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Following up on an earlier post of mine, the Democratic National Convention has released their long-awaited "autopsy" report. Critics of the party will get some immediate schadenfreude upon opening the document: the default font, the hastily-added red addenda by a higher power, the missing sections and absent formatting. The sick pleasure continues upon the realization that neither Biden's senility nor the Israel-Gaza conflict (nor the associated hysteria) ever appear in the 100+ pages.
Digging deeper, CNN reports that the autopsy was compiled by "Democratic consultant Paul Rivera," a veteran of the Clinton administration and friend of DNC chair Ken Martin. Rivera's minuscule effort and misguided conclusions result in a paper with few citations, ignorant assessments, and a half-assed attempt at shielding the DNC from the worst of it.
Well, that's certainly backfired now. The DNC hasn't looked this incompetent at its highest levels of power since the scandals of 2016 (say, was anyone ever held accountable there?) and the oft-panicked-about "competence crisis" appears to have reached a high point.
There needs to be an autopsy on the autopsy report. I am 100% serious. Figuring out all the things that went wrong to allow this to happen would solve half of the party's problems. Reinterview witnesses. Reconstruct lines of thought and inquiry. Find the points of failure and conduct root-cause analysis.
The report is poorly written, unprofessional, and incomplete yes, but above all it is vapid. It doesn't even ask the questions that matter. The overwhelming majority of effort is focused on ad targeting and campaign spending.
Okay, what was the mistake then? What should be done differently next time around? Should the Vice President have changed her position or not? In fact, there is almost no discussion of issues in the report at all. A model of why anyone would want to vote for one party or the other is conspicuously absent.
The fact that the DNC's attempt at making sense of and learn from their dumpster fire of a failure became a dumpster fire of a failure in itself is just all too fitting. I have to laugh, because otherwise I'd cry. It's just nearly perfect as a costly signal that the party really does believe what it says about blaming everyone else for things going poorly.
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I'll try to salvage this "boo outgroup" post.
I know just a little bit about hardcore career politicos from spending some time in D.C. and doing some contracting work. The group I'm speaking about are staffer types who usually did some sort of internship while still in undergrad. Usually, in Congress or one of the big think tanks. Sometimes in their state for the Governor. State legislators, I believe, don't usually have the time/money to hire even free staff, although I could be wrong about that.
For the ones that stay in politics after their undergrad, the majority will find something else to do within 5 - 10 years mostly because they don't make enough to really have a "normal" life. Often time this is lobbying, sure. Or government affairs at a big corporation.
But then you have the group that stays in .... forever. They don't run for office and they don't do the lobbying revolving door. They do staffer work for a candidate or campaign / party work (like at the DNC). These people are very, very strange because they have an entire career in an industry that doesn't function like any other industry out there. In a for profit corporation, if the organization is fucked up enough, you got out of business. That's a feedback loop. Even for lobbyists, if you can't actually help get your clients in front of lawmakers, you go out of business. Feedback loop. Even non-profits -- if you can't raise funds (however shadily you may do that) from donors, you go out of business. Feedback loop.
But for a party apparatchik, your organization doesn't really ever go out of business so long as the American two party system remains as it has been since the end of WW2 and, probably, since the end of the Civil War. So your feedback loop is broken. Mostly, what's required is a kind of zealot level commitment to "the cause" -- even if the cause is constantly changing and hard to define.
On an operational level, the people that have been around the longest - though not necessarily the leadership, which can be difficult to manage for long periods of time - are the very people who have never even seen what a "feedback loop" organization looks like. So, reports like this are what you get -- half compiled, shoddy presentation, basic errors in professionalism. At a corporation, you'd get fired for this when you were 23. Here, however, a lot of the "deep" actors don't even know what basic professionalism is (again, their ideologues) and so no one stops to say "hey, this report looks like dogshit, let's fix it" right up until the public pressure to release it is so high that you have to put out the roughest of rough drafts.
By the way this applies equally to both major parties, imho.
In a very real way, the people who built their careers within the DNC/RNC and perhaps gubenatorial or congressional offices, with only a few exceptions, never really developed a full set of basic professional skills. I think many of them realize this if they get married to someone outside of the bubble and the realization that they pretty much can't transfer out to corporate america (or another professional style line of work) hits them like a ton of bricks. It has to be a radically frustrating existence.
Very interesting perspective, thanks.
I have some perspective into professional advocacy orgs and it seems like a very different, much more put together situation there. However that's an area where I would expect competition to be much fiercer (for donor money).
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The median voter does not know about this. You would have to ELI 5 it to them, but it's pointless- the median voter already thinks the DNC is out of touch, them apparently not thinking Biden's senility is relevant doesn't actually change that. People who know what this is aren't going to have their opinions changed.
My thoughts exactly, although you're a little more hopeful than I am that the median voter has opinions about Biden's senility.
What did cheer me up about this report is that it suggests that DNC leadership is still refusing to learn lessons. How indicative it is, I can't guess, but it points that way.
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Median Voter doesn’t read it, but the GOP complaint I believe is a legitimate issue with the modern Democratic Party. Doing it thru some white paper is kind of dumb but there are issues leadership needs to figure out. They can not find candidates to run at the national level. Top candidates tend to come from white men who do not feel welcomed within the Dem Party. ADOS has too few 99% wordcells to go thru a national campaign. Barack obviously was not ADOS and half white. DEI basically excludes the few white men in the party from climbing now. Biden made it because he was Obamas VP. A 25 year old Biden would never even enter that side of the aisle now.
Jewish men still exists in the Party. Shapiro could do it. Ossof being in Georgia would have a chance. But since the Israel-Palestine thing I am not sure that a Jew could make it thru a primary. The best Dem politicians do tend to come from red states. That leaves them looking for a Thatcher with the current party gender imbalance. Kamala Harris type pipelines are probably going to have issues on the national stage due to IQ. AOC I think is perfectly fine in congress, but my gut says she is IQ limited for the top office.
I don’t want to do a full debate on HBD but it does seem like the extreme right tail on most traits are dominated by white men. At the national level of politics when you are on tv a lot more the competence ability is much more noticeable. So hitting DEI quoatas makes national level politics very hard. Besides the electoral college and gerrymandering favoring team red I also think they have a structural talent issue for the top spot.
What could change? Indians have a lot of far right tail talent so that’s a possibility. The top law schools are extremely left so perhaps in a generation that produces candidates.
I guess it’s my opinion but at the very top of the parties I think team right has structurally better talent. Vance may be a little weird and may limit him later but I do think he’s quite smart. Same thing with Rubio or Cruz. I think if you list the top 5 most likely candidates on each side that the GOP guy is likely 1 standard deviation higher in intelligence.
I think Newsome said he had like a 960 IQ. I don’t believe that so perhaps he’s actually much smarter and just pretends to be stupid like Bush.
960 SAT. FWIW, he says that while excusing it as the result of dyslexia, but I've never seen anything that made me think he was better than actual average, which is much lower than what the average sequestered shape rotator monks here think is average.
The circles he runs in would indicate he’s well above average. Smart rich people just don’t talk to average people. Looks like his wife graduated from Stanford. Those types never marry average intelligence guy.
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That's some extreme humble-bragging.
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I’m with Rov_Scam. Down to the part where you’ve blocked me, even!
This makes for a nice comparison with the UAP disclosures, where a promise of juicy tell-all journalism proves much more exciting than the reality.
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Since you've evidently blocked me for some reason, you won't see this, but your framing of the matter is rather boo-outgroup. Nonetheless, I don't think this is going to have much of an effect on anything. There's literally nothing this report could have contained that would have stopped critics of the party cold, so everyone sees what they want to see. Critics of the party were certain that it said bad things about Biden's senility and Kamala's incompetence and that they didn't want the report to get out because it would be too devastating. Instead it turns out that the report wasn't released because it was so poorly done the guy who wrote it got fired. It will make Ken Martin look bad to both people who know who Ken Martin is for about 2 days until Trump audibly farts on camera and the nation's attention moves elsewhere. By the time people start announcing their candidacies it will have about as much relevance as that time Amy Klobuchar allegedly threw a salad at an aide.
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