Democratic Primaries

before he first went to work for the progressive from Vermont.



https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/bernie-sanderss-new-speechwriter-has-controversial-past/585547/

Bernie Sanders first hired his new speechwriter, David Sirota, 20 years ago, shortly after Sirota was fired from a mayoral campaign for his connection to a bogus website that promoted a racially charged quotation, taken out of context, of a black opponent. In 1999, in Philadelphia, there was a crowded Democratic primary for mayor. Three of the candidates were African American: John White, Dwight Evans, and John Street, all of them friends going back years. But the race got intense early, and David Sirota, then working as the deputy campaign manager for Evans, was part of an effort to cut down White’s support: creating a bogus website, purporting to be the official home page of the White campaign, and using it to promote a racially charged quotation, deliberately taken out of context.

The ruse was soon discovered. Evans, who is now a Democratic member of Congress, fired Sirota. He called Sirota “overzealous” at the time. “I do not want this race to be about race,” Evans said in 1999, calling the site in question an example of “dirty tricks.” The website took a comment that White had made in a broader interview with a Spanish-language weekly, Al Día, and presented the line as if it were an anti-white slogan: “The black and the brown, if we unite, we’re going to control this city.” Local reporters in Philadelphia received emails directing them to the site as though it were part of John White’s campaign.

White, according to news reports at the time, was speaking about the increased political clout African Americans and Latinos could have if they worked together as a coalition. That was February. By the fall, Sirota was hired as the press secretary for Bernie Sanders, then in the House. He was hired by Sanders’s then–chief of staff, Jeff Weaver, who went on to manage Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and remains a senior adviser to the 2020 campaign.

On Friday morning, in response to inquiries from The Atlantic about his 1999 firing, Sirota acknowledged his role in helping create the bogus site. “I deeply regret being involved in this whole incident. I am absolutely ashamed that it happened, and I have felt genuinely terrible about this for 20 years. Even though I was a junior political staffer, I should have known better, and I certainly do today,” Sirota responded by email.

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