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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.
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.
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