“In 107 days, what typically takes us a year and a half to two years in our presidential campaign, we were defining someone who was wholly undefined from the start, trying to remind people about the opponent and what life was like underneath him, and also take into account what the political environment was and the realities that we had to deal with,” the Harris – Waltz campaign senior adviser for strategy messaging Stephanie Cutter said on the November 26th episode of the progressive podcast “Pod Save America,” hosted by Dan Pfeiffer.
“When asked on ‘Pod Save America’ if Harris should or should not have done more to distance herself from Biden,” summarized The Epoch Times, campaign chair Jen “O’Malley Dillon said that it wouldn’t have helped to separate herself from Biden by cherry-picking what should have been done instead.
“Look, vice presidents never break with their presidents,” O’Malley Dillon said. “The only time in recent memory is when Pence broke with Trump.”
Harris chose to remain loyal to Biden to avoid changing precedent, O’Malley Dillon said.
“Our focus was to look at the future,” she said.
On the failure of the campaign to secure a spot on the most influential podcast in the world, Ms. Cutter was politic: “We had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team. They were great. They wanted us to come on. We wanted to come on. Will she do it sometime in the future? Maybe. Who knows. But it didn’t ultimately impact the outcome one way or the other.”
The general consensus of podcasters seems to be that Kamala Harris appearing on Joe Rogan’s Spotify podcast would have only doomed her campaign. Rogan is known for authentic long-form interviews; few observers believe Harris could fake authenticity for ten minutes, not to mention two hours.
As for these excuses made by campaign staffers, eighty-year-old Democrat campaign guru James Carville is on record with a ‘slightly different’ take:
“The vice president (Harris) was thinking about going on the Joe Rogan show and a lot of the younger progressive staffers pitched a hissy fit,” Carville said.
While Carville reiterated Harris’s staff claim that avoiding Rogan was not the determining factor for her election loss, he unleashed a vulgar rant about their management of her losing campaign.
“When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, let me tell you exactly what you tell these people: What I would tell them, ‘Not only am I not interested in your f***ing opinion, I’m not even going to call you by your name. You’re 23 years old. I don’t really give a s*** what you think.’”
“James Carville rips Kamala Harris staffers over choice to skip Joe Rogan podcast,” Toronto Sun (November 28, 2024).
In point of fact, Ms. Cutter was born in 1968 and Ms. Dillon in 1976.
1 reply on “What Went Wrong?”
At this stage, anyone thought to attend to Carville’s advice might as well tell voters in their teens and early twenties that he or she doesn’t care what they think. Meanwhile, the fools on The View are rather older than that, but anyone giving them a veto would be foolish for exactly the same reason as anyone would be foolish to give a young progressive a veto. Age is irrelevant here. And Carville himself illustrates that one can get be rather old without wising-up.
Harris was well defined; she just wasn’t appealingly defined. In her time as Vice President, she came to be widely perceived as someone impaired. Harris lost because she wasn’t capable of doing as her handlers wanted. She would have been elevated to the Presidency in early 2022 if she could have learned her lines and hit her marks. But she wouldn’t have been an improvement on the doddering old fool in the Oval Office, so he got to stay, and couldn’t be prevented from seeking a second term until the role-playing became unbearable for those who’d been eating the toads. And, in a moment of spite, the Biden family used his Twitter account to endorse Harris, exactly because she wasn’t going to be an improvement on the doddering old fool.