For what it’s worth, I think the single most important thing that needs to happen in the Democratic Party is to fire everyone associated with the disastrously-mismanaged Harris campaign.  For now all I see are excuses, including in a much-discussed podcast.  If the Democrats can’t come to terms with what they did wrong, it’s hard to imagine them ever doing anything right. The campaign validated the charge that Democrats are arrogant elitists with no respect for the people they claim to represent. In so doing they didn’t just lose the election, they discredited everything they stand for.

If Biden had run, he would have run on his record.  While Biden’s favorability rating was low, the Biden economy was the envy of the Western world, inflation was lowest here, and the country had taken important steps for climate and infrastructure.  Biden was replaced not because he was unsuccessful but because he was no longer up to the demands of campaigning.  We had expected him to lead the fight on his record in the first debate, and were shocked when he wasn’t up to it.  Harris was put in place to address that problem.

Harris had a tough job, to put together her own campaign with only a few months before the election.  So she had to rely on party regulars to make that happen.  Poor Harris.  Poor all of us.

Harris’ genius handlers threw all of that out for a new approach.  Because of the low Biden numbers, we wouldn’t defend any of Biden’s accomplishments.  Instead Harris would become a brand new candidate, not linked to Biden’s problems, and exciting for the future.

There were two obvious problems with that:

–        It was an outright lie.  If you want to be the adult in the room, you can start by not lying.

–        It didn’t address the reasons for Biden’s low rating—in particular the pain of inflation with higher prices continuing to the present day.  In answer to the pressing question—who is to blame for my pain?—the answer was Biden, but he’s not here, so let’s just move on.  Who were we kidding?  That was acceptable to Democrats, because we believed in Biden’s economy, but for anyone else it was an infuriating punting of responsibility.

The geniuses presumably decided they were so much smarter than the voters that no one would notice.  But in fact it was the geniuses who were morons, and the voters knew exactly what was going on.  The core of the Harris campaign was an insulting and infuriating lie.

I went door-to-door with the campaign, and ran into this problem constantly.  I and other people tried to point this out to the campaign, but we were informed by campaign organizers that there were no channels up to the campaign from the field.   No one cared about all those people talking to voters.

The geniuses had a few other equally brilliant contributions:

–        Since they weren’t defending Biden’s record on the economy, they didn’t want to talk about inflation at all.  In particular no one was making the point (that you read everywhere now that the election is over!) that all three of Trump’s major measures (tariffs, tax cuts, and deportations) are wildly inflationary.  So virtually none of Trump voters thought there was any risk to their vote.

–        They repeated Hillary Clinton’s mistake of counting on big Republican defections, to the point that they went out of the way to tone down anything that might offend Republicans.  One terrible mistake was to moderate Walz’s behavior in the Vice Presidential debate—where the Harris campaign lost momentum that it never recovered.  The debate served no purpose other than to “sanewash” truly hateful Vance. Further no one ever mentioned George Bush’s disastrous 2008 crash—which is certainly relevant for Trump’s proposed policies.

This election ultimately came down to a contest of dishonesty and arrogance on both sides.  We need to recognize that the Democrats were not better than Trump in that respect.  Who knows if an honest campaign would have won, but in our eagerness for dishonesty we lost big with the people most hurt by inflation, as shown by this exit poll:

I’m not claiming there were no other issues–after all Netanyahu and Trump made sure we had a mess in the Middle East with even an October surprise in Lebanon.  But mistakes need to be acknowledged.  After this disaster there needs to be an accounting for consultants and anyone in the campaign organization making $500K or more. If we don’t fire them all we deserve what we get.

This election reminds me of experiences I’ve had in business.  A bunch of people in a room are working on a serious problem, and someone (usually in sales) gets up and announces “we need to think outside the box.”  What followed invariably was something impossibly unethical, some way of cheating customers where they couldn’t figure out what happened until too late.  Here the problem is inflation.  Let’s think outside the box—we’ll put all that awful stuff on Biden and walk away scott free!