Donna Brazile
Donna Brazile

Former Democratic National Committee chairperson Donna Brazile worries that her progressive friends may be upset that she signed on as a contributor to Fox News. They need to suck it up.

Brazile, who will provide political analysis on Fox News and Fox Business Network, is doing what the Democratic National Committee should do: engage with conservative viewers.

The DNC decided to ban Fox from participating in the coverage of its presidential candidate debates after chairman Tom Perez read Jane Mayer’s March 11 “The Making of the Fox News White House” blockbuster published in the New Yorker.

Where’ve you been, Tom? Did it really take Mayer’s epic to convince you that Rupert Murdoch’s network is in the tank for the Republicans?

Do the names Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, a pair “treated very unfairly” (to steal Donald Trump’s favorite description of the “fake news” coverage of him) by Fox ring a bell?

While the majority of Fox viewers are conservative, the network does attract some independents who are hardly committed to voting for Trump in 2020.

And as the Democrats learned so painfully in 2016, every vote counts.

A less than 100K Republican to Democrat vote swing in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin would have put Hillary in the White House and Trump either in Moscow doing deals with Putin, or preparing his legal defense.

The Democrats don’t have the luxury of writing off all Fox watchers.

Perez should follow the lead of Brazile, who as former campaign manager for Al Gore’s presidential race, knows a thing or two about tight races.

“There’s an audience on Fox News that doesn’t hear enough from Democrats,” she said in a statement. “We have to engage that audience and show Americans of every stripe what we stand for rather than retreat into our ‘safe spaces,’ where we simply agree with each other. For there is no safety in self-limiting numbers.”

Brazile promises that her commentaries “dish it out straight.”

The pride of New Orleans plans to use as much hot sauce as folks expect. The hotter the better. Donna should make a big pot of gumbo loaded with hot sauce for Perez.