Brazile says she considered swapping Clinton for Biden as 2016 nominee

Donna Brazile, the former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), says she contemplated removing Hillary Clinton as the party’s presidential nominee in 2016 and replacing her with then-Vice President Joe Biden.

In a section of her upcoming memoir, reported Saturday by The Washington Post, Brazile recalled how she considered using her power as the DNC’s interim chairwoman to install candidates more likely to energize working-class voters. 

The presidential candidate she settled on, according to the Post, was Biden, with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) as his running mate.

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But she ultimately decided against such a shake-up, saying that she felt that she could not upend the campaign of the first woman presidential nominee of a major political party. 

“I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her,” she wrote. “I could not do this to them.”

In the memoir, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” which is due for release Nov. 7, Brazile casts Clinton’s campaign as an often-spiritless operation which failed to elicit the kind of enthusiasm needed to propel the former secretary of State to victory.

Campaign aides for Clinton regularly disrespected Brazile, the longtime Democratic strategist recalls, and the campaign declined to provide the DNC with the funding it needed to push voter-turnout efforts.

Brazile casts Clinton as generally well-meaning. But she says her campaign lacked enthusiasm for the candidate, and made a number of missteps that ultimately sank Clinton’s presidential bid. At one point, the Post reports, Brazile compared Clinton’s Brooklyn campaign headquarters as being like a hospital in which “someone had died.”