Uncovered by Steve Krakauer

Author:Steve Krakauer [KRAKAUER, STEVE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2023-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Case Study: The Bernie Primaries

Sometimes an article drops and it makes you re-evaluate everything you’ve thought about before. That happened to me in November 2017 when I read the Politico excerpt from Donna Brazile’s book Hacks. The Politico excerpt was titled “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC.”4

Now that’s a juicy headline. And it delivered. “I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie,” began Brazile.

What she ultimately found was a “Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America,” which showed Clinton’s campaign in 2016 had an agreement long before Clinton was the actual nominee that she would take over the DNC operations, which is customary after the candidate wins the nomination, not before. In that way, the deck was completely stacked against Sanders from the start in 2016, by his own party machine.

Let’s pause for a minute. You may not be a Bernie Sanders fan politically, but we should acknowledge that whether you are or not, our democratic system must allow for a fair electoral process. And clearly in 2016, Sanders was screwed over by the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. But what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2020 was different, and actually a little more alarming. And it points to something far more all-encompassing and messy.

Yes, there was still the political operation that tried to stop him from winning the nomination. There were two bizarre moments that pointed to the Democratic Party working against Sanders still, four years later. First was the candidacy of Michael Bloomberg. There was no real constituency for Bloomberg—a billionaire financial and media mogul who was a solid New York City mayor but had no real national hook. Yet he jumped in with a massive spend. His appearance in the debates seemed to indicate he was there for one main reason—as a kamikaze mission to take down Sanders. He ultimately was barely even able to register a real hit, instead taking incoming from Elizabeth Warren and others, and fading away.

The other moment was on March 2, 2020, the day before Super Tuesday, when two of the final six competitors in the primary dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. Pete Buttigieg had won Iowa and, while not necessarily on a path to the nomination, surely would have registered some electors on Super Tuesday and kept in the mix. Amy Klobuchar was not far behind the pack, and also could have performed well in a few states the next day. But instead they

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