Becket Adams writes for National Review Online about Democrats’ latest excuse for their 2024 presidential loss.
Until the architects of Kamala Harris’s doomed presidential campaign exit the public arena, we’ll keep getting fresh rounds of excuses for why none of them are to blame.
Oh, but they are.
The Harris 2024 campaign wasn’t just unlucky or hamstrung by the timing of events. We’ve been over this before. It was a uniquely fumbling mess of staggering incompetence and bizarre missteps, from its incoherent messaging to its tone-deaf reliance on A-list millionaires and billionaires during a period of economic downturn.
With such bewildering mismanagement, it’s no surprise we’ve already seen a cavalcade of face-saving narratives from campaign officials, surrogates, and hangers-on: voters were too sexist, the economy was too shaky, the media were too unfair.
And now, thanks to senior Harris adviser (and former Obama confidant) David Plouffe, we can add another excuse to the list: it was all Joe Biden’s fault.
“The 107-day campaign was a f***ing nightmare,” Plouffe told journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, in their forthcoming book on Biden. “And it’s all Biden. He totally f***ed us.”
The former president can be blamed for many things — especially his refusal to step aside when it was painfully clear he could not beat GOP nominee Donald Trump. But Biden alone isn’t responsible for the Harris 2024 disaster. Harris and her team bear much of the responsibility for how things played out. She would’ve lost just as badly, if not worse, if Biden had stepped down even 200 days earlier.
It wasn’t Biden’s big idea, for example, to wait an astonishing 38 days — during a 107-day campaign! — before putting Harris in front of a camera for her first primetime interview. …
… The terminally online “brat” campaign branding. The stubborn unwillingness to prepare for the few interviews she granted, a habit of laziness that culminated in Harris’s bombing a high-stakes Bret Baier interview on Fox News. Arrogantly squandering an opportunity to appear on the Joe Rogan podcast. … None of this falls on Joe Biden.
