Reply #34: during the 2002 election cycle...Donna starting hanging out with Rove

[ElsewheresDaughter]

hell even when she was Al Gore's presidential campaign manager they are quite good friends now...she work on mary landuue;s LA campaign and thats when Rove and her became chummy

http://www.aarlc.org/news/022103.shtml

February 21, 2003
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
New York Times

WASHINGTON - Two years ago, Donna Brazile, then Al Gore's campaign manager, was engaged in daily combat with Karl Rove, then George W. Bush's top campaign strategist.

Today, they chirpily exchange e-mail, chat on the phone and write letters, indulging in their shared zeal for the inner workings of politics.

"I like her a lot," said Mr. Rove, now ensconced in the West Wing as President Bush's chief political adviser.

Ms. Brazile, a committed Democrat who was the first black woman to manage a presidential campaign, has built similar relationships with other Republicans, like Grover Norquist, an influential conservative strategist. And her coziness with them comes as she is deeply frustrated with her own party for what she calls years of taking African-Americans for granted and for failing to organize for elections in a coherent way.

In fact, Ms. Brazile's alienation could well be viewed as emblematic of a Democratic Party in disarray.

For years Ms. Brazile, 43, has worked diligently in the trenches for Democrats, mobilizing the black vote. She worked on Representative Richard A. Gephardt's last presidential primary campaign, in 1988. She was fired from Michael S. Dukakis's presidential campaign later that year for impolitic remarks about his opponent, Vice President George Bush. After pulling out record numbers of black voters for Mr. Gore in 2000, she helped engineer one of the few Democratic victories in 2002, rebuffing an intense Republican campaign against Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana.

But as the new presidential season approaches, Ms. Brazile has spurned overtures from most of the Democratic candidates and opted out of the 2004 primaries. For the first time in her two decades in politics, she has hung out a shingle as a consultant who wants to be paid as well as other top Democratic strategists for her advice.

These days she pointedly calls herself a "totally independent Democrat." And she is not defensive about her chattiness with Republicans

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