Max Burns is a 'Democratic strategist'. He has written an op-ed for MSNBC on Kamala Harris's new book '107 days'. It appears, he thinks that the group which votes overwhelmingly for your candidate is the group you need to concentrate on. You needn't bother about 'swing voters'. Just keep preaching to the choir- even if it is only ten percent of the voting population- and you can repeat Kamala Harris's fantastic performance in the last Election.
For years it was an open secret in Washington that former Vice President Kamala Harris had amassed powerful critics among the advisers closest to President Joe Biden.
She had also amassed powerful critics amongst those who listened to what she was saying or who wondered why she was trying to pass herself off as a 13 year old Valley girl. The woman was 60 years old. She was a former Senator. Why did she lack gravitas? Was she stupid or merely narcissistic?
Perhaps, if it hadn't been for the comedy series 'VEEP', there would have been less interest in America's first female Vice President. But that also meant Kamala needed to appear to be the opposite of Selina Myers- viz. a narcissistic opportunist spouting word-salad when not cackling like a witch.
As a Democratic strategist and columnist during the Biden presidency, I received my fair share of insider pitches from Harris skeptics in the West Wing.
But you didn't advise her to cultivate gravitas and have facts and figures, not fluff, at her fingertips.
This week’s much-hyped preview of Harris’ upcoming memoir, "107 Days," reveals a politician finally ready to reclaim ownership of her own political and personal narrative.
Fuck does that mean? Is it the sort of thing people in AA say to the guy who just reclaimed ownership of his narrative because he reveals he got so drunk he soiled himself and this distracted him with the result that the school bus he was driving went off a cliff killing 30 children?
“I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me,” Harris writes.
In other words, she listened to gossip.
“One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a ‘chaotic’ office
she did. This was surprising. She was seen as a possible POTUS and thus her staff should have stuck to her like glue even if she were a sociopath. Sadly, the more you see of Kamala the more you realize she is a Californian Sarah Palin or dickless Dan Quayle.
and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.”
Staffers who quit made sure Kamala would be blamed. They hadn't been fired. They had quit because they thought Kamala was unelectable. Put another way, she was a diversity hire.
The gossip wasn’t subtle. Within months of Biden’s inauguration, Beltway gossip columns openly discussed the tension between Harris and first lady Jill Biden.
Jill has been vindicated. Harris was the wrong pick.
White House staffers did little to rebut (and often quietly supported) stories of Harris’ staff dysfunction
They were saying it wasn't the West Wing's fault that the diversity hire was shit.
that later made their way into prominent political tell-all books. I even wrote about Biden’s bizarre decision to sideline Harris despite her significant achievements in a 2023 column for this website.
Harris was banging on about slavery. But Joe had already got the Black vote. He needed the White vote. Harris wasn't helping him any there.
Harris, according to her book, took Team Biden’s barbs in stride because she understood how critical it was for Democrats to telegraph unity and shared purpose after four divisive years of Donald Trump.
She didn't resign because she didn't think she could win a future primary.
She might have hoped that her willingness to overlook all that political backbiting would be repaid with respect and support from Biden’s team after taking over Biden’s spot on the Democratic ticket in August 2024. That respect never came.
It would have if she had won. That's how politics works. You win- you get respect. You lose- people think you are shit. Kamala was shit.
Instead, Biden loyalists piled blame onto Harris for the party’s 2024 losses just days after the election.
That's good for the party. Blame the diversity hire and say a white dude would have won. Thus Trump doesn't really have a mandate.
They could have — would have — done it better, they recounted to journalist Franklin Foer. Whatever dignity Harris expected to earn from her grace,
Politics is about winning. It isn't about 'dignity' or 'grace'.
it’s clear she wildly misunderstood the intensity of political tribalism in Biden’s inner circle.
So she is naive as well as stupid. Max Burns isn't doing Kamala any favours by writing this. I guess this Op-Ed of his is 'strategic'.
Now, freed from her connection to her former colleague, Harris and her team are finally venting their frustrations.
She still has a team? It's good to know she isn't the biggest loser in the country. Other losers, venting farts or frustrations, are teaming up with her.
Democrats should listen closely, because Harris is
a loser
articulating a key problem that still plagues the party even after Biden’s departure.
That problem is that if you pick a 'diversity hire' you must also manufacture all sorts of great triumphs which the diversity hire can claim credit for. Otherwise, all you've got is a diversity hire.
Anyone who doubts Harris’ claims need only look at the bitter response from Biden world. On Thursday, anonymous former Biden advisers dismissed Harris as playing “zero substantive role” in the administration,
true enough. The problem was that the rest of the Cabinet were equally useless.
and instead focusing on “stilted photo ops.”
Nothing wrong with photo ops.
That those advisers refused to put their names behind such nasty accusations speaks volumes about the toxicity that still dominates Biden’s inner circle.
George Clooney was made the scapegoat for this.
Rhonda Elaine Foxx,
who is African American and currently appears unemployed
former Biden campaign director of women’s engagement,
& of 'Harris for President'. She may be being blamed for not getting more votes from White & Hispanic women
was among the first to validate Harris’ account of her treatment on the campaign trail. In a post on X, Foxx recounted emailing Biden staffers about the dismissive way women of color were treated on the campaign,
because their votes were already secure. Kamala retained Biden's share of the Black Female vote. Well, almost. She lost about 6 percent compared to Biden.
specifically around the uphill battle to give Harris any visible presence at major Black cultural events
which could scarcely increase the Democrat's share of Black female Vote
— the same Black voters who played a pivotal role in Biden’s 2020 victory, and who Biden personally pledged to represent in his inaugural remarks.
He was senile. Still, I was bitterly disappointed that he didn't undergo gender reassignment surgery and change his name to Foxxy Cleopatra.
“The fight just to have a campaign presence at the Zeta convention referenced in her excerpt was insane,
There was no 'fight'. The lady in charge met with Biden in the Oval office and then asked Kamala if she could preside. Biden did not say 'I, Foxxy Cleopatra, not Cameltoe Harris, will preside because it is my milk-shake, not hers, which brings all the boys to the yard. I could teach her, but I'd have to charge.' Kamala then attacked him using ancient Kung Fu techniques. Biden tried to fight back using Ninjitsu but Kamala triumphed.
” Foxx wrote. “Black spaces that should’ve been obvious priorities for coalition-building were dismissed.
Black spaces aren't where 'coalitions' with Whites and Hispanics are built. Foxx is as stupid as shit.
The expertise of Black staffers was constantly dismissed.
Foxx should have been dismissed. She did a terrible job of 'Women's engagement' in the campaign.
What the VP says in 107 Days is right: our biggest challenge isn’t just Trump, it’s us.”
African American women may well want to spend all their time talking to each other. It may be 'challenging' for them to appreciate that they are a small percentage of voters. Furthermore the percentage of Black women voting Democrat peaked with Obama and fell thereafter.
Lest anyone think Foxx is just a disgruntled former staffer, her post received public support in a post from former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison,
who is African American.
one of Biden’s most visible backers during the campaign.
No doubt, this is 'strategic' behaviour on his part.
Harris’ book and the testimonials of former staffers paint a picture of a vice president willing to suffer petty humiliations in order to maximize Democrats’ chances of beating Trump in 2024.
If that's what she really wanted, she should have resigned and let Biden appoint someone competent.
Instead of embracing Harris’ proposals to increase the campaign’s engagement with Black communities,
i.e. waste time and money on a secure vote-bank
the Biden team egotistically dismissed them as efforts to promote her own brand over and above the boss.
In other words, Biden pays the price of his diversity hire hanging out with her own community.
“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well,” Harris wrote.
But Harris didn't do well. What she is saying is 'Biden should have made it his first priority to make me look good. Otherwise people would say I was a diversity hire.' Sadly, that's all she was.
“It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands.
But Kamala's hands were too busy waving at her sorority sisters.
My success was important for him.
No. His success was important to Kamala. Sadly, she could contribute nothing towards this goal. To be fair, the same could be said of much of the rest of the Cabinet.
His team didn’t get it.”
Her team ran away.
The Biden team’s growing insecurity about Harris’ publicity would have disastrous consequences on Election Day, when Black voters bolted from a Democratic Party they felt took them for granted.
Hilarious! Black voters didn't vote for a Black person because of an elderly White dude's insecurity! Is Max Burns genuinely stupid or only strategically so?
Democrats won 87% of Black men and 95% of Black women in 2020. Four years later, they won just three-quarters of Black men and 89% of Black women.
So, even Black women preferred Biden to Kamala!
Harris’ memoir is a cautionary tale about
diversity hiring.
what happens when a president allows his senior staff to amass too much decision-making power.
No. This is a story about firing folk who fuck up. Blinkin-idiot should have been canned after the Alaska meet with the Chinese.
Time and again, Harris describes her personal relationship with Biden in positive terms, yet key campaign decisions
There were no such decisions. Once Biden bowed out, all decisions regarding the campaign were made by Cameltoe & co.
seemed to be made by staffers who rarely or never consulted Biden directly. Perhaps had the former president been informed, he would have made different decisions.
Perhaps not. The President's job isn't to make the Veep look good. The reverse is the case.
Unfortunately for the American people, the extreme control Biden’s team had over his day-to-day decisions means we will likely never know.
Okay. I think I see what Burns is getting at. Biden was ga ga. His staffers were responsible for all the stupid shit his Administration did.
What is clear is that Harris doesn’t deserve the venom heaped upon her in the wake of Democrats’ 2024 losses,
There wasn't a lot of venom. She was a diversity hire and she did her best. Trump would probably have won anyway.
and she’s no longer willing to take incoming fire for a White House team
which doesn't matter any more. The problem is this book of hers makes her look like a vapid diversity hire. The lesson here is DEI is BAD. Don't do it.
that apparently showed little loyalty or decency to her.
There is no loyalty or decency in Politics. Why not join the Mafia, if that's what you are looking for?
As someone who has spent nearly two decades fighting to build a Democratic Party that lives up to its moral promise both internally and externally, I say it’s about time.
It's about time every Dem turns against every other Dem and blames them for the fact that people think they are shit. What Dems must realize is that only by praising other Dems will the voters be convinced the whole lot of them aren't on the make if not on the take.
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