacks, is doing boffo box office. So much so that the day after the book’s official release, Amazon was sold out of hardback copies.
By now you’ve no doubt heard some of the more scandalous details that have boosted sales. Such as: When Brazile took over as interim head of the Democratic National Committee during the summer of 2016, she discovered that the Democratic primary election had been rigged. A year before, the very broke DNC had made a desperate, corrupt deal with H. Rodham Moneybags. There was a contract, Brazile explains: In “exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised.”
Brazile learned all this after replacing Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced out of leading the DNC in no small part due to anger over the party’s unfair treatment of Bernie Sanders. And with the Clinton campaign pulling the DNC’s strings, there is good reason to believe that how Sanders was treated was no accident.
Much of the book is devoted to detailing how the Clinton campaign—like a baseball team convinced sabermetrics will win it the pennant—obsessed over data-driven vote-targeting. In a short but piquant detour, Brazile explains that she had an old-school campaign metric of her own—one that didn’t bode well for Team Hillary. She writes that Democratic congressman Tony Coelho used to say about campaigns: “Are the kids . . . having sex? Are they having fun? If not, let’s create something to get that going, or otherwise we’re not going to win.” Brazile laments that by that measure, Hillary’s New York-based campaign was doomed: “I didn’t sense much fun or f—ing in Brooklyn.”
The Scrapbook would wager this wasn’t a problem on any of Bill Clinton’s winning campaigns, where the candidate led by example.
