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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24007 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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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.

Recently one of the Pod Save America hosts interviewed DNC chair Ken Martin about this report.

It's quite the train wreck. Ken kept asserting that the report was free and the host kept cutting in to question how that's possible. I guess this is how. Your incompetent buddy does it for free. Not literally free since people supposedly traveled to every state to interview voters and the effort took more than a year. But free-ish compared to actually paying for a well made report.

Your incompetent buddy does it for free.

Hard to know if it was incompetence or if Martin kept a leash on him. Probably "¿Por qué no los dos?" The only sense I can make of this débacle is that Martin had a fair idea an autopsy of how they done fudged up in 2024 would lead to an entire battery hens farm worth of egg on face for the party, including Big Senior Figures, and he tried stalling and throttling it as much as he could:

Martin called for an autopsy only after former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley made an issue of it in his own long-shot race for DNC chair. Once he did, Martin locked in, even ripping in private conversations former chair Tom Perez’s decision to withhold an autopsy of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss.

He asked Rivera, a longtime but low-profile Democratic hand based now in Texas, to be in charge. They were close, which helped, but Martin also liked that Rivera hadn’t been involved with the DNC or the Harris campaign, so he could be independent.

The problem, others involved argued then and now, is that Rivera hadn’t worked on any presidential bid since an inglorious turn on John Kerry’s campaign in 2004. Many who know Rivera describe him as having a savvy yet unconventional point of view, but say he also comes into conversations with a preset viewpoint.

Though he’d set the autopsy as a priority, Martin decided to have Rivera in charge as a part-time volunteer while juggling other clients. Rivera would sometimes say he was available to conduct interviews only before 9 a.m., after 7 p.m. or on weekends. Martin kept him so siloed that the most senior staff could do was occasionally chip in with suggestions of people he should consider contacting.

...Not until September, several months into his review, did Rivera try to reach out to key Harris campaign aides. He has told people since that he always meant for the Harris team to be his last stop since he wanted to gather other information first. But holding out that long made campaign aides suspicious.

Rivera ultimately blew past several deadlines last year in finishing the autopsy, according to people familiar with the matter. It wasn’t until after Thanksgiving that Martin got a document that multiple people say was at best unfinished.

Who Rivera reached out to, and who he didn’t, tells part of the story of what he was producing. While the DNC has said Rivera and others conducted “hundreds of interviews” with “sources from all 50 states,” he didn’t start to talk to the people who ran the Biden and Harris campaigns until September, according to multiple people involved.

Among those not included in interviews: Biden, Harris or Walz. Top strategists, including Biden aides Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, and top Harris decision-makers like Jen O’Malley Dillon, Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe, weren’t interviewed either. Neither were close Harris aides Sheila Nix, Kirsten Allen, Erin Wilson, Brian Fallon and Jalisa Washington-Price, or Sam Cornale, the Walz traveling chief of staff who had also been executive director of the DNC.

...Some say underlying research, including notes and transcripts of interviews, was deleted from DNC servers. But a DNC source familiar with the process told CNN that Rivera didn’t provide even a list of names of people he spoke to, notes or recordings. Nor, the source said, did he provide some of the data that he was given to him by senior campaign leadership.

...“The notion that any of this was nefarious or by design…” sighed one former DNC official. “It’s much more Keystone Kops than that.”

"Keystone Kops" is not reassuring for a party asking the nation "put the fate of the economy, your jobs, oil prices, peace or war, and dealing with the rollout and regulation (or not) of AI in our competent, assured, well-qualified hands!"

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