Tampon Tim Morphs Into A-Walz, But That's The Least Of It

Let's see if I can tease out yesterday's developments. JD Vance was on all the alphabet-network Sunday shows, mostly keeping up the "stolen valor" attacks on Walz, although his remarkable performance on a wide range of issues revealed Trump's wisdom in naming Vance his running mate. This is no Mike Pence. But one of his consistent points was that neither Walz himself nor Kamala was on any such show defending him.

In fact, the only Democrat defending Walz yesterday was Nancy Pelosi. Let's look at this.

In an interview that aired Sunday on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki,” Pelosi said, “First of all, it’s a sign of the bankruptcy of their ideas. They don’t have anything to say, so they make up things.”

. . . Pelosi argued the Harris-Walz campaign should “just dismiss” the allegations.

“Yeah, they should just dismiss it, because if people lie, as they are lying, and you hear the lie enough times, it sort of becomes … kind of accepted in their group,” she said. “And so, you have to say, ‘No, that didn’t happen.'”

The problem is that the dirt from people in his former unit keeps coming out, like the former chaplain of his unit callimng him "cowardly", or his former battsalion commander saying he "did not successfully complete any assignment as a Sergeant Major".

But why is Pelosi, now all but retired, the main figure who's coming out in Walz's defense? The reason is twofold. First, it's becoming clear that letting either Walz or Kamala defend him themselves would just make the situation worse. But also, Pelosi owns the pickle the Democrats are currently in -- she pushed Joe out and created the opening that gave them Walz. As Joe said just last night,

“A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic — you’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say [something] … and I thought it’d be a real distraction,” he told “CBS News Sunday Morning.”

This is echoed elsewhere in the Biden camp:

Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser on communications who has since departed for a Harris super PAC, inveighed against Biden’s doubters in Congress and elsewhere in her first interview since the 81-year-old president dropped out of the 2024 race.

“You know, clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave permission to other people to go public,” Dunn told Politico of the growing chorus of Democrats calling on Biden to abandon his run after his debate flop June 27.

Asked whether she was referring to “senators and House members” as well as “when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate,” Dunn shot back, “Absolutely.”

In fact, Pelosi herself took credit for forcing Joe out last week:

Now Pelosi admits she was behind the coup, saying she didn’t like how things were going.

“So I really wanted him to make a decision of a better campaign because they were not facing the fact of what was happening. Just a little background. I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation. I’m not,” she added.

. . . “So my concern was, this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for us this to happen, and the President has to make the decision for that to happen.”

“Let me just say, I won’t say necessarily I knew doing at that time. I knew what I was doing in the whole thing, not just that ship. Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”

It sounds as though, late last week or over the weekend, someone -- that is, someone at the level of the people who can tell Obama and Pelosi what to do -- told Pelosi she broke it, and she'd better fix it. But she isn't the only one responsible:

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) appeared on 770 WABC’s “The Cats Roundtable” Sunday with host John Catsimatidis and dropped a bombshell: the Obamas are actually running Kamala Harris’ campaign behind the scenes.

The story lists numerous Obama alumni who either, like Joe's former campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon, who is now Kamala's campaign chair, or David Plouffe, who will now be joining the campaign, but another story in Politico says it isn't that simple:

Kamala Harris’ campaign is navigating internal tensions as a team of new senior strategists take hold of an operation largely staffed by people hired when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, according to six people, including aides familiar with the dynamics.

Longtime Harris loyalists are also chafing at the continuing presence of some Biden aides known for disparaging the vice president, three of the people said.

. . . Jen O’Malley Dillon, the former Biden White House official and campaign chair, told Harris in a phone call that she needed specific assurances that some of the campaign’s new power players — including David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager — would not dilute her decision-making authority, two of the people told POLITICO.

. . . They described Plouffe’s title — senior adviser for path to 270 and strategy — as severely downplayed given that those duties are typically the purview of a campaign manager.

Let's poke around the edges here. As I pointed out in this post, Walz was vetted and short-listed by a group made up of Obama alumni Jen O'Malley Dillon, former attorney general Eric Holder, and Dana Remus. We don't know exactly how this happened, but the resullt of the whole process was as catastrophic as McGovern's selection of Thomas Eagleton in 1972. And it's starting to look like this was the outcome of Obama's micromanagement of the Harris campaign.

Except that now, a new team of Obama alums, headed by David Plouffe, is coming in to fix the mess that the first team of Obama alums created. But as we're beginning to learn, Kamala herself seems to have an IQ in the dull normal range at best, and she seems to need constant supervision, quite possibly more than Joe, who is thought to have good days and bad. So who gets to run Kamala, the old Obama team or the new one?

This is turning into a cluster[bleep].