Donna Brazile: The Kenner Kid Who Ran a Presidential Campaign

The Girl Who Organized Her First Campaign at Nine Years Old

Donna Lease Brazile was born on December 15, 1959, in New Orleans, the third of nine children in a working-class family in Kenner. She grew up in a household where dinner table conversation was political by default — her parents were engaged citizens in a city where politics was contact sport and community organizing was a way of life. At nine years old, Donna worked on a local city council campaign because the candidate had promised to build a playground in her neighborhood. The candidate won. The playground got built. Donna Brazile learned a lesson she never forgot: politics is how regular people change their own lives.

The Rise

Brazile attended Louisiana State University, then moved to Washington, D.C., where she built one of the most remarkable careers in American political history. She worked on every Democratic presidential campaign from Jimmy Carter in 1976 through Al Gore in 2000, rising through the ranks of political operatives until she became the first African American to manage a major-party presidential campaign when she ran Gore's 2000 bid.

That distinction alone would have secured her place in history. But Brazile was more than a campaign manager. She was a strategist, a commentator, a connector, and — in the most New Orleans sense of the word — a character. She brought the directness and warmth of New Orleans to the cold machinery of Washington politics, and she did it without ever losing the accent or the attitude.

The DNC Chair

In 2016, Brazile became interim chair of the Democratic National Committee during one of the most turbulent periods in the party's history. The role thrust her into the middle of the controversy surrounding the DNC's handling of the primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Her subsequent book, "Hacks," provided a candid and controversial insider account of the dysfunction within the party. It was classic Brazile — honest to the point of discomfort, willing to tell the truth even when the truth made her own side look bad.

The New Orleans Way

Brazile has always been explicit about what New Orleans taught her. The city's culture of community organizing — the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, the church networks, the neighborhood associations — showed her that political power starts at the block level. The city's racial dynamics — complex, layered, sometimes brutal, always evolving — gave her an understanding of race in America that went far beyond academic theory. And the city's insistence on joy — on celebrating in the midst of struggle, on dancing at funerals, on throwing parties in the face of catastrophe — gave her the resilience to survive decades in the most bruising profession in America.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, Brazile was one of the most prominent voices demanding federal action. She wept on CNN. She called out failures at every level of government. She was not performing outrage — she was expressing the fury of someone whose family, whose neighborhood, whose city was drowning while the government watched. It was the nine-year-old girl from Kenner all over again, demanding that the people in power do something for the people who needed it.