Part of the shock of 2016 was the slow reveal that the DNC had been allowed to die on the vine under the watch of Barack Obama and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.  Many of us knew the party had taken an unfortunate ideological and tactical turn during the Bill Clinton era that was causing it to bleed support from working people.  But the party itself was supposed to be a superior money raising and recruiting machine with advanced computer aided voter/donor targeting capabilities.

Donna Brazile reveals that when Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was forced out the party was in debt, disarray and had been taken over by the HRC campaign.  Which maybe was perfectly appropriate since it had been subsumed by the Obama faction for 8 years at the expense of the rest of the party.  Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC.

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

The level of dysfunction at the DNC is still shocking.   Here we are still trying to heal the rifts, both real and Russian propaganda induced, between the Bernie people and the Hillary people and we find out that we have actual real structural problems that really are bigger than who didn’t support who quickly enough.

This goes to the failure of the national party to hold hundreds of seats all over the country and to effectively identify and address numerous issues that has rendered the party as ineffective as it’s been in my lifetime.  Every public opinion poll has the Dem party just slightly above the GOP, the party of Bush, Trump and toxic dishonesty on almost every issue.

There’s no excuse for this.  And sadly it feeds the negative energy that abounds in the country and questions the party’s very existence. It supports the view that the party was in the tank for Hillary.  It should have been, her campaign owned it!

At a time when there is no powerful enough nationally oriented third party to pick up the mantle, the devastation of the Democratic Party both functional and intellectual, especially at this time, is a disaster for everybody.

Thousands of good people have risen up in the shadow of Trump to challenge his evil.  Can they even get the support they need from a functional national party to be successful?  We don’t even know anymore.  We thought it was bad in the 70s.  We thought it was bad when Howard Dean rescued it in 2004.  This is now a new low.