The Democratic National Committee released its long-awaited “autopsy” this week on the 2024 presidential election, generating all manner of backlash. On today’s Editors podcast, Noah says, “We’re 18 months out from this thing now. This is a totally useless exercise at this point.”
“I was going through it — skimming, because it’s 200 pages long — but what I was skimming was just a bunch of nonsense,” says Noah. “A lot of it reads like it was written by ChatGPT because it’s so saccharin. The prose is just so highfalutin and kind of obnoxious.”
A number of people have been pushing for this document’s release, and as Noah points out, “When you covet information like this and refuse to release it for long stretches of time, it is going to create the conditions for people to speculate about why it’s not being released. And that lends itself to conspiracy theorizing. And there was a lot of conspiracy theorizing around this.”
Dan says that some parts of the autopsy were worth considering, such as the “section on just how Obama hollowed out the state parties. And that’s just an enduring theme of the last 20 years of American politics is hollowing out of state and local party infrastructure on both sides. I think that’s useful, even if it’s obvious, it’s useful for Democrats to read. And then just reminding Democrats that in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the kind of blue-dog centrist Democratic Party was born, and it became incredibly effective for 20 years.”
“It’s useful for Democrats to see that, too, because if there is a solution, it’s that.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.