As a Republican unhappy with the Trump nomination, I at least can take heart in the knowledge that GOP leaders tried in their fashion to stop The Donald's surge. Democrats have to live with the fact that their party leaders engineered the primaries and debates to hand Miss Unpopularity the nod on purpose.
"She won by over 3 million votes," Clinton booster Lanny Davis observed over the phone, "so if the staff of the DNC was leaning or favoring to Hillary Clinton, it probably didn't have much effect on that total."
Copy that. Which begs the question: Why did DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz throw the full weight of her machine behind Clinton when the former secretary of state had the nomination in the bag anyway? Lord Acton had it right when he said that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Consider the DNC debates. In January, Republicans had scheduled 11 debates, Democrats had scheduled six. Wasserman Shultz maintained that the DNC schedule was designed to "maximize the opportunity for voters to see our candidates." Really? Half of those six debates were scheduled during weekends -- one on the Sunday of the three-day Martin Luther King Day weekend. No one schedules a political debate for a weekend unless the goal is to decrease viewership.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders agreed to a California debate before the state's June 7 primary -- The San Francisco Chronicle had hoped to be a co-sponsor -- but Clinton declined. The newly released-by WikiLeaks emails included correspondence by DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda who forwarded a copy of a press release on Sanders' acceptance of the invitation with the editorial comment, "lol." That's why Wasserman Schultz had to go. When an institution lies to its members even though leaders are fully aware that no one is being fooled, it is time for regime change.
Sanders only has himself to blame, however, for this DNC-talking point included in the batch released by WikiLeaks Friday: "Dems don't even pay attention to email story." After all, it was Sanders who looked at Clinton during the first presidential debate in October and said, "The American people are sick and tired about hearing about your damn emails."
Methinks the public has grown tired of the Clintons flouting rules and getting away with it. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that a third of Democrats disapproved of FBI Director James Comey's decision not to seek criminal charges against Clinton for using a private server for classified Department of State correspondence. The game gets old. Hillary Clinton claims she used private servers for convenience, none of the emails was marked classified, and she turned over all of her emails to investigators. That's bunk. Everyone knows she is lying. And the lies will only get more blatant if she is elected.