What Donna Brazile’s New Book Really Reveals

The former DNC chair’s sometimes-confused book illuminates the fundamental difference in approach between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns.

.. Brazile seems to have harbored unrealistic expectations about the DNC’s independence. By the time Brazile was named interim chair in July 2016, Clinton was already the de facto nominee, days away from formal nomination. It’s customary for the nominee to effectively control the party apparatus from that point, but Brazile repeatedly bridled at directives from Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn.
..  Brazile: She is a boisterous, vivacious presence, and Clinton’s campaign was cool and clinical to a fault. Conflict between the two was practically inevitable. And while Brazile’s critique of the Clinton team as overly dispassionate is widely held now, her own instincts were also questionable, as in her demand that money be spent in major cities to drive up turnout due to a fear that Clinton would win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote.
.. the differences between Clinton and Sanders neatly:
one the unshakeable party woman, fiercely devoted to institutions and willing to bend the rules a little to get what she felt needed to be done done; the other
an outsider, with no strong attachment to the party but a fierce sense of principle and propriety.
..  Clinton campaign officials have said the agreement was only about general-election details, and did not prejudice the primary. Mark Longabaugh, a top Sanders aide who was that campaign’s liaison to the DNC, dismissed the story for a different reason: “All Donna has done here is she’s put a little bit more detail on what we all knew,” he told me. “Hillary Clinton had a heavy hand at the DNC, if not outright control.
.. What does seem to be unusual are the terms laid out in an addendum
.. “If you go back and listen to his speeches, the core message of his campaign was he was battling a rigged economic system that was propped up by a corrupt campaign-finance system,”
.. Sanders could have signed states up, but he didn’t do so, for the same practical and ideological reasons he didn’t like the JFA in the first place.
.. the Clinton team should have used that occasion to oust Wasserman Schultz, rather than to demand control of parts of the DNC while leaving her in place... Many Democrats view her airing of dirty laundry now as similarly self-defeating