This week, four senior staffers from the Kamala Harris campaign – Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks, and Senior Advisors David Plouffe and Stephanie Cutter – sat down with Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer for their first post-election interview.
The interview generated a significant amount of backlash, with critics on the left expressing frustration with the staffers for refusing to take responsibility for missteps, and with Pfeiffer for softball questions.
Maybe Harris was doomed from the start Maybe the macro headwinds & the late candidate swap were always going to be too much to overcome But her top campaign brass talking about “what happened” for 100 min & not saying anything they would’ve done differently in hindsight is insane
I’ve heard a lot of anger from folks connected to the campaign over this podcast but this from a Harris aide might take the cake: “The rare cases where they speak in public shows how insular and controlling these people are, because you can see how fucking thin what they’re saying is.”
David Plouffe has more political expertise/experience in one fingernail than I have in my whole body But my sense is that segmenting ideology along a liberal/moderate/conservative spectrum is honestly pretty dated, isn’t how many voters think about politics these days, and has diminishing analytical utility (especially “moderates”)
Listening to the Pod Save interview with the Harris Campaign leadership, I’m struck by how shallow and detached from governing these people are. They really think their jobs are just to (1) look at polls and (2) string together words that people want to hear. Political strategy beyond “messaging” is just nonexistent to them.
One of the more surprising revelations from the podcast is that – contrary to reporting at the time – the campaign’s polling never had Harris ahead of Trump.
A tricky position for the Harris staffers is that it’s difficult for them to point fingers at Joe Biden (as many pundits, including the PSA boys, are doing) since many of them were the same people running his campaign until he dropped.
Fortunately for this internet newsletter, Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau, – who also co-hosts Crooked Media’s Offline podcast, extolling the virtues of having discussions in-person rather than on social media – is tweeting through it.
One surprising vocal critic is frequent TOTI star Jack Schlossberg – the same Jack Schlossberg who made videos in support of Joe Biden earlier this year.
Oh, Jack. They can’t make me hate you.
Meanwhile, lefty streamer Hasan Piker (whose name has come up in recent “Joe Rogan of the left” conversations) is coming back to Pod Save America, pissing off a whole different set of online liberals because of his harsh criticism of the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris put out this somewhat baffling, contextless (no pun intended) short video. Given that she’s reportedly on vacation (just up the road from your newsletter author!) on the Big Island, I’m not too sure what the thinking here is.
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