Happy Busiest Travel Day of the Year and Thanksgiving Eve, everyone. On the menu today: Top staffers on the Kamala Harris presidential campaign appear on a podcast and explain how the defeat is everyone’s fault but theirs; a new video of the vice president raises sobering concerns; and a look at the bureaucratic obstacles that will greet the incoming Trump cabinet.
The Staffers’ Lament
Keep in mind that any former high-level staffers and strategists with the Kamala Harris campaign have a vested interest in convincing everyone — including future clients and bosses — that the race was unwinnable from the start.
If Harris had a serious chance to win and big advantages — more than $2 billion in fundraising, no primary, the concerted support of Hollywood, much of the media, etc. — and she and her campaign still blew it, well, it reflects very badly on those former high-level staffers and strategists. But if geriatric Joe Biden and his administration had dug an insurmountable hole by the time Harris took over as the nominee, and Trump was always ahead, well, these campaign staffers are like Sisyphus — they did their best in an impossible task. Or perhaps they see themselves like Texians at the Alamo: going down fighting in a noble but doomed cause.
Dan Pfieffer, the White House communications director under Barack Obama and co-host of Pod Save America, sat down with four beleaguered high-level staffers of the Harris presidential campaign — senior adviser David Plouffe, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks, and senior adviser for strategy messaging Stephanie Cutter — for their first public assessment of what went wrong.
The quartet’s message on the podcast was, as a Huffington Post headline bluntly summarized, the “campaign was just doomed.” Apparently, it was just impossible for Harris to tell Sunny Hostin or anyone else anything she would have done differently than Biden:
“We knew we had to show her as her own person and point to the future and not try to rehash the past,” Cutter said. “But she also felt that she was part of the administration, and unless we said something like, ‘Well, I would have handled the border completely differently,’ we were never going to satisfy anybody.”
“She had tremendous loyalty to President Biden,” Cutter continued. “Imagine if we said, ‘Well, we would have taken this approach on the border.’ Imagine the round of stories coming out after that, of people saying, ‘Well, she never said that in the meeting.’”
Fulks said that there was no point in responding to the Trump campaign’s ad showcasing Harris, on camera, justifying taxpayers covering the costs of gender-transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners:
“I ultimately don’t believe that it was about the issue of ‘trans.’ I think that it made her seem out of touch, and it was sort of a pseudo-economic ad underneath it, because he was saying you’re going to pay for it with taxpayer money,” Fulks said, adding that the fact the ads used video of Harris stating her position in her own words made them more damaging.
“We tested a ton of responses to this, direct responses, and none of them ever tested as well as basically her talking about what she would do . . . the future, the type of president that she would be,” Fulks said. . . .
“If we spent this entire race pushing back on immigration attacks or crime attacks and pushing back against trans attacks, at what point are we bringing Trump down and/or introducing the vice president on our own terms?” Fulks said. “We’re playing on their field.”
Really? Harris couldn’t come out and say, “Hey, in retrospect, maybe the taxpayers shouldn’t pay for gender-transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners”? That flip-flop would have hurt her more than saying nothing for a long stretch and then insisting she would just be following the law by that position?
Early in the interview, Jen O’Malley Dillon downplayed the scale of the defeat. “I do think we saw some lighter turnout in some of the areas we had hoped, but the difference of a point here or there, which obviously, in a close race, makes a huge difference.”
The only state within one percentage point was Wisconsin, at nine-tenths of a percentage point. (That still adds up to more than 29,000 votes.) Michigan and Pennsylvania were 1.4 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively. Trump won Georgia by 2.2 percentage points, Nevada by 3.1 percentage points, North Carolina by 3.2 percentage points, and supposed swing state Arizona by 5.5 percentage points. (The Corner, November 4: “Arizona, the swing state that wasn’t.”)
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.)
As alluded to earlier this week, it’s not hard to find Republicans and right-of-center folks who want Harris to run for president again. It’s Democratic megadonors like John Morgan who are saying things like, “This disqualifies her forever. . . . If you can’t run a campaign, you can’t run America,” and it’s Democratic strategists like Theryn Bond who are saying, “I hope she doesn’t, and if she is relying on those same advisers that advised her this cycle, that’s not who I would listen to.”
The Gritty Reality of the Federal Bureaucracy
A commenter responding to the latest episode of The Editors podcast notes of Trump’s incoming cabinet nominees, “All of them should be required to watch the entire run of Yes Minister the 40-year-old BBC show that perfectly describes the aims of the bureaucracy to undermine their elected leaders. Also, it’s just fun.” Amen. It is not a coincidence that the surname of the shameless, ruthless, and gleefully wasteful protagonist of The Weed Agency is “Humphrey.”
When I express doubts that Mehmet Oz is not going to want to stick around for four years as Medicare and Medicaid administrator — it’s a number-cruncher job! — it is not “intellectual arrogance,” as another commenter contends. It’s familiarity with the world these cabinet officials are about to enter.
I’d love to see the federal bureaucracy dramatically cut down and for government operations to become cost-efficient and streamlined, and for a metaphorical meat cleaver chop away the waste, fraud, and abuse.
Even a Vanderbilt study that largely defended the federal workforce was forced to concede, “Where do underlying beliefs about bloated bureaucracies, deep state resistance, and gross inefficiencies come from? In part, they come from experience. Like any large organization, whether it is the federal government or a local cable company, federal agencies can be bureaucratic — slow, unresponsive, and impenetrable. When organizations do not get to recoup the money they save (agencies do not), there are fewer incentives to operate efficiently.”
Civil servants will rarely if ever tell an appointed head of a department or agency that they won’t make a proposed change. They’ll say yes, and then start running into problems and delays. “We need to run this by the lawyers.” “The meeting to figure out how we’re going to do this got postponed to next week.” “We need [so-and-so] to sign off on this.” “We need to post this proposed change in the Federal Register and have the legally required 30-to-180-day public comment period.” “This is going to require money from the budget that we don’t have.” (You would be amazed how often a proposal to save money is considered too expensive.)
Check out the rulemaking process!
And for everyone who says, “If they drag their feet on making changes, fire them” — that’s the whole point, federal workers are difficult to fire, but not quite impossible:
It is nearly impossible to remove an entrenched, poorly performing or even malfeasant federal employee. The red tape is too thick to penetrate. The bureaucracy protects itself.
Even the Office of Personnel Management, the federal agency charged with creating and enforcing governmentwide human resources policy, concedes there is a pervasive sense that firing a fed is difficult. “The procedures for terminating employees are perceived as a lengthy process,” says Tim Curry, OPM’s deputy associate director for partnership and labor relations.
Undoubtedly, there are major hurdles to removing an employee from federal service; federal workers are guaranteed levels of due process not typically provided to employees in the private sector. Whether that’s a problem is the subject of a lengthy and nuanced debate, but the mere perception that incompetent federal employees operate with impunity creates fractures that divide agencies from their workforces, the legislative branch from the executive branch, managers from their employees and the American people from their government.
“Whether or not it is a fair statement,” says Dan Blair, president and CEO of the congressionally chartered National Academy of Public Administration, “it becomes reality.”
Some of Trump’s appointees know what they’re getting into — they’ve worked in government before and know the tricks of how a bureaucracy resists reforms through death by a thousand cuts. If they’ve served in the House or Senate, they’ve likely served on committees and heard a thousand excuses in oversight hearings. But for some of the others . . . I guess we’ll see.
ADDENDUM: In this season of gratitude, thanks to everyone who contributed to our fall webathon.