Veterans of her campaign are trying to offload responsibility for its failures, but it’s just about self-preservation.
Veterans of her campaign are trying to offload responsibility for its failures, but it’s just about self-preservation.
U ntil the architects of Kamala Harris’s doomed presidential campaign exit the public arena, we’ll keep getting fresh rounds of excuses for why none of them are to blame.
Oh, but they are.
The Harris 2024 campaign wasn’t just unlucky or hamstrung by the timing of events. We’ve been over this before. It was a uniquely fumbling mess of staggering incompetence and bizarre missteps, from its incoherent messaging to its tone-deaf reliance on A-list millionaires and billionaires during a period of economic downturn.
With such bewildering mismanagement, it’s no surprise we’ve already seen a cavalcade of face-saving narratives from campaign officials, surrogates, and hangers-on: voters were too sexist, the economy was too shaky, the media were too unfair.
And now, thanks to senior Harris adviser (and former Obama confidant) David Plouffe, we can add another excuse to the list: it was all Joe Biden’s fault.
“The 107-day campaign was a f***ing nightmare,” Plouffe told journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, in their forthcoming book on Biden. “And it’s all Biden. He totally f***ed us.”
The former president can be blamed for many things — especially his refusal to step aside when it was painfully clear he could not beat GOP nominee Donald Trump. But Biden alone isn’t responsible for the Harris 2024 disaster. Harris and her team bear much of the responsibility for how things played out. She would’ve lost just as badly, if not worse, if Biden had stepped down even 200 days earlier.
It wasn’t Biden’s big idea, for example, to wait an astonishing 38 days — during a 107-day campaign! — before putting Harris in front of a camera for her first primetime interview.
When Harris secured the nomination, she inherited the Biden reelection campaign’s $96 million war chest, which would balloon later to nearly $1 billion. It wasn’t Biden who torched all that cash and reportedly finished the campaign $20 million in debt. He didn’t sign off on spending an estimated $100,000 to build a custom podcast set for a softball interview. He didn’t approve a 50-stop abortion-rights bus tour — at a time when the issue of abortion barely cracked voters’ top ten concerns.
Nor was it Biden’s idea to lean into the mortifying “White Dudes for Harris” gimmick, which bombed so badly it got mocked at the Al Smith Dinner — a dinner Harris skipped in favor of a bizarre, prerecorded segment featuring an SNL character from 30 years ago.
The terminally online “brat” campaign branding. The stubborn unwillingness to prepare for the few interviews she granted, a habit of laziness that culminated in Harris’s bombing a high-stakes Bret Baier interview on Fox News. Arrogantly squandering an opportunity to appear on the Joe Rogan podcast, which caters to millions of listeners, many of whom are young men, a demographic the Harris campaign desperately wanted to please. The eleventh-hour press conference outside the VP’s residence, which focused on an Atlantic article no one would remember 48 hours later. None of this falls on Joe Biden.
It was Harris and her team who decided to wade into a bogus scandal involving Trump and Gold Star families at Arlington Cemetery, unintentionally reminding everyone that the losses those families suffered happened under the Biden-Harris administration.
Whose idea was it to conjoin “joy” and “Trump is Hitler” as central campaign themes? Did Biden tell Harris to skip over popular Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as a running mate in favor of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has all the charisma of a napkin dispenser?
It’s also not Biden’s fault that Harris spent most of the race running away from her previous positions. He never told her to back taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants. He didn’t advise her to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan — only to backtrack later.
Was it the former president’s idea to spend the final days of the campaign barnstorming the country with Representative Liz Cheney, a figure admired only by a supremely niche and increasingly narrow slice of the electorate and disliked with near-equal intensity by others on both sides of the aisle?
Harris had no message. She made herself unavailable. She refused basic preparation. And she spent more time debating Kamala 2020 than Donald Trump.
None of this can be laid at Biden’s feet.
Yes, the Harris campaign began behind the eight ball. But its problems went far beyond the calendar. The idea that she just needed more time is belied by the reality that the more voters saw of Harris, the lower her approval numbers sank.
Blaming Biden is just a clever way to dodge accountability, much as James Comey and the Russians became scapegoats for the Democrats’ 2016 loss.
One hundred days, 200 days, 300 days — none of it would have changed the fact that Harris 2024 was a historically bad campaign, led by a historically inept candidate, and advised by people whose core competence is avoiding accountability.