A group of Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign aides were accused by liberals of gaslighting and taking no accountability in a post-election podcast interview about what went wrong for Democrats in the election.
"Pod Save America" host Dan Pffeifer spoke with Jen O'Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter in the Harris campaign's first major interview since the vice president's loss to President-elect Trump. The questioning and the defensive posture by the guests was sharply criticized by online progressives.
"Listened to the @PodSaveAmerica bros interview the Kamala campaign team and it was....somewhere between disappointing and enraging. I would not hire these guys if I was running the next D campaign," Ben Yelin, a podcast host and law professor, wrote in reaction to the podcast. "The more I listen to this, the worse it gets. Fully discrediting. Every five minutes they reference the fact that the campaign was short, that they didn't have enough time. FIRST OF ALL, all of these guys, except Plouffe, were part of the Biden campaign, so they could have helped give Kamala more time by getting him to drop out earlier."
The Harris aides complained about media coverage and repeatedly cited their time crunch of just over 100 days to put together a campaign, which was due to President Biden going effectively unchallenged in the Democratic primary and not dropping out until three weeks after a disastrous June debate with Trump. Social media critics piled on the aides who just lost an election that Democrats and members of the media repeatedly warned was the most consequential in history.
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Pollster Nate Silver also called out the aides on social media and said the staffers are "the most non-agentic people I've encountered in a position of comparable decision-making authority."
"They don't even see themselves as victims so much as Non-Player Characters with no will of their own," he added.
"I do think a narrative, 107 days… two weeks talking about how she didn't do interviews, which you know she was doing plenty, but we were doing in our own way, we had to be the nominee, we had to find a running mate, and do a roll-out, I mean there was all these things that you kind of want to factor in. But real people heard, in some way, that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump, that I think that was a problem," Dillon said during the podcast, prefacing the statement by saying she isn't a "media hater."
She went on to say that the narrative was "completely bulls---."
The excuses in the interview didn't go over well.
"Maybe the macro headwinds & the late candidate swap were always going to be too much to overcome. But her top campaign brass talking about ‘what happened’ for 100 min & not saying anything they would’ve done differently in hindsight is insane," Adam Carlson, a former pollster, posted. He said in another post that he voted for Harris and that the commentary from the aides was frustrating.
"Pod Save America" host Tommy Vietor even engaged with a critic who accused them of not learning a "single thing." Vietor and his fellow hosts are all alumni of the Obama administration.
Dan Turrentine, host of "The Morning Meeting," said he had great respect for the Harris campaign team, noting they were dealt a difficult hand with the president dropping out of the race in late July. However, he added, "What cost Harris in 2019 is what cost her in 2024 - extreme caution, indecisiveness, fear of offending/making a mistake."
"Rather than be bold, clear, nimble and aggressive, she was vanilla, small, hesitant and obfuscating. These facts hover, unspoken over the podcast," he added.
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CNN's Bakari Sellers, a Harris supporter, said during an interview on the network on Wednesday that the podcast interview was "disappointing at best," panning "their lack of self-awareness, their lack of self-reflection."
"It was reminiscent of a Kamala Harris interview: nothing is actually said. No one answers the question. No interview push back," Tricia McLaughlin, a Republican strategist, wrote of the Harris campaign aides' interview.
Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy, also shared his thoughts about the podcast, calling it "insulting."
Jack Mirkinson, a reporter at The Nation, took issue with the aides' failure to bring up the Israel-Hamas conflict, and said, "the fact that they and their candidate backed a genocide merited not even one thought."
Others described the podcast as a "painful listen" and pointed out that there was "zero accountability" from the aides.
In the show's interview posted to YouTube, commenters accused the Harris aides of "gaslighting," and largely said the aides just "don't get it."
Jon Favreau, another "Pod Save America" co-host, posted on X early on Wednesday defending the interview.
"I think people need to decide if they're genuinely interested in finding out what went wrong in 2024 so Dems can win again, or if they're just going to reject any data or information that doesn't confirm all their political beliefs," he wrote.
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When New York Times reporter Astead Herndon referenced the interview as a "good ad for the importance of independent media," Favreau lashed out, "You ok? Have you not gotten enough credit for breaking the news that Joe Biden is old?"
"You’d think you’d have more shame, but I understand this is just like a game of sims for you," Herndon replied on X.
