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Margaret Hoover: She’s a pioneer, a crusader, a fixer, and a role model. Democratic powerhouse Donna Brazile joins me this week, on Firing Line.
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Margaret Hoover: If 2018 was a groundbreaking year for African American women in politics, than Donna Brazile led the way. She is one of the most experienced political operators in America. She has worked on the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt and was the first African-American woman to run a major presidential campaign for Al Gore in 2000.
During 2016 she had a controversial tenure as the chair of the Democratic National Committee and has written about it in her latest book For Colored Girls Who Have Considered politics, She reflects on that incredible journey and the scars she’s picked up along the way.
Donna Brazile welcome to firing line.
Donna Brazile: Its a great honor, thank you so much.
Margaret Hoover: For the first time in American history after these past 2018 midterm elections 100 women have been elected to the House of Representatives. More than 20 African-American women, have been elected the House of Representatives and will be sworn into their seats in what is I think a bit of poetic justice. Exactly 50 years almost to the day after Shirley Chisholm the first African-American representative to the House of Representatives was sworn in. As you reflect on 2018 and the midterm elections is there a bit of sweet victory in it for you.
Donna Brazile: I think had Mrs. Chisholm lived to see this moment, she would have been pleasantly surprised that we would finally elect women of color from across the country. She would be proud of
Ayanaa Pressley, the first black woman elected from the state of Massachusetts. Joanna Hayes the first black woman elected from the state of Connecticut. Of course she would be proud of the terrific campaign that Stacey Abrams ran down in Georgia. But most importantly Mrs. Chisholm who understood the power of women and the power women voting in would have been pleased to see the first Native American women elected in Kansas and New Mexico the first openly gay women elected. And of course two Muslim women elected, she would be proud of the depth and the breadth and of course she was celebrate this moment by reminding women that service is the writ that we pay for living on this planet.
Margaret Hoover: Well those are words that you’ve certainly taken to heart and no breadth of successes happens in a vacuum. But these sort of successes are built on the shoulders of the women who have come before them and you have been one of those women for 40 years.
You have been in the trenches of Democratic Party politics and it seems to me a wonderful moment to reflect on your journey because your journey personally also reflects the progress that African-Americans especially within the context of Democratic Party politics have made over the course of the last 40 years. Your personal stories an allegory for the journey African-Americans have made into mainstream political successes. Your Book
Begins with a story when your grandmother informed you and your eight siblings that Dr. Martin Luther King had been shot and pulled you into her bedroom and asked you to get on your knees and pray for him.
Donna Brazile: That’s right.
Margaret Hoover: You tell a story about how your reaction wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t tears but it was that you were indignant.
Donna Brazile: I was angry. I was eight years old but I’ll never forget that day. It was a rainy day in Louisiana is always raining but it was a rainy day and was a kind of a drizzle
that you couldn’t go out and play you had to come inside. And yet my grandmother called us into her bed room and she wanted us to get on our knees. She had learned that Dr. King had been shot. We didn’t know if he survived the assassination attempt and so she wanted us to pray. We were Catholics and we started praying and when we finished praying my grandmother said wait. We’re like what. And she’s like we have to also pray for his family. We went back and prayed for his family. And this was, margaret, You would probably have felt the same way as an 8 year old child. She said we now have to pray for the murderer or the person who tried to kill Dr. King because she said that Dr. King was about love and we had to pray. And that’s when I said whoa wait a minute. Of course back then up everybody would say Donna shut up. And of course I didn’t. But I wanted to know why we had to pray for the person who attempted to kill or kill Dr. King. And she reminded us it was in the Bible because God was love and God said we had to love our enemies. And that was an instructive moment for an eight year old kid to try to believe this and I’ll never forget my grandmother when she say pray.
Margaret Hoover:Well what struck me is that that event was your first experience in terms of political mobilization because the first thing you did in politics was go lobby for Martin Luther King Day to become a national federal holiday.
Donna Brazile: I kept it in my heart that Dr. King called us to serve. Dr. King called us to build bridges to find a way to the Promised Land and politics and find a way to make sure that every child had the dream. And as a young girl growing up in the segregated South I too wanted to serve and I wanted to be involved in the movement my mother Jean would say you’re too young Donna but I didn’t feel young. I felt like I could do it. I didn’t feel like I was a little girl. I felt like I wanted to be that woman and I’ll never forget when I wrote my diary. But the time I turned 40 I wanted to be a campaign manager and I turned. I became a campaign manager at 39.
So I made it.
Margaret Hoover: Just beat it. Your first presidential campaign and presidential effort that you worked on was for the Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1984 and I think as we look back on it. I think it’s easy to miss that an entire generation of African-American political operatives
came into the fold and was mainstreamed in the Democratic Party because of that campaign. You worked on. What was the legacy of Rev Jackson?
Donna Brazile: Oh my God. He was. I’ll never forget and Reverend Jackson is an incredible force in American politics but back in 1984 he was going against the tide. Harold Washington had just been elected mayor of Chicago. He had broken a barrier and Reverend Jackson who for years followed in Dr. King’s footsteps. His campaign had multiple purposes one was to encourage more people to register and vote. The second was to encourage people to run for political office. And the third Reverend Jackson decided it was our time and he gave so many of us a seat at the table. Shirley Chisholm once said If you don’t find you see that the political table bring in folding chairs. Well Reverend Jackson actually gave us folding chairs comfortable chairs cushion chairs because he wanted us to have a seat as campaign managers
as political strategists as political advisers and I am so incredibly humbled that he gave me a young kid I was 23 years old an opportunity to serve, and I’ve worked on seven presidential campaigns 56 congressional campaign 19 state and local campaigns forty nine states one more state Margaret now become Miss USA without the bikini.
Margaret Hoover:I want to show you a Jesse Jackson said on this program to William F. Buckley Junior in 1982 when he was talking about the prospects for black politicians getting white voters and black voters to join behind them. I’d like to show you get your reaction .
Jesse Jackson WFB clip: It is clear that black Americans by and large are so American until they tend to imitate and follow the rhythm of white Americans. So by and large all we buy. And believe with white people you know we vote for white politicians by and large by and large white voters did not vote for black politicians. That has a kind of basic appreciation the fact that that’s it. That’s painful to me as a black person. That is the white people in many ways, believe white people are superior. That’s wrong. But what’s tragic is that many black people believe the same thing. And the hard part and part of our job is to convince. People black and white. That people are just people to be measured by. Their character by the energy and by their particular and peculiar gifts.
Donna Brazile: Amazed amazing. I mean Reverend Jackson believed that.
I still believe that I believe that we have to look at people based on their character and in their peculiar gifts. But think about what Reverend Jackson did not only in talking to Mr. Buckley but also what he did in American politics he transform American politics. He built the Rainbow Coalition. He encouraged millions of Americans to register and vote. And if you go from Jackson eighty four to Jackson 88 and then 2008 the election of our first African-American president actually Barack Obama is biracial. But Jesse Jackson opened so many doors because he gave people a seat at the table.
Margaret Hoover: And what was the phrase the phrase is you open the door and leave it open.
Donna Brazile: That’s right. You when you swing that door open you leave it open. And that is something that I believe we all now have the challenge of ensuring that that door never closes. We cannot close it to women to people of color to people who are openly gay. It doesn’t matter anymore.
We are America and America is an idea and that idea is about giving every citizen the right to control his or her own life.
Margaret Hoover: One of the other legacies of Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign and 1988 campaign. You mentioned changes on the Rules Committee that changes on the Rules Committee hadn’t happened in those campaigns. They wouldn’t have they would have gotten wouldn’t have gotten rid of winner take all. Which would not have led to Barack Obama’s nomination in 2008. So there is a direct line.
Donna Brazile: Barack Obama was an outsider.
He was not a Democratic Party insider. Hillary Clinton had the inside track to the nomination. But what he was able to do like Reverend Jackson was to expand the electorate to bring new energy into the party and to encourage young people to vote. He mobilized people that we had never witness in the American political process. But like Reverend Jackson he was a game changer. And the rules that we transform under Jesse Jackson’s leadership enable not just Barack Obama to succeed but also Hillary Clinton because we may proportional representation we have equal division between men and women. And we ensure that every state and every caucus every state that whole caucus is a primary that they’re open to new people and that people like Bernie Sanders can come in and find their seats at the table.
Margaret Hoover: moving forward.
I Think of things that are most instructive about your tenure in 2016.
In the Democratic National Committee’s leadership structure.
For that that brief tenure is is what we’ve learned about it and how the Democratic Party and frankly the country is gonna move forward into 2020 with the lessons from 2016. And for you what became very clear in reading your book Hacks and also reading colored girls who’ve considered politics is how severely shaken you were when you walked in the door and realized how compromised
the party’s systems were to foreign entities
and cyber security threats.
Donna Brazile: I was I was not familiar with the depth of the intrusion. I knew that we had been hacked and being hacked. I thought Well they they’ve compromised our server, our email server. I had no idea that when they first went in it was to create false impressions to steal our research data and they stole all the material
on Trump. As you recall there were several Republican candidates the only candidate they were interested in was Donald Trump. We felt this though that they were looking into our voter data.
Our you know profiles of voters also believe that they were looking into our state systems and so we were very concerned but I had no idea the depth of the intrusion until I was briefed by
including the FBI who was investigating this.
Margaret Hoover: Is everything you know now now public information. Or do you still have classified.
Donna Brazile: There’s still stuff that I believe will come out eventually when Special Counsel Mueller has completed has completed his investigation. I’m pleased that
the American people are learning that this was a serious attack on our country. Um this impacted us. This impacted not just the Democratic Party, it impacted Hillary Clinton, of course, but it impacted the country. We should have an election that is free of foreign interference and foreign meddling And yes to weaponize emails and to corrupt our data system, to try to hijack our election machinery in various states, this should be a crime and we should not allow it.
Margaret Hoover: Well and the Democratic party functioning at the very minimum it crippled your ability, as you detail, to just do your job on election day and in the weeks leading up to election day.
Donna Brazile: But we didn’t know if the data was accurate. I mean, how do you know? How do you know if Margaret Hoover is the Margaret Hoover? You’re not a democrat but
Margaret Hoover: So I wouldn’t be in the system but they might have done that to you.
Donna Brazile: No but you are in our system. Because we have a database of all registered voters, yet we communicate with those who have a preference of being a democrat, but when that data is compromised and we cannot connect with you, because you’ve disappeared from the rolls, and you’ve disappeared from our data, and perhaps they take you out of context. You used to be a 3 Which is a republican, and now you’re a 1, or a 2, we didn’t know. So what we had to do was basically working as if we were blind.
Margaret Hoover: Has — so —
Has this been solved?
Donna Brazile: Yes. We took steps to not only clean up our database, strengthen it to protect it in the future, but more importantly we have to take steps as a country. We have to take steps as — as Americans to protect the integrity of our election systems, and that can only be done at the state and local level Because most of our elections, a decentralized form of government means that we have to do this at the state and local level. And by the way, during this time, I communicated with my counterpart at the republican national committee, because if both parties were under attack then we have no database of our entire electorate. That is dangerous. So I communicated with the republicans to take steps to protect their infrastructure, because if both of us went down, then our country. I’m an american, and for me i wanted our country to be protected not just my party.
Margaret Hoover: Do you have any doubt that there was somebody within the Trump campaign operation, whether it was a campaign or someone who is in touch with
that campaign, that had some sense or knowledge of the DNC hackings.
Donna Brazile: I — I believe at the end of the day – Someone had to have known about the daily drip, drip, drip of emails and how they were weaponized. It’s one thing to steal data and steal information, but to use it in terms of making it a political narrative. It was the story of the day. It became the tweet of the day.
Margaret Hoover: Well, and the timing was the thing —
Donna Brazile: Suspicious.
Margaret Hoover: — that always says suspicious, right? As soon as the Hollywood Access Hollywood tape came out for Donald Trump —
Donna Brazile: October 7th, 2016. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. Because at three o’clock in the afternoon I was finally relieved that the American people would understand that the Russians had attacked us because prior to that everybody called us liars.
I mean I was — I had no credibility because how do you prove it? I couldn’t prove it. I could not defend myself, nor could I defend my party. And so you have
to accept the fact that you know with patience the truth will come out. I was so
gratified. And then we had the Access Hollywood tape, and then I thought, Oh my God, Donald Trump is over. And then Podesta. Of the three major stories that day, which one had legs? The Podesta emails became the story that — that basically shaped the narrative until Director Comey
came out on 10/28. So 10/7 to 10/28, 21 days throughout the debate season, throughout that entire period, that shaped the political narrative. And that, if you look at the polls, Hillary numbers kept dropping and dropping and finally at that last debate and Comey, Donald Trump I refer to it in my book as the day that we got hit by an 18 wheeler.
Margaret Hoover: There — there are a couple things that have come out of 2016 as well, um, a change in the rules for superdelegates.
Donna Brazile: Yes.
Margaret Hoover: You’ve been a superdelegate for a long time.
Donna Brazile: I still am —
Margaret Hoover: Now, in 2020, superdelegates will not be able to vote in the first round of voting in the convention when nominating the Democratic Party nominee.
How will this affect the caliber or the kind of nominee the Democratic Party will put forward to beat Donald Trump?
Donna Brazile: I am still opposed, I would have eliminated superdelegates as a category of delegates versus removing the right to vote, the right to vote is sacred in my judgement. Superdelegates get one vote like regular dele — delegates. We are a — a minority of — of delegates, a majority of delegates are pledged delegates. But it was — we removed the right to vote in order to help unify and reform the party. Um that’s my governor in Louisiana, my mayor in Washington D.C. will not have the vote on the first ballot. So if the party uh nominates
someone without that support what I’m fearful of is that they will not have the kind of political leadership they need in those states in order to win in a general election. I believe it was a bad move but we’ll — we’ll relitigate that at another point.
Margaret Hoover: Do you think in the context of this struggle or the tension between mainstream Democrats and progressive Democrats that this could lead to the nomination of a candidate that is wildly popular within the progressive base of the Democratic Party but sadly unelectable in a general election to a country that is still not as progressive as it is?
Donna Brazile: The majority of delegates will come from states, large and small, uh, that are very diverse. And I do believe that the party nominee will be someone someone within the mainstream of the party. There is no way the Democratic Party is going to transform into a Republican Party where a total disrupter comes into the process, uh and take over the party. We have within the Democratic Party, I think, the kind of electorate that will prevent that from happening.
Margaret Hoover: This was maybe the first presidential election cycle 2016 where both parties considered replacing their nominee at one point.
Donna Brazile: Yes.
Margaret Hoover: And you went through every permutation in case Hillary Clinton was not going to be well enough to serve as the nominee. And your perfect combination was Biden – Booker.
Donna Brazile: [laughs]
Margaret Hoover: J — Vice president Biden and Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey. What is your top pick or — or who is the candidate looking forward to 2020 in your mind that will be able to mobilize the coalition?
Donna Brazile: Well, first of all, I’m excited about the 2020 prospects. We have a great bench. But what really excites me is that we have so much young blood, young talent within the Democratic Party. I want to make sure that we have an open process, that we can get the kind of leadership within the party that can not just unite the Democratic Party, but also unite the country. So before we get to a person, I think we have to figure out our mission.
Margaret Hoover: As you went the day after the election to teach your Georgetown students, you tell the story about how one of things you learned about them was that they disliked the identity politics that they heard from the democratic party. You wrote “they thought that Hillary had spent too much time trying to appeal to people based on their race and their gender and their sexual orientation, and not enough Time appealing to people based on what really worried them, like issues like income inequality and climate change”. And, so, I wonder if your sense, because identity politics can be a controversial frame, a double edged sword, but is it something that risks tearing the party apart and the country apart when pursued that way by focusing on whats different versus what we have in common?
Donna Brazile: You know, Barack Obama rode into the White House on a wave of hope and change. People believed in that message. Um we need to ensure that we have a candidate who can ride in a wave of hope and optimism. Uh they don’t want to um — I think because of the divisions that we’re — we’re seeing and that — that the president has exploited, they really want to find a leader that lifts up the country — lift up what America means and the values of our society as opposed to you’re this but you’re not that. I think we’re beyond that, but we’re — we’re going to have to litigate that also as Democrats pursue the White House in 2020.
Margaret Hoover: One other lesson the Democrats, it seems to me, are struggling with to learn from 2016 and move forward to 2020, is how to win back the white working class voter and that voter is best embodied and reached, in my view, on the Democratic side by Bill Clinton. I mean bill clinton won Mccomb County. Bill Clinton was secretary of explaining things. Should the democratic party be benching bill clinton?
Donna Brazile: Bill Clinton is still a very strong leader within the party, we just need to ensure that our candidates can talk to all voters across the economic spectrum, and not just limit the conversation to a handful of people.
Margaret Hoover: So is that a yes?
Donna Brazile: I think Bill Clinton will continue to be a voice of reason within the Democratic Party.
Margaret Hoover: But he’s not going to be leading the charge.
Donna Brazile: You know what, the good news is that there so many wonderful candidates out there who in addition to being like Bill Clinton in terms of messaging, there are strong enough to carry their states and to help carry the party into the future.
Margaret Hoover: Is he too compromised because of his past with women?
Donna Brazile: I’m not going to run the Democratic Party but I’ll tell you every president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama to Bill Clinton they are asset to the Democratic Party and they are an asset to our great country.
Margaret Hoover: So you’re a consultant. If you were hired you’re paid millions of dollars to come consult Republican candidates or if — if Republicans really wanted to know… in this age of Trump it seems only 10 percent of the vote —
for African-American vote — goes to Republicans and it’s not hard to understand why, certainly from my perspective. What would be your advice to Republicans in terms of really reaching out in an authentic way to earn African-American votes, and one election and one race comes to mind in 2018, and which was Larry Hogan the Maryland governor who was re-elected, was re-elected double his support in the African American community which was 30%, which is really unprecedented for a Republican candidate. And he was running against an African American candidate Ben Jealous who had been the head of the NAACP. So what is he doing right that other Republicans should mimic?
Donna Brazile: He recognized and respected the leadership of African American leaders in his state, the African American community, I heard time and time again, because I live in the beltway, that he responded to their needs, whether it was transportation, education, creating small businesses, Larry Hogan is seen as a hands on governor that serves everybody. The majority of — of African-American seniors consider themselves conservative. There is a base within the African-American community that Republicans can uh appeal to. But you cannot appeal to them by looking back. You’ve got to look forward. They want to hear about education. They want to hear about opportunities. They want to live in a society where they are no longer judged by the color of their skin. If you can run as a compassionate conservative, it’s not the conservatism that scares African-Americans,
it’s the lack of compassion and empathy that scares African-Americans.
Margaret Hoover: Donna Brazile, your journey in politics has also tracked with a really important time in American history and you’re a role model for many women and for many of us in politics. Thank you for being on Firing Line —
Donna Brazile: It’s always great to see you Margaret, and thank you. Wonderful work.