By Robert Laurie —— Bio and Archives August 10, 2017
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One year after the Florida congresswoman’s resignation as national party chair at the Democratic National Convention — where activists booed and shouted “shame!” at her during a Florida delegation breakfast speech — the once-rising star's political fortunes continue to fade, beset by critics on all sides. Wasserman Schultz is again on defenseafter steadfastly refusing to explain why she continued to employ Imran Awan, an IT staffer who was under a federal investigation for alleged equipment and data scam in the U.S. House since February. She finally fired him on July 25, one day after authorities arrested him on a seemingly unrelated mortgage fraud charge. He was at the airport leaving for Pakistan, after wiring $283,000 there.You'd think Wasserman Schultz would see the writing on the wall and shuffle away into obscurity. By this point, any normal human being would be so humiliated that they'd be desperate to escape the spotlight. Debbie, however, is not normal. She's trying - in an extremely unsuccessful way - to hang on to power by pretending the Awan story is really the story of GOP-backed anti-Muslim bigotry. She's trying to spin her decision not to fire the compromised IT staffer into a twisted version of the race card. She claims that she was somehow taking the moral high road by protecting Awan from Republican Islamophobia and profiling.
“We wish she would go away and stop being so public by doubling down on negative stories,” said Nikki Barnes, a progressive DNC member from Florida, who believes Wasserman Schultz left the national party “in shambles” while chair, culminating with the hack of DNC servers and the release of embarrassing internal emails by WikiLeaks in the 2016 campaign. As for Wasserman Schultz's defense, Barnes said “none of this makes sense. It doesn't sound like racial profiling … there must have been something for her.” The problem with the Awan case, Barnes said, is that it’s not just hurting the congresswoman. It’s drawing negative attention to a party still healing after last year’s shocking losses and the divisive Democratic primary when Wasserman Schultz appeared to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. “This adds to Debbie being re-branded as the Democrats’ disastrous destruction,” Barnes said. “Those of us on the DNC know we have to rebrand ourselves and earn the people’s trust. And unfortunately Debbie’s name does not scream trust. It screams power. It screams limited access. It screams WikiLeaks now. DNC lawsuit. It screams a lot of negative things to the public. That’s not how we want to rebrand ourselves.” “Debbie Wasserman Schultz is still a national figure, but unfortunately for her it’s because so many people around the country see her as playing a devastatingly bad role in the last election,” said R.T. Rybak, the former mayor of Minneapolis and former DNC vice-chair who clashed with Wasserman Schultz. “I can mention her name in Minneapolis and it gets a viscerally negative reaction, and I’ve found that to be the case in other parts of the country, too. Sadly, I think she deserves the negative reputation.”
Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com
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