It is probably human nature such that it is too much to expect Democrats as a whole to accept a stinging defeat and take some time to heal, then go back to analyze and reorganize. People are too hurt, too upset to think about it with detached rationality. Thus it is most certainly predictable that the infighting has already started and will likely only get dirtier and dirtier until the emotions wear off and time heals some wounds.
Until then, get used to the Biden loyalist camp going after the Harris followers and vice versa. Mediaite has quotes that are worth considering:
HARRIS AIDE: “We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president. Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop there. If Joe Biden wasn’t president there is no reason to think that COVID wouldn’t have been taken care of so valiantly, they would not have passed big big economic legislation dragging this country into the 21st Century, and the U.S. economy be the “envy of the world” as is written everywhere? In the end, the voters wanted change but it is no certainty that they wouldn’t have wanted it more if Joe Biden wasn’t at the helm.
BIDEN AIDE: “There is no singular reason why we lost, but a big reason is because the Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee, and then signed up as the saviors of the campaign only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn’t Obama.”
Now that is a little too much inside baseball. I don’t believe that Obama advisers pushed President Biden out – “Democrats” did. I wrote two years ago that he should wave his hand and say “I got us back, someone else carry the torch” and then retired as a one-term president without weighing in on the nominee. Moreover, it may be fair to point out that Obama did win twice.
Now, let’s hear from an old pro willing to go on the record and hear the different tone:
HARRIS ADVISOR DAVID PLOUFFE: “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough. A devastating loss.”
Yes! Yes, he does say that they inherited a hole – but yes they did in fact inherit a hole and who knows who caused that? There is no blame in that statement. It is the way forward. And then there is this, from a Philadelphia organizer:
“I would have liked to see the Harris campaign, especially the national campaign, coordinate with us a little bit, talk to us a little bit, give use some more resources, show us some respect. It didn’t happen. They were just elitist and went after their own thing.”
Yes, except she lost everywhere. Had she won in other places but then narrowly lost in Pennsylvania maybe he has a legitimate complaint. As is, it comes across as sour grapes and too self-absorbed to blame her for a Pennsylvanian’s loss.
“And now I understand someone in their camp was blaming Joe Biden. Can you imagine blaming Joe Biden for her loss? She lost, he didn’t lose.”
Well, that is true. Ultimately it is the candidate. He is she gets credit for a win and blame for a loss. They know that going in and it’s the gamble they make.
FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE ANDREW YANG: “The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden. If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place.”
Again, it likely would’ve been better had Biden dropped out two years ago. I will point out that he is the one who beat Trump, not Hillary and not Harris. Then again, had he not dropped out in June, it’s possible that Harris wouldn’t have been the candidate and possible that she wouldn’t have gotten the shot in the arm with excitement over the summer. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election..
they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better.”
After the debate, no one in Biden’s camp has any right to think that he would’ve done much better. Harris waxed Trump in her debate and then promptly got waxed in the election. As for faith that he could’ve done better, it’s okay for them to feel their pain with faith that he would’ve done well. It is highly unlikely – but not a sin to have faith in their guy.
DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVE JIM MANLEY: “He shouldn’t have run. This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings. He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”
Yes, well – the time to make this statement is well before the actual election so as to look like a genius and not someone who “knew it all along” but only “really knew it” after the results. This is kind of bush league even if I agree that Biden should have announced he had no plans to run again right after the 2022 election… When I did write it.
And…
MSNBC’S SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND: “And again, the people that said Joe Biden was the problem… Where’s my camera?… I will just note that it is probably not the best idea that Democrats orchestrated a very public stab fest, a proverbial stabbing in the front of the sitting President of the United States of America, and then didn’t use him in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania!”
The problems are self-evident and it is self-evident that those problems go well beyond President Biden or what he could have done in the campaign. Even if Joe Biden campaigned and won Pennsylvania for Harris, she still gets walked in the election.
The voters have spoken even if it is near 50-50. We were happy to take the win in the last 50-50 election and pat ourselves on the back. “We” need to be ready to look at the loss as a problem by the whole, of the whole, and only to be fixed by the whole. For that very reason, people should lay off the blame game, take some time to heal, and then come together to look at what happened and only then analyze why.
In doing so, they can formulate a plan going forward so as to have greater appeal. Until that plan comes together, there is no point in looking back for someone to blame.
God Bless: I can be reached at [email protected] and @JasonMiciak
I agree. There have been things I’ve wanted to say about both Harris and Biden but I’m the first to admit I’m not really in control of my emotions and as a results my thought process when it comes to each person and what might have been done differently. Perhaps, probably even down the road when the proverbial bleeding has stopped I’ll did into it. But for now I’m trying to be cautious and careful about what I say. My general thought is that talk from both Biden and Harris that “we are better than this” as in this country is fundamentally made up mostly of good people simply isn’t true anymore. I sure wanted to believe it although even with the size of Biden’s win in 2020 the fact that ten million MORE people voted for Trump than before has always been on my mind.
Even after the disastrous, destructive cluster-f**k of his first for years the fact that 10 million MORE people voted for him instead of ten million (at least) less worried the hell out of me. Add in knowing how the media works and that it would do all it could to create their ratings (revenue!) generating “horse race” by normalizing Trump rather than explain just how much more dangerous he’d be and harping on anything they could to paint Biden as the old and mentally declining candidate it would be close.
Harris came along and lit up the scene and yet journalists kept propping Trump up. Only in the final days did they start with real warnings but by then it was way too late. But the real issue is that the bulk of Americans are not what the bulk of Americans were for the first half-century of my life. We are NOT, at least not the majority of us the fundamentally decent people our Democratic leaders say we are. And as I told an old friend today, a man of deep faith Christians, and not just the “Evangelicals” but the bulk of Christians in general including many Democrats actually aren’t. At least not in the sense of what Jesus taught. Things like welcome the stranger, help the needy, love your neighbor as yourself and other things. We also discussed the Gospels and not just the four included in the New Testament. And how as children we were taught that Mary Magdaline was a prostitute. That, as other gospels show was a construct of Peter and the early church. To oppress women. My friend completely agreed with me. And like me marveled that so many of those who profess to be Christian joined the RWNJ Evangelicals and voted for Trump.
We are no longer a nation of decent and Christian people. Perhaps both Harris and Biden didn’t understand that and misread the room after Biden’s 2020 win. Whether it had been Biden or Harris we’d have had a campaign along the lines of American showed in 2020 it was tired of Trump and all his chaos and divisiveness. And he’ll be even worse this time but we know America is better than that. Now’s our chance to finally turn the page. That was going to be the message either way. Both Biden and then Harris were wrong.
This internecine sniping that’s going on is sickening because the key players in both camps believed in the same overall message that would frame this campaign! Everyone was wrong. The sooner they and us regular folks admit that the sooner we can get to the hard work of starting to change us back to a flawed people but one that overall wanted to become better if only a little at a time.
On Joyce Vance’s substack yesterday: comment section—college kids new to voting did not remember the trump years because they were only 14-16 years old and like the Hispanics listening to RWNJ radio in Spanish; the Democratic Party still hasn’t gotten the How To Memo that that guy Rush Limbaugh left laying around.
Instead of bemoaning FUX why not BUILD ONE, and it ain’t MSNBC,
Still wondering where those 10 million people who voted last time but didn’t this time went. If they were “too busy” it means they fucking had jobs that were only made possible by Biden/Harris. All the finger pointing discussed in other “analysis” articles here and elsewhere do not discuss this elephant of so many fewer voters for the Ds. Could it all be “woman color, race?” Just add “TV and camera”…
In addition,, here’s that actual comment, I got it wrong, but they both make sense:
One of the most disturbing things I listened to yesterday was a clip of interviews with college students voting for Trump. According to the students: Trump has better policy, he did a great job in his previous four years, he did an interview with Joe Rogan and Kamala didn’t so she must not want to be honest with us!
And I thought the young folks would help save us, not help destroy us (and themselves).
Most reporters today are nothing but gossip columnist. This is the dumbest country on Earth. Until that changes we are doomed. Oh, and the egomaniacs that talk to these reporters are dumber than dirt.
Too much money and too many egos in our political system.
President Biden has been a fantastic president who literally saved our country from the devastation Covid and Orange tyrant caused. VP Harris would have made a terrific president and that is also fact
The country spent four years hearing FJB, go Brandon, President Biden caused inflation, high prices, illegal immigration, and everything else the magats were unhappy about magnified by the shit press, fux, and most of all their wannabe dicktator. Hard to overcome that, no matter who. The idiots refused to listed, learn, read and mostly understand that our country for now has the best economy in the world. But eggs, bread, and gas…
We had the facts but they had the lies, and the marketing arm to push them.
I’ve just seen a video about a young woman who voted for Trump because ‘Biden banned abortion’. And, of course there are pundits saying Biden lost because of his ‘handling of covid’, when that’s actually the reason he was voted in. And he’s spent his entire term coping with it, and quite well too – but Trump ACTUALLY campaigned on ‘Are you better off than four years ago?’.
They had 2 and it is clear this country will not elect a woman for president. The Dems need to face that fact first and foremost. It not fair but none of this is.
The post mortems will continue till long after the dust settles but basically Trump knew his base would slither out from under its rocks when needed. Those dimwit MAGAts in their red Chinese caps who’ve never (and never will) got over a black man being president sure as hell weren’t going to allow some uppity black woman into the White House. They’ll cite all kinds of more innocent reasons but that’s just gaslighting. This election was decided by bigots exercising their racism and misogynism. That was Trumpler’s hole card.
I don’t want to believe that, Jarvis, but I may have to. When the results of the 2008 election came down, I thought the country had turned a corner – thank you, Mitch McConnell for showing me otherwise
First, the Tea Party, and now MAGA. I’ll be 80 in three months, and won’t have to deal with this much longer, but my children and grandchildren, as well as future generations will have a tough row to hoe.