WASHINGTON, D.C. — Donna Brazile, interim chair of the Democratic National Committee held a press conference early Thursday morning and spoke for the first time about the results of the 2016 election as well as the DNC’s plans for 2020.
“In hindsight,” Brazile said, “we should have been able to read the tea leaves better. We should have foisted someone entirely different on the masses.”
Ms. Brazile, who was has been running the DNC since pressure from angry Bernie Sanders supporters at how the party was handling its primary forced Debbie Wasserman Schultz out of the position. Ms. Wasserman Schultz was accused of doing everything in the party’s power to diminish Sanders and his voters, a claim that was later lent more credence as WikiLeaks published emails between the DNC and various media outlets. Brazile herself was the target of criticism for how she fed questions to Hillary Clinton before one of the presidential debates.
In her opinion, Ms. Brazile thinks the Democrats ran into problems in two areas. First, she says that who they tried to “cram down everyone’s esophageal airways” someone who perhaps wasn’t as well-liked as they’d envisioned. But she also says that Dems “flat out forgot how much some Americans are intimidated by intelligent, highly qualified women or people in general.” She said that in 2020, the party will address that issue directly.
“We’re going to have to ram a less qualified, but more palatable candidate down Democrats’ throats next time,” Brazile admitted, “there’s just no two ways about it. There are a lot of Americans who just can’t handle an educated, powerful woman at the top. We should have known that, plus also maybe chosen someone who doesn’t look like there’s no bank’s speaking fee she wouldn’t gladly gobble up. Oh, and then that whole looking like a corrupted politician in an obviously populist election cycle. Our bad on that one too.”
Ultimately, Brazile says that there were any number of reasons why Donald Trump defeated Clinton, but she specifically referenced the man Clinton defeated in the primary.
“I don’t know,” Brazile said to reporters, “maybe we should have looked at how well Bernie Sanders was doing in red states as a sign that he could do what Trump did in the rust belt, but then again, we were with her, and you know how hard slogans are to change in the middle of an election.”
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