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  After it was clear in June that Bernie Sanders had lost the nomination, he announced he would support Hillary, but he spent the six weeks leading up to the convention complaining to anyone who would listen about Debbie and the DNC. He claimed that she put the fix in for Hillary from the start. He attacked the rules that allowed party leaders chosen as superdelegates to declare their support for a candidate independent of the results of the state primaries and caucuses. He said all the rules for the primaries had been written to favor Hillary. I have served on the rules committee since 1997, and I could assure him that the rules were not written one way or the other. The Rules and Bylaws Committee meets immediately after the presidential election is over to begin the process of writing the rules for the next cycle. The goal of these meetings is to fix whatever problems arose in the previous presidential cycle. Bernie has always been an independent, and became a Democratic candidate only for the 2016 election. Those who have run under our party rules in the past operated under them better than someone who comes from outside party politics. The Bernie folks and some other unsettled state delegations from the West were not persuaded that was the full story.

  I saw these powerful divisions playing out during the negotiations over the party platform back in Orlando in the second week in July. Thousands of people had been drawn to this election for the best of reasons. In 2008 it was a time for change, but in 2016 it was a popular revolt. From the left to the right, many Americans wanted something different. That energy became concentrated on the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Their supporters worked hard for their candidates, because they believed the system needed radical reform and they wanted to have an impact. As the bruising primary campaign played out, some of their supporters came to believe that the process was rigged. In Orlando, the platform delegates who supported Bernie were outraged and wanted their grievances heard. I was hoping that as we negotiated the planks of the platform, the party could show people that we were working to make sure that everyone’s voice could be heard.

  I guess I succeeded a bit too well. In Orlando many delegates were inspired to make long, impassioned speeches. We had multiple drafts from different factions for each one of the platform planks. The meeting on Saturday, July 9, was supposed to be over by 7 p.m. but it went until 3 a.m., thirteen hours. As we approached midnight I had that weary feeling that we would never get out of there with all these people arguing and sermonizing. Fortunately, at around 9 p.m. I had realized what I needed, and what these people needed, was a drink.

  I went next door to a store and bought $400 worth of liquor. I set up an impromptu bar and started mixing drinks and ordered food to be delivered. 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. After a few drinks and some dinner, people were in a mood to compromise. We negotiated a very progressive platform that both Bernie and Hillary could stand on, which I hoped would mean fewer conflicts at the convention. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder why I had placed myself in this situation, though. This was Debbie’s mess, not Donna’s mess.

  At least our convention would not be the ghoulish sideshow that the Republicans had created in Cleveland. It seemed like every prominent Republican I knew who wasn’t being paid by a TV network to be there had conveniently found an excuse to stay home. In their place emerged such inspiring figures as Gen. Mike Flynn and Scott Baio. When I spotted Sen. Orrin Hatch in the convention hall, he even came up and hugged me—so relieved was he to see someone he recognized.

  This was the only convention I’ve ever been to that literally made me sick. It wasn’t just the speeches. Between the air outside, which was poisoned by the tear gas police had sprayed on the protestors, and my moldy, dusty hotel room, I ended up at the Cleveland Clinic to figure out why I was having such a hard time breathing.

  The GOP convention had been so dispiriting and chaotic that I felt there was a big opening for the Democrats to build on. I knew that there would be disruptions from the Bernie folk, but our program was hopeful, and we had talent for every hour of our convention program and inspiring speakers.

  I had been to nearly a dozen conventions in my time in politics, first as a delegate and later as a pundit. It was a life beyond what I could have imagined when I started in politics at the age of nine, working to elect a Kenner, Louisiana, city council candidate who promised to build a playground in my neighborhood. The councilman won, the playground was installed, and I was on my way. I’ve been on the staff of seven presidential campaigns, culminating as manager for Gore 2000. I have served as a strategist for more than fifty-six House and Senate races, and nineteen state and local contests. At the point when I stopped working on campaigns in 2000, I’d helped elect Democrats in forty-nine states; one more state and I would be named Miss USA without having to wear a bikini.

  As I got to the end of my forties, I had come to a time in life where I did not want to be in the battle anymore. I was happy teaching my course on women in politics at Georgetown University, running my consulting firm, and getting paid to talk politics on CNN and ABC. Although I am through and through a Democrat, my decades of experience had helped me master the skill of being able to say nice things about everybody when I was on television.

  I could say good things about Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, Joe Biden, Lincoln Chafee, or Bernie or Hillary. Hell, a few times I even found a way to say something good about Donald Trump. In some ways I thought of myself as an actress, playing the part that the producers wanted me to play. In the morning when I was getting ready to go to the studio I’d know if I was going to play the part of the bitch who stands up to the GOP talking points. Or they might ask me to be the cool, calm Donna, the voice of reason and experience, who will just give it to you straight. When I looked into the TV cameras, I envisioned that I was speaking to someone older, whiter, and living in middle America who was staring at me and trying to open their minds to what this black lady had to say.

  This, to me, was my perfect life: still with a voice and in the mix of politics, but no longer responsible for the outcome. I had been asked by President Obama to serve as the vice chair of the party in 2009, and I focused my attention on strengthening the Voting Rights Act. While the chair of the DNC is a paid position, the other officers do not take a salary and serve much like a board of directors for the party. I was rarely in the DNC office. I helped raise money and worked with my staff at the Voting Rights Institute to protect the right to vote in states where it was under assault. The day-to-day operations at the DNC were in the hands of Debbie and her full-time professional staff.

  The notion of being the party chair, even for a little while, did not appeal to me at all. Maybe it was just the mellowing that comes with age. I had a strong suspicion that my resistance to taking on this job was because of Kai, a little boy who had stolen my heart.

  Kai was born strong and healthy late in May 2016, but the birth really tore up his birth mom, Mia. She had to stay in the hospital for six weeks with a horrible infection that threatened her life. During that time she and her wife, my best friend Betsy, asked me to care for the child. Now, I was thinking: Here’s this girl who spends all of her life guarded. Don’t want no more love. Don’t want no more attachments. I’m done with that. I’m enjoying my life at age fifty-six. Then here comes this little boy who touched my heart in a way no child ever had before. Maybe this was because I cared for him and him alone ten to twelve hours a day, rather than seeing him among all the other people in a room during a visit. I fell in love. I told CNN and ABC that I needed to go on maternity leave because I did not want to be separated from Kai.

  In July, after seven weeks together, I left Kai to speak in Seattle and Colorado Springs and to go from there to Cleveland to serve as a commentator on the GOP convention. I was surprised by how much I missed Kai. I rushed home on Friday after the convention to see my little Boo, even though we would only have a short time together before I left for Philade
lphia. As I was relaxing with him in my arms, letting the unpleasant feeling of that GOP convention slip out of my body, I got to thinking about what a great summer we were going to have. When the days got hot, there was a piece of shade in my garden where he and I could sit and listen to the birds and look at the flowers I had planted there. In the fall, I’d bundle him up and we could see the leaves change color in Rock Creek Park. I’d still go off and do my pundit thing, but most days I could spend long pieces of time with Kai.

  I was looking into those sweet blue eyes of his on July 22 when WikiLeaks dropped the bomb on the DNC.

  My first sign of the trouble came when my phone started acting like it was possessed. It kept asking me for my password, and other ways to verify my identity, as if it had some kind of hardware malfunction. As that phone was not my primary mode of communication, I decided I’d deal with it later, but it would not let up. Then I got worried that I might lose the pictures of Kai I had on it because I had not backed them up. I called the tech help line at the DNC, and the man I spoke with advised me to delete my DNC email account immediately from my devices. All of my emails would be wiped out as a result. He didn’t express alarm to me and never mentioned the name WikiLeaks or referenced an email dump. He promised me that the pictures would still be safe, so I would have no trouble if I deleted that account. Then at 3 p.m. the party told all the officers about the WikiLeaks dump.

  On June 14 Debbie invited the Democratic Party officers to a conference call to alert us that a story about hacking the DNC that would be published in the Washington Post the following day. That call was the first time we’d heard that there was a problem. Debbie’s tone was so casual that I had not absorbed the details, nor even thought that it was much for us to be concerned about. Her manner indicated that this hacking thing was something she had covered. But had she?

  WikiLeaks had been releasing small batches of emails ever since that phone call. There were some from the DNC and Hillary, but WikiLeaks seemed to have a grudge against everyone. It also released a few embarrassing emails from Donald Trump’s campaign and Sarah Palin. Maybe these were just test batches to see how the public would react, and in truth, people were so focused on the GOP convention, these small dribbles of emails barely surfaced amid all the news.

  Then came that Friday, when WikiLeaks dumped twenty thousand Democratic Party emails in a move deliberately timed to disrupt our convention.

  The WikiLeaks emails—written by a wide range of DNC staff from the top leadership all the way down to the lowest employees—were carefully chosen to reveal senior members of the DNC staff speaking disrespectfully of Bernie and his supporters; one staff member had made an anti-Semitic remark. They questioned his faith and conjectured about ways to smear him for being an atheist in strongly religious states like Kentucky and West Virginia. They mocked him for being an outsider, the very thing that had energized his supporters, who were sick of establishment corruption. The emails showed the DNC staffers developing a story to plant in the press about how his campaign failed.

  Suddenly you could not turn on cable news without hearing these shameful statements. There were conjectures about a convention floor fight, demonstrations to embarrass Hillary on the night she was nominated, a public display of disunity that would make the Republicans excited about their prospects in November. My inbox was flooded with messages from people complaining about the DNC’s unfair treatment of Bernie. Everything we had done to unify the party was unraveling. I realized I had to leave Kai and get to Philadelphia right away.

  Saturday morning I took the early train from DC to Philly. In the days before the convention opens, groups and state caucuses hold meetings and receptions, and the Democratic Party hosts meetings of the party rules, platform, and credentials committees, which are required by convention rules. The emails had cast a big shadow over these meetings, and I wanted to be there so I could try to calm things down. The party needed to go on record ASAP to apologize for the emails. I wanted to personally apologize to folks for how they reflected on the DNC, not just to the Bernie people.

  As the train pulled into the 30th Street Station, I sent word to Debbie that I had arrived. I went to the Sheraton Hotel to drop off my suitcase and hailed a driver to take me to the convention center. I arrived at the convention center at ten o’clock in the morning and would stay until three in the afternoon—apologizing, it seemed, to the whole world.

  First I walked right into the meeting of Sanders delegates. The atmosphere was rowdy. People were restless and looking for a target for their anger. There were no other DNC party officers there, so I got up in front of the room with the bull’s-eye square on my chest.

  “I’m a vice chair of the party, and I just want to say on behalf of the DNC, I’m not the chair, but I want to apologize for the nature of the emails and the conversations that you all read in the paper,” I said. “I don’t know much about what happened. I just got here. I came early to apologize for myself and for the other officers.” I pledged to get to the bottom of what happened, but I could see that the crisis was mushrooming. The release of the emails also had exposed the personal information of our staff people and many donors, some of whom Debbie’s top staff had ridiculed in their messages. The Bernie people were ready to throw bombs at the Hillary people, who were in shock as well. No one had expected this.

  As the rough day wore on, we could not get any guidance from Debbie. She was nowhere in the convention hall. I called her to say that an apology should come from her, but she was defiant. “I’m not doing that,” she said. If I knew Debbie, she was probably hunkered down in her hotel room trying to cut a deal with Hillary for her exit, but truth was I didn’t have much time to think about that. All I knew was that the right option was to take responsibility. I went to another meeting and apologized again.

  Email and text messages from journalists and the Democratic Party powerful scrolled constantly across the screen on my phone: IS DEBBIE GOING TO STEP DOWN NOW? WHEN? IS IT YOU WHO WILL REPLACE HER? SOMEONE ELSE? Finally I had to stop looking. I knew the call for me to replace her as chair was coming, but I wanted to keep my hands off it. I felt strongly that if I put myself in the center of it, a door might open and I would be the only person left in the room with no place to duck.

  I wanted to disappear from view so that I could go back to being Donna. But I knew that was not very likely to happen.

  The next morning, I was set to appear on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. From offstage, I could hear Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, pretaping a segment before the roundtable. Robby was talking about the Russians, and the Russians, and the Russians, and I thought, “What does this have to do with the Russians?”

  Later, when the show went live, George Stephanopoulos started asking the members of the roundtable about Robby’s comments.

  “First of all, this is not just a one-day leak,” I said, scrambling to find something to say. “There will be a substantial number of emails that I understand will be leaked over the next couple of days, weeks, and months because it was not a one-month breach or a two-month breach… [The Russians] have been involved. They were in our system at the DNC for well over a year… Will some people have to step down, be removed, or resign? I’m sure at the end of the day, yes.”

  After I was finished with ABC, I rushed back to my hotel room to change clothes and put on some comfortable shoes. R. T. Ryback, the former mayor of Minneapolis and an officer of the DNC, texted: WHERE ARE YOU? R.T, who had been mentioned as a possible successor to Debbie, wanted the officers of the DNC to meet to work on issuing a formal apology from the party. I agreed.

  We found a room at the convention center where we could work. Anita Dunn, who served on the Obama campaign, in the White House, and as a consultant for the DNC chair’s office, had assembled a team of folks from her firm, SKDKnickerbocker, to work on the draft. She was also working with Debbie on handling the press. Hilary Rosen, my longtime friend, CNN colleague, and DNC consultant to the chair’s
office, was there, too.

  As we sat down at the conference table, my phone was oddly quiet. Had my avoidance manuevers worked? After all my ducking and weaving away from this crisis, maybe they had forgotten me. Rumors were now swirling that Hillary was going to replace Debbie with Stephanie Schriok from Emily’s List or former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, people who had been her surrogates. I’d be happy to help them change the rules to allow that instead of the burden falling to me. Unfortunately my fate was already written.

  The first order of business around the conference table was discussing what to do about Debbie. Many people thought she should not gavel in the convention considering how much controversy surrounded her. No matter the problems many of us had with Debbie’s style, she had done her very best preparing the party for this big moment. Everyone who spoke had pain in their voices. It was heart-wrenching.

  As the group discussed the various options, I felt my phone vibrate. I looked down and saw it was Charlie Baker, an old friend of mine from the Michael Dukakis campaign and the chief administrative officer of Hillary’s campaign.

  Shit.

  “I need you to come over here, Donna,” he said.

  “Oh no, Charlie,” I said. “Oh no. Please tell me.”

  “I need you to come over here right away,” he said.

  “Oh no, Charlie,” I just kept repeating. “Oh no.”

  TWO

  From the Back of the Bus to Center Stage