Gore supremo who plays for keeps
Sunday, 16 July 2000
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If there is one person who is responsible for raising the salience of race in the 2000 elections, then it is Donna Brazile, who as Al Gore's campaign supremo is the first black woman to lead a major US presidential campaign.
If there is one person who is responsible for raising the salience of race in the 2000 elections, then it is Donna Brazile, who as Al Gore's campaign supremo is the first black woman to lead a major US presidential campaign.
Brazile has often been compared to James Carville, the house-trained attack dog who led Bill Clinton's first campaign. Like him, she is from Louisiana, a place where politics is played for keeps and governed by as few rules as a bar-room fight. But Brazile has a place in American politics which may eclipse even Carville. If she wins - and it is still a very big "if" - she may be more comparable to Lee Atwater, the sinister genius from South Carolina who helped to get both Ronald Reagan and George Bush to the White House.
Brazile is controversial within her own party, let alone with the opposition. "The four pillars of the Democratic Party are African-Americans, labour, women and what I call ethnic minorities," she told the Washington Post, in comments that shocked the party's reformist wing. "Having the support of African-Americans will enable Al Gore to lock down the nomination and begin to take on the Republican nominee."
When Gore decided to take his campaign out of Washington and down to Nashville last year, it was Brazile who was credited with the decision. She cut the staff in half and savagely reduced the salaries of those who remained behind, disembowelling what she scornfully referred to as "Goreworld".
The daughter of a New Orleans janitor and maid, she is now a veteran political operative. She worked as a youth organiser for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, before she could vote; aged only 20, she led a march on Washington, DC, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Martin Luther King's 1963 civil rights demonstration. She was political director for Jesse Jackson's campaign in 1984. She was field director for Richard Gephardt, now the most senior Democrat in the US House of Representatives, in 1988. She was a senior adviser to the Clinton-Gore campaigns in 1992 and 1996.
She played the race card early and publicly against George W Bush, the Republican candidate, and in the most controversial way: she accused former General Colin Powell, one of the most famous and respected black Americans, and Republican Congressman J C Watts of being Uncle Tom figures. "Republicans bring out Colin Powell and J C Watts because they have no programme, no policy," she said in an interview with Bloomberg.
She has also said that she will not let the "white boys" win. "A white-boy attitude," she explained, "is 'I must exclude, denigrate, and leave behind'." Brazile has come under intense attack from the right, which views her as a racebaiter extraordinaire. She has also been the subject of some gossip regarding her sexuality. She was a member of the board of directors of the Millennium March on Washington (MMOW), a gay-rights march. "As far as I know every member of the board is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered," one board member told a gay publication.
Brazile was nine years old when she waged her first political campaign, she told the Los Angeles Times, backing a local council member in a poor New Orleans parish. "I would say, 'Miz Yancy, you gotta support the council member because he's going to pave the roads, he's going to give us plumbing'," she said later.
Like many in the consultancy game, she has little respect for the business, calling her peers "whores" and expressing the wish to retire. "Having spent 30 years doing this, I want to see what's on the other side of the mountain," she says. "I want to know what it's like to go home at five o'clock ... have dinner with someone before seven. I want to see my family more. I want to become a human being again."
