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November 14 - December 24, 2017
The hotel hosting the meeting threatened to shut me down for serving alcohol without a license, but somehow the DNC staff made that problem disappear.
wanted to disappear from view so that I could go back to being Donna. But I knew that was not very likely to happen.
If I was going to be the party chair and in front of the cameras all the time, I needed a better wardrobe.
but he also cared deeply about his image. Late into his second term, the party was still paying for his pollster and focus groups.
throw the nomination to Hillary. I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him.
The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.
Was this a lingering effect of the concussion she suffered in 2012, where she was out of commission for weeks and had double vision for six months and later a blood clot?
The wild mix of him being so vulgar and contemptuous, but also covered in gold, made those who supported him identify with him. As one wit put it, he was a poor person’s idea of a rich person. Acting as he did, he made it very difficult for anyone to take him down, because he seemed impervious to shame.
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And if they were black they’d immediately take the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” stance.
The election that would mark for history the way we responded to electing our first black president, and this was what we were talking about.
Never mind that Hillary has not served in Congress, the branch of government that writes the tax laws.
She was a Senator!
When I checked my phone again at two thirty, the story of my alleged terrible deed was all over the Internet. My jaw dropped. People from the left and the right had the long knives out for me,
was the liar, the cheat, and the thief.
Donald Trump had created this madness. His philosophy was either rule or ruin, so he was trying to ruin me. He had turned thousands of my fellow citizens, people who never knew me and never would, against me.
From the rally stage he always mentioned me, and always as if I were second only to “Crooked Hillary” in infamy for this thing I very well might not have done.
In that world, information is a form of currency, and we all trade it back and forth all the time.
Assuming the email was legitimate, I would have thought that I didn’t want any of our candidates blindsided by this turn of subject matter.
So she did send the questions to Hillary!
But what I could not accept was that I would have shared information with one Democratic candidate and not the other.
And the hits were coming from all sides. They were digging up emails I’d written about Obama in 2009 saying that people were still hurting under his economy. They published this as if it had been written in 2016. Where was this coming from? And why did the emails they dropped seem to support perfectly the talking points Trump had for that day’s campaign?
The footage of Creamer and Scott Foval boasting about picking fights with crazy people in the line to a campaign rally looked terrible. Foval was taped saying, “It doesn’t matter what the fricking legal and ethics people say. We need to win this mother fucker… In the lines at Trump rallies, we’re starting anarchy.”
“The campaign is fully in it,” Creamer said. “Hillary knows through the chain of command.” Both he and Foval described in detail how the money flowed through different contractors and PACs so that it could not be traced directly to the campaign. I knew how much fuel this would add to the raging fire of this campaign.
Everyone was feeling fat and happy (except me) until October 28.
When you are in charge you never express remorse, doubt, or confusion. You keep the staff focused on the task and hold out hope, even if you do not feel much yourself at that moment.
In my emotional state, I was unguarded. He quoted me in his piece saying, “This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time.
We don’t want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, ‘Keep your focus; keep your eyes on the prize.’”
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.
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.
Sending those emails was a mistake I will forever regret.
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.
The Russians may have not changed the totals in the voting machines, but they confused us, inflamed our doubts and our worst impulses, and destabilized the Democratic Party, making it an unfair fight.
Despite the deflection, dishonesty, and distraction we all lived through in 2016, I still have faith in the American people.
“the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
