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 otheran 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
The guardrails can’t contain Trump
Donald Trump’s character — volatile, impulsive, often self-destructive — had not changed since the campaign. But it seemed as if the guardrails of our democracy— Congress, the courts, the states, the media, the Cabinet — were keeping things within bounds.
Then came the past 10 days. The country is now caught in the internal maelstrom that is the mind of Donald Trump. We are in the realm of the id. Chaos reigns. No guardrails can hold.
.. Layers of falsehoods giving the impression of an elaborate coverup — in the absence of a crime.
.. Trump insists there’s no there there, but acts as if the there is everywhere.
.. Trump had three top officials come out and declare the disclosure story false. The next morning, Trump tweeted he was entirely within his rights to reveal what he revealed, thereby verifying the truth of the story.
.. The White House hurriedly issued a statement denying the story. The statement was unsigned.
.. this would be seen by millions as an establishment usurpation to get rid of a disruptive outsider. It would be the most destabilizing event in American political history
Trump’s new Russia expert wrote a psychological profile of Vladimir Putin — and it should scare Trump
Well, now the Trump team has its own dossier on Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s better sourced, convincingly written, damning in its conclusions — and its author is scheduled to start working at the White House on Monday.
.. In this telling, Putin sees the United States as a malicious, incompetent and disrespectful power, an obstacle in his relentless effort to restore and expand the might of the Russian state.
.. list six identities that they think make up Putin’s “mental outlook, his worldview” —
- the Statist,
- the History Man,
- the Survivalist,
- the Outsider,
- the Free Marketeer and
- the Case Officer.
.. underlying everything in this book is a vision of Putin as manipulator — he is “a master at manipulating information, suppressing information, and creating pseudo-information” — and as extortionist, deploying blackmail against opponents, allies and (take note here, President Trump) foreign leaders. “As he can fully trust only himself,” Hill and Gaddy write, “Putin applies extortionary methods to everyone else — basically mutually assured incrimination to ensure loyalty.”
.. Putin regards Russia’s post-Soviet stumbles of the 1990s — beholden to the West, rudderless at home — as an unforgivable humiliation he must avenge.
.. “Putin pledged to rebuild the Russian state, protect Russia’s sovereignty, preserve domestic stability and unity, and ensure national security,”
.. The tools at his disposal include deft historical symbolism
.. Every survived calamity reaffirms the special status of Russia in history.
.. He relishes inappropriate humor (testicle-related jokes, in particular, are a Putin specialty) and likes to make a show of dressing down subordinates or oligarchs. “The public loves to see him admonishing figures they do not like in the same language that they would use if they had the opportunity,”
.. Putin is a Free Marketeer in sort of an “Art of the Deal” sense.
.. “Capitalism, in Putin’s understanding, is not production, management, and marketing. It is wheeling and dealing.
.. Here is the Case Officer. Because of his 15 years in the KGB, Putin is skilled in “studying the mind of the targets, finding their vulnerabilities, and figuring out how to use them.” This is how he has managed Russia’s oligarchs, the authors say, using their wealth — and their desire for more — against them.
.. Participants in the system are not bought off in the classic sense of that term. They are compromised; they are made vulnerable to threats. . . . Corrupt, even illegal, activity will be kept secret as long as the individual continues to play the game.”
.. It is not clear, though, that he has a good sense of the West, or of the United States in particular. This country is an abstraction for him; he knows few Americans, and those he knows, such as George W. Bush and Obama, he does not like.
.. He believes all local protesters are driven by “fringe minorities and professional oppositionists, or by foreign funding and intervention.”
.. Does he believe that or, like other leaders we know, is he simply deligitimizing legitimate protests?
.. “Putin has spent a great deal of time in his professional life bending the truth, manipulating facts, and playing with fictions,” they write. “He is also, we conclude, not always able to distinguish one from the other.”