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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"Explosive... A blistering tell-all." --- Washington Post
"People should sit up, take notes and change things." --- Ace Smith, Los Angeles Times
"Brazile most certainly has a story to tell.... Vivid." --- The Guardian
From Donna Brazile, former DNC chair and legendary political operative, an explosive and revealing new look at the 2016 election: the first insider account of the Russian hacking of the DNC and the missteps by the Clinton campaign and Obama administration that enabled a Trump victory.
In the fallout of the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee--and as chaos threatened to consume the party's convention--Democrats turned to a familiar figure to right the ship: Donna Brazile. Known to millions from her frequent TV appearances, she was no stranger to high stakes and dirty opponents, and the longtime Democratic strategist had a reputation in Washington as a one-stop shop for fixing sticky problems.
What Brazile found at the DNC was unlike anything she had experienced before--and much worse than is commonly known. The party was beset by infighting, scandal, and hubris, while reeling from a brazen and wholly unprecedented attempt by a foreign power to influence the presidential election. Plus, its candidate, Hillary Clinton, faced an opponent who broke every rule in the political playbook.
Packed with never-before-reported revelations about what went down in 2016, Hacks is equal parts campaign thriller, memoir, and roadmap for the future. With Democrats now in the wilderness after this historic defeat, Hacks argues that staying silent about what went wrong helps no one. Only by laying bare the missteps, miscalculations, and crimes of 2016, Brazile contends, will Americans be able to salvage their democracy.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former Democratic National Committee chair Brazile (Cooking with Grease) refuses to concede that, during her time at CNN, she aided Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign by leaking a question in advance of a town hall with Bernie Sanders; this omission tarnishes her self-serving insider account of the campaign. Although elsewhere Brazile has publicly stated she made a mistake, here she resists that being an admission of guilt and resorts to equivocation ("I still didn't recall sharing questions with Hillary's campaign"). That lack of transparency will lead to skepticism about some of her dramatic revelations-especially her assertion that she nearly chose someone else to replace Clinton as the party's candidate for president. Those surprised that the DNC chair holds such unilateral power will find their reaction validated when Brazile later states that she would have needed to consult with party leaders before making such a drastic decision. Her account of what happened after Clinton nearly fainted during a 9/11 memorial service amounts to a few hours of her internal debate, making clear that the entire episode has been overhyped. Odd sentences ("Women of Hillary's era, like Eleanor Holmes Norton, are thinkers") and inconsistencies only further diminish the value of what could have been a warts-and-all postmortem of one of the greatest political upsets in American history. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The inside story of the 2016 presidential campaign, told by a once-powerful political operative pushed to the fringes of her own party.Brazile (Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics, 2004), the former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, is angry, and she wants everybody to know it. Ultimately, this supposedly fiery book, a tell-all chronicle of the election that gave us President Donald Trump, is more a tale of simmering resentment than a full-on bridge-burner. There aren't that many bombshells to be had, and they're often couched in rationales that don't always add up. Brazile inherited her role from Debbie Wasserman Schultz in an organization bleeding cash and failing to recognize its own dysfunction. "As I saw it, these three titanic egosBarack, Hillary and Debbiehad stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes," she writes. The author has plenty of targets, and she begins by slinging bile at Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and liaison Brandon Davis. Brazile's core argument is that the Clinton campaign exerted an unethical influence over campaign funds, pointing to an obscure fundraising agreement, but her case is thin. Less persuasive are her waffling explanations and a nonapology apology for those controversial debate questions. The author also displays disturbing naivet, particularly regarding WikiLeaks and the much-publicized Russian hacking of the DNCalthough the author does make a solid case for fighting back against this unprecedented interference. An undercurrent of paranoia, however valid, also undercuts the narrative as Brazile ponders the murder of Seth Rich and gets advice from an intelligence operative she only identifies as "The Spook." This is a portrait of a professional political operative marginalized and still suffering from wounds that have yet to heal. In a memoir replete with profanity, Brazile's post-election mindset might boil down to this: "You know, fuck 'em."A messy, self-serving rationalization of one of the biggest debacles in recent American political history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
