November 27, 2024

JIM GERAGHTY: Harris Campaign Staffers Offer Their Excuses.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation — “assertion” might be a better term — is Plouffe revealing, “Even post-debate, we had ourselves down in the battleground states . . . I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”

From this, some right-of-center folks are arguing that all the public polling — which mostly showed a close race in those swing states, so not wildly far from the final results — was nonsense and an effort to depress Republican turnout. I would just point out that the narrative that Harris was always trailing, and that internal polling always had her behind even during her best news cycles is awfully convenient for anyone who wants to argue the race was always unwinnable. Moments later, Plouffe says, “In the end, it was a jump-ball race. We needed some things to break our way.”

As our Alex Welz reports, O’Malley Dillon disputed the criticism that Harris was avoiding interviews. “Real people heard in some way that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump that I think that was a problem. And then, on top of that, we would do an interview, and . . . the questions were small and process-y.”

This is an absurd reimagining of quite recent history. You and I were there. Mary Katharine Ham looked up the dates: Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris on July 21, and her first interview was with Dana Bash on Aug 29. That’s about six weeks of no interviews!

The second priority of these staffers and anyone else in the current leadership of the Democratic Party is to persuade everyone — including future clients and bosses — that the race was winnable, but Harris herself couldn’t win it.

I suspect that is why the Twitter/X account of the Democratic National Committee released a 30-second snippet of Kamala Harris’s full remarks that makes the vice president appear and sound thoroughly, embarrassingly inebriated. (Note that the full ten-minute video doesn’t make Harris look quite so bad.)

We’ve heard for years that she’s a difficult and dysfunctional boss and that many of her staffers hate her. Now, we have definitive proof. Note that the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee is Jaime Harrison and the current vice chair is . . . Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. That tweet is a primal scream of, “This defeat wasn’t my fault!”

(As I noted last night, besides the sense that you can almost smell the alcohol through the screen and the fear that if you lit a match around Harris she might burst into flame, her chosen message of “don’t let anyone take your power from you” is perhaps less than ideal as a theme during the peaceful transfer of power.)

Of course, there’s another reason the official Democratic Party house organ dropped that tweet last night:

But still there’s always 2028, maybe even 2032, right?! Could Kamala Harris be the next Richard Nixon? I think she’s got the Secret Honor aspect down cold:

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Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll