The Democratic National Committee Needs a Thorough Purging

Yesterday, contemplating the ham-handed attempts by DNC leadership to rig the Democratic Primary for the second presidential election in a row, I came to the realization that an occupation of party headquarters is going to be necessary before all is said and done.

Blame for last night's Iowa caucus meltdown appears to lie with the Democratic National Committee forcing the state party to report results via a smartphone app. According to The New York Times,

Cybersecurity experts also said that the app had not been properly tested at scale, and that it was hastily put together over the past two months. Iowa Democratic Party officials only decided to use the app to report results after a previous party proposal — which entailed having caucus participants call in their votes over the phone — was scrapped, on the advice of Democratic National Committee officials.

Sydney Ember and Reid Epstein explain that many if not most of the precinct captains decided not to use the mobile app and those who did had difficulty. When people tried to call in their results to headquarters they couldn't get through.

Max Blumenthal is reporting that

The delay in reporting is the result of a failed app developed by a company appropriately named Shadow Inc.

This firm was staffed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaign veterans and created by a Democratic dark money nonprofit backed by hedge fund billionaires including Seth Klarman. A prolific funder of pro-settler Israel lobby organizations, Klarman has also contributed directly to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign.

The delay in the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the presumptive winner of the opening contest in the Democratic presidential primary. Though not one exit poll indicated that Buttigieg would have won, the South Bend, Indiana mayor took to Twitter to confidently proclaim himself the victor.

This is banana republic stuff. Yves Smith's post this morning is scathing:

On one level, this is an illustration of America’s descent into banana republic status. Pundits and the media keep reinforcing American exceptionalist fantasies, our brand fumes of vaunted democracy, yet we can’t even run elections competently. Is is just the grifting, that introducing more tech creates more opportunities for vendor enrichment? Or is it yet more proof that a lot of people in charge really hate democracy and are at best indifferent to doing things right?

It’s not hard to see the Iowa fiasco as an illustration of an even more deeply-seated pathology: elite incompetence. Too many people with the right resumes get to fail upwards or at worst sideways. And remember, unlike our older WASP-y leaders who were a combination of people from the right clubs and self-made men, our current crop of people in charge pride themselves on being the end products of a meritocratic system, as in their claim to legitimacy stems from the claim that they are more talented (gah) than mere mortals and therefore obviously should be in the top slots because they’ll do oh so much better than everyone else.

Buttigieg appears to be the beneficiary of the two recent snafus: 1) the decision not to publish the Des Moines Register poll showing Sanders ahead, and 2) the caucus night reporting meltdown. Fortunately Buttigieg is going nowhere in the polls. He's fading in New Hampshire. He is polling below Tom Steyer in Nevada. He's dust. Kaput. He won't even get a free-media bounce if he is declared winner later in the day because tonight is Trump's state of the union address. Tomorrow is Trump's impeachment acquittal. Already the caucus meltdown is providing Trump a platform to remind voters about Obama's cataclysmic HealthCare.gov roll-out.

But back to my original point. This is what democracy looks like to the DNC. The DNC needs to be cleaned out thoroughly and ruthlessly.