I pay some attention to commencement speakers, as I beleive it tells you an awful lot about a place. This one was too ridiculous to ignore.
Apparently Reince Preibus was unavailable....
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Commencement Speaker
DONNA BRAZILE
Renowned Political Strategist and Commentator
Vice Chair of Voter Registration and Participation, Democratic National Committee
"Donna Brazile is hard to ignore, given her penchant for candor and 20 years' experience in the making of Democratic presidential candidates. She feels that getting a candidate elected takes the same artful mix as cooking up a fine gumbo. And her political opinions are as fiery as Tabasco."
–The New York Times
Veteran Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile is vice chair of voter registration and participation at the Democratic National Committee and the former chair of the DNC's Voting Rights Institute. She is also the author of the best-selling memoir Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, a syndicated newspaper columnist for Universal Uclick, a columnist for Ms. Magazine, and an on-air contributor to CNN, NPR, and ABC, where she regularly appears on This Week. She also made two cameo appearances on CBS's The Good Wife. After all, acting, as she will say, is the key to success in politics.
Aside from working for the full recovery of her native New Orleans, Brazile's passion is encouraging young people to vote, working within the political system in order to strengthen it, and running for public office. In her presentations, she addresses our current political environment, hot-topic legislation, campaigns, and voting.
Political Beginnings. Brazile began her political career at the age of nine when she worked to elect a City Council candidate who had promised to build a playground in her neighborhood. The candidate won, the swing sets were installed, and a lifelong passion for political progress was ignited. Four decades and innumerable state and local campaigns later, Brazile has worked on every presidential campaign from 1976 through 2000, when she served as campaign manager for former Vice President Al Gore, becoming the first African-American woman to manage a presidential campaign.
Accolades. In August 2009, O, The Oprah Magazine chose Brazile as one of its "20 Remarkable Visionaries" for the magazine's first-ever O Power List. Washingtonian magazine named her among the "100 Most Powerful Women," Essence magazine called her one of the "Top 50 Women in America," and she received the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's highest award for political achievement.
Brazile is also the proud recipient of honorary doctorate degrees from Louisiana State University, North Carolina A&T State University, and Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically Black, Catholic institution of higher education in the United States.
She is currently on the board of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Brazile is also the founder and managing director of Brazile & Associates LLC.
