Someone Else Notices There Was Never A Plan B

Much of the second-guessing so far over the Harris cmpaign has come from the left, arguing that it should have brought racial identity and Marxism more to the fore, which were what the working class really wanted, or something like that. Via Real Clear Politics, one such piece from The Nation unintentionally stumbles on a worthwhile insight. No, Kamala Harris Staffers Did Not Run a “Flawless” Campaign:

Quentin Fulks told Pod Save America, “We were honestly in, in crisis management mode of keeping President Biden in the race.… Trump’s favorability numbers were creeping up as Plouffe said, and we had to do something about that as well. And so it was a lot of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but there really was no sort of contingency planning to turn the race over to her right after that debate or at any point until President Biden definitively said he wasn’t going to continue on.”

The fact that there was no contingency planning even after Joe Biden’s horrendous debate performance against Donald Trump in June is shocking. Yet it is confirmed by Time magazine, which reports: “Biden let his top hands know on July 21 that he’d be dropping out of the race. O’Malley Dillon said she and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez both cried that day, and insisted there had been zero planning for that moment. ‘Not one ounce,’ O’Malley Dillon said.”

What this tells me is that the top people in the campaign, O’Malley Dillon and Chavez Rodriguez, were never in the loop. In fact, contingency planning was above their pay grade. They were both Biden loyalists and would never have seen the need for it in the first place, but if either of them had said, at any point, "Gee, just playing devil's advocate here, but shouldn't we put together some kind of contingency plan?" they'd have been fired. Not by Joe or Dr Jill, neither of them was in the loop, either, although Dr Jill was starti8ng to catch on.

They would have been fired by Pelosi, who wasn't just in the loop, she owned the loop.

The author of the piece, Jeet Heer, gets one big thing wrong:

The original sin of the 2024 election was Joe Biden’s selfish decision to run again, which meant that when he finally gave up the ghost over the summer, Democrats had to scramble to replace him with Kamala Harris.

Many Harris strategists also worked for Joe Biden—and they remain singularly reluctant to hold their former boss to account or to explain their own complicity in Biden’s disastrous egoism.

Let's game this out. Assume Joe decided in mid-2023 that he should in fact decline to run, for the good of the country and the party. Wouldn't the Democrats have had exactly the dilemma they had a year later? Newsom, the front runner, had all his California baggage over taxes, homelessness, crime, immigration, and EV mandates, plus his record on the Covid lockdowns. Josh Shapiro and J B Pritzker were Jewish, so Pelosi, aligned with the far left of the party, would veto them. Whitmer had her own Covid lockdown baggage and her bossgirl image. None would have stood a chance against a resurgent Trump.

The Democrats and the media would have had to merchandise any of them the same way they did with Kamala, present them as pretty faces in an otherwise issueless campaign. There were no good alternatives to Joe in 2023, for the same reason that there were no good alternatives in 2020. Pelosi, who was pretty clearly the de facto head of the party, knew this. Let's also be a little bit realistic here and acceopt that Kamala would not have been Joe's running mate in 2020 if Pelosi hadn't approved it. In fact, I've been arguing that Pelosi had a plan from 2020 onward, and it always involved Kamala. Kamala had come up through the California machine via Willie Brown and Pelosi herself; she owed her career to them, and Pelosi in particular trusted her in Washington.

Pelosi was probably more aware than anyone, except maybe Dr Jill, of Joe's weaknessess even as early as 2020. She seems to have accepted that in spite of that, Joe was good for one more basement campaign against a Trump -- or any other Republican -- who could be vilified as Hitler and branded a convicted felon. The plan was always going to be to humor Joe and go along with his decision to run for re-election with another basement campaign in the fall.

At that point, having won reelection, whether Joe liked it or not, Pelosi would tell him it was time to go, and he would either resign in favor of Kamala, or he'd be removed via the 25th Amendment and replaced by Kamala. Kamala was a cipher, just like Joe, and business would continue at the White House as usual.

In support of my position, I would point out that what we've indirectly learned so far is that the two figures who are most deeply resented by Joe and Dr Jill are Pelosi and Kamala. I suspect that the Bidens belatedly came to realize the plan all along was going to be to edge Joe out, before or after the election, but in the end, Joe was going to go, courtesy of Pelosi and Kamala. In comparison to those two, they've decided Trump is even an OK guy.

Pelosi's plan had three flaws. The lawfare was poorly executed from the start, and as some lawyers have noted, it should have begun execution a year earlier than it did, since it didn't account for Trump's attorneys being able to delay the cases as successfully as they did. Second, it didn't recognize that the plan itself would backfire by turning Trump into a victim, a role he knew how to play and exploited with great success. Third, it didn't anticipate the speed and extent of Joe's cognitive decline by early summer 2024, forcing Pelosi into taking early the action she had always anticipated she would take only after the election, which exposed her hand prematurely.

The overall problem was that this plan had been in effect at least since 2020, it was too complicated, and it assumed nothing would go wrong at any point over four or more years. The odd thing is that there doesn't seem ever to have been any intermediate Plan B for any of the key things that went wrong along the way -- the lack of a contingency when Pelosi had to force Joe out early was only one of the gaps.