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In the three weeks since the election, there have been some entertaining attempts at navel gazing by senior Democratic voices, including former Bill Clinton campaign guru James Carville, that have been pretty on point about what went wrong and where the party needs to move in order to realign with a large chunk of the voting populace. Ed’s write-up of Serpenthead’s latest media appearance is here. 

In other places around regime media, even in advance of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’ DNC donor call, the campaign autopsy continued in some pretty remarkable ways. On NewsNation with Chris Cuomo, Democrat megadonor John Morgan of the very powerful law firm Morgan and Morgan didn’t just critique Harris’ performance and resource management during the campaign, but stuck a fork in her for any future campaign she might envision running. 

But the main event, the premiere after action report, if you will, took place on PodSaveAmerica, the left-wing podcast run by the Barack Obama policy kids – Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and Dan Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer was Obama’s strategy and comms advisor, and hosted a roundtable of the senior members of Harris/Walz ’24 – Jen O’Malley-Dillon, Harris’ campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, who served as the deputy campaign manager, longtime Democratic operative Stephanie Cutter, who served the Harris campaign as senior advisor for strategy and communications, and David Plouffe, who officially was the senior advisor to the Harris campaign, but unofficially was the conduit for marching orders from former President Obama. 

The purpose of an after action report, of course, is storied in the military. Rank pretty much goes out the window. Everyone involved in a mission is treated as an equal, and nothing is spared in criticism. Every aspect of the mission is parsed and discussed, criticized openly if necessary, sometimes very heated, so that the team learns from the mistakes and the next mission is more lethal and effective. 

In hospitals, doctors often have to go through a murder board, where a panel of colleagues nitpick the treatment given in a specific case so as to learn and improve overall patient care. The point of all this is to have different viewpoints all there to speak freely so the entire group learns. 

That’s not what happened on PodSaveAmerica. The host, Pfeiffer, and the panel were all part of the campaign. There were no other voices from outside the senior camp to offer criticism. It was pure, unadulterated denial and copium. For me as a conservative, it was nothing short of spectacular.

Toure’, one of MSNBC’s political contributors, appeared on Joy Reid’s ReidOut program, and reminded people of Ms. O’Malley-Dillon’s 2023 attempt to rid the campaign of Kamala Harris. 

So O’Malley-Dillon was not a fan of Kamala to such an extent that she tried to convince Joe Biden to dump her before launching his reelection bid. Of course, Biden kept her as a strategic move, calculating that no sane person would throw Biden overboard due to age and infirmity when they’d be stuck with Harris, who was less popular than Biden. 

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer tried to draw into an inside straight. They were able to push Biden to the curb, but they couldn’t keep him from blessing Harris as an albatross around the neck of the DNC, dooming the party to their worst-case scenario. O’Malley-Dillon was not only unsuccessful in engineering a more winnable ticket in 2023, she became saddled in mid-2024 with running a campaign for that same person she tried to dispose of several months prior. 

One of the early critiques of Kamala Harris, one that stuck early and throughout her entire campaign, was her inability to conduct interviews without looking like an abject fool. It was obvious the campaign delayed as long as humanly possible having Harris talk to anyone off prompter until internal polling gave them no other option but to put her in harm’s way. Now that the campaign is in the rearview mirror, O’Malley Dillon is gaslighting everyone on Harris and interviews. 

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and I’m thankful for a whole lot this year especially – my adorable wife, my kids, the ability to write here at Hot Air, podcasting at Duane’s World, producing a talk radio show that affords me opportunities to fill in and guest host, and that the country got this election right and we dodged a bullet. I’m immensely thankful. But I’m especially thankful for the Democratic Party, because their lack of self-awareness is both encouraging for continued Republican governance and a rich vein of material for show prep. 

No, you rubes, it’s not the fact that Kamala was horrible in interviews. You just do not understand, O’Malley-Dillon says. The problem was the media. They asked stupid questions. Their inability to craft the correct questions in the proper way that would elicit the font of wisdom that resides in the very soul of Kamala Harris was the real problem the Harris campaign could not overcome. According to everyone on that panel, the regime media was harder on Harris, in some ways, than they were on Donald Trump. You know you’ve reached peak delusion when the campaign staff for the Democratic candidate for president is blaming the regime media for her loss.  

If you’re Sunny Hostin on The View, after reading a string of legal disclaimers after preceding commentary statements all week long, this has to be especially maddening. It was Hostin who asked Harris the question about would she would have done different from Biden over the past four years. Harris whiffed badly, said nothing comes to mind. But according to Jen O’Malley-Dillon, Hostin was to blame for that clip going viral. Everyone else on that panel sat there silent as a churchmouse. There was no pushback to that analysis. They agreed with her explanation. The denial is so deep-seated, it’s now embedded in their DNA. Not one person on that podcast could admit the real problem was Kamala Harris is physically and mentally incapable of uttering a coherent thought that was not written for her ahead of time. A few hours after this podcast, Harris put the lie to O’Malley-Dillon’s spin. 

If this podcast would have been an after action report of any value, they would have brought in Carville. They would have brought in other senior Democrats to tell them how they screwed up. This exercise was not anything other than blame shifting. 

David Plouffe correctly outlined the demographic problem Harris faced, and that her only path to majorities in swing states and 270 Electoral votes was to peel away disaffected Republicans still unhappy with Donald Trump. Their strategy? Calling Trump Hitler at every turn. In a vacuum, it certainly is a deployable strategy that Democrats have used for decades against Republican candidates, from George W. Bush through Mitt Romney to Trump. 

So it turns out, Plouffe says matter-of-factly, that calling Trump Hitler bothered a lot of voters. He then goes on to defend the strategy of using it, and why they went full Godwin’s Law, for four-plus minutes. Here’s the problem. Nowhere in Plouffe’s answer, nor with anyone else on that set – the host, other panelists, was the recognition of why the strategy bothered voters. 

If everyone is Hitler, then no one is Hitler. If everybody you oppose is a Nazi, you cheapen the supreme evil Adolf Hitler personified in Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s. If you call Donald Trump a fascist, you minimize the Holocaust, where fascism mass murdered over six million Jews. That’s why voters were bothered by the rhetoric. The disaffected Republicans Plouffe so desperately needed to add to the Harris coalition know their history. They understand what happened in World War II. They’re not antisemitic. They’re center-right, and they may not like the comportment of Donald Trump one little bit, but comparing him to Hitler is beyond ridiculous. It’s off-putting. Plouffe admits the tactic didn’t work, but he can’t bring himself to think through why. That’s the fatal flaw with the current Democratic Party. They don’t see the moral problem with calling everything Hitler. To the Democratic consultants and strategists, it’s still an available arrow in the quiver to be pulled out next time. If this were a true murder board or after action report, that Hitler arrow would be taken out of the quiver, snapped in half, burned, and the arrowhead melted into a little ball.

Then, in another dose of gaslighting, Plouffe pivots from defending the use of Godwin’s Law to claiming it was not a significant part of the campaign anyway. Excuse me, but the entirety of Kamala Harris’ campaign pitch was Trump is Hitler, federalizing abortion on demand, and how awful Trump was on J6. That’s it. That’s all they had. Plouffe may think he’s being transparent here, but he’s just lying to his audience. He’s too smart to be that ignorant. 

The last bit is from Stephanie Cutter. Their media strategy came up, and whether or not they made the best use of available podcasts. 

Sure, we wanted to do the Joe Rogan podcast, but he’s in Texas, and that’s a long way away from all the swing states we were living in, Cutter began. Except she cut the legs out from under her own argument when the Beyonce non-concert debacle in Houston took place. If Cutter’s argument is that it was super important to shuttle between the seven swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and that’s why we couldn’t waste a day in Texas visiting the most downloaded podcast in the country, that’s one thing. It’s crazy stupid, but it’s certainly a strategy.

Cutter’s defense of the Beyonce Houston non-concert was that it was to showcase abortion. They believed Texas was the flashpoint for the abortion issue, and they felt it was important to go to the Lone Star State for that appearance only. Texas ended up going for Donald Trump by 14 points. As it turns out, Texas voted for Trump by a bigger margin than New York voting for Kamala Harris. There simply is no defense for her media strategy other than trying to wallpaper over Harris’ innate inability to handle interviews.  

Finally, Susan Page of USA Today was on Morning Joe with Morning Jonathan. And to add insult to injury for the left, they can’t even take solace in the protests, riots and expressions of rage the country saw in 2016 after Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. This time, the left got thumped enough that they’ve just turned around and walked away from the public square. That’s the worst of all possible worlds for activist journalists and reporters – getting people ginned up, losing soundly, and having those people turn you off. 

Don’t worry, Democrats will get their mojo back at some point. I’m just thankful that as of right now, there are no indications that’s going to happen anytime soon. The strategists and consultants are too busy counting their share of the $1.5 billion dollars Kamala Harris blew through to be bothered with 2028. 

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