By golly, it was Old Lady Dithers* the whole time! Ruh roh!
“I’m not a media hater,” Jen O’Malley Dillon starts off this hilarious whine, nor should she be. No presidential candidate in American history ever had the media as fully incorporated into the campaign, running interference for Kamala Harris while painting Donald Trump as The Prince of Darkness at every turn. That included making excuses for her refusal to engage reporters, and even when Harris did, getting the easiest possible treatment. CBS’ 60 Minutes even edited her responses to make her sound more coherent.
Nevertheless, Dillon has decided that the media torpedoed her client by falsely portraying her as afraid of interviews. Er … sure, Jen. Duane covered this earlier, but this is just too irresistible:
Kamala Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon claims that the campaign was up against insurmountable odds, as if they didn’t have all of the media on their side.
“Being up against a narrative that we weren’t doing anything or we were afraid to have interviews is completely… pic.twitter.com/NiqamfMdt7
— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) November 27, 2024
“Being up against a narrative that we weren’t doing anything or we were afraid to have interviews is completely bullsh*t, and also, like, took hold a little bit. And we just gave us another thing we had to fight back for that Trump never had to worry about.”
Trump never had to worry about it because Trump never hesitated to do interviews. He also held numerous press conferences, not press avails, where he took questions extemporaneously. Trump did podcasts, establishment media interviews, and call-ins constantly throughout the campaign. Trump has never been accused of being afraid of a microphone, and for good reason.
Dillon claims that Harris did plenty of interviews, which is nonsense, and then complained about the questions she got as “process-y.” That is an apparent reference to repeated attempts to get Harris to explain her 180-degree shifts on policies across the board from the progressive agenda to Bidenism. That’s not “process” — candidates are supposed to be able to answer questions on policies. It wasn’t just Bret Baier who tried to get answers on Harris’ policies; Dana Bash asked twice for explanations on Harris’ shifts and got two non-responses, and ABC News kicked off the one debate by attempting to pin her down too, to no avail.
Harris never did answer those questions except to chant her mantras, “My values have not changed,” and of course, “I was raised in a middle-class household.” She was objectively terrible at it, and has been for years before the election. There’s a reason why Joe Biden pushed Harris off the stage and out of reach of the media after her June 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, the “I’ve never been to Europe either, ha-ha” debacle.
No one knows this better than Dillon, either. Touré told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Monday that Dillon began attempting to push Harris off the ticket in 2023 to get a more competent running mate for Joe Biden:
This is going to piss a lot of people off that helped on the campaign—and it should!
“When I spoke to elite Democratic people they kept bringing up the name Jen O’Malley Dillon (Kamala Harris’s campaign chair)… who in 2023 was leaking to the media that Kamala should be replaced… pic.twitter.com/fjQIVFSY6l
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) November 26, 2024
After off the record conversations with five people with direct knowledge of the insides of the Harris campaign, there is a consensus on what really went wrong and the person who may deserve the most blame. The who is Jen O’Malley Dillon, the 48 year-old campaign chair of the Harris campaign. I was told, “She was essentially running the campaign.” The what-went-wrong of it all is obviously multi-faceted but one issue is that Harris was forced to run for the Presidency with a team that was constructed around someone else, Joe Biden, a team that included someone who was such a Biden loyalist that she had leaked negative stories about Harris in an attempt to hurt her political future. That person is Dillon.
Remember all the chatter coming from inside the Democrat tent about switching out running mates? I certainly do, and I certainly remember why. As far back as February 2023, the New York Times ran through the nightmare scenario of a late Biden withdrawal with Harris still in harness, and even her impact if Biden could make it through another election:
But the painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country. Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.
Through much of the fall, a quiet panic set in among key Democrats about what would happen if President Biden opted not to run for a second term. Most Democrats interviewed, who insisted on anonymity to avoid alienating the White House, said flatly that they did not think Ms. Harris could win the presidency in 2024. Some said the party’s biggest challenge would be finding a way to sideline her without inflaming key Democratic constituencies that would take offense. …
Now with Mr. Biden appearing all but certain to run again, the concern over Ms. Harris has shifted to whether she will be a political liability for the ticket. Given that Mr. Biden at 80 is already the oldest president in American history, Republicans would most likely make Ms. Harris, who is 58, a prime attack line, arguing that a vote for Mr. Biden may in fact be a vote to put her in the Oval Office.
Seems pretty prescient in retrospect. Did Dillon brief the NYT on this scenario? The article references “dozens” of Democrats speaking out about the need to replace Harris at that time, a move that Democrats likely regret not making now. Dillon may be blaming the press for undercutting Kamala when she herself enabled it in the first place, if Touré’s sources are accurate.
*- As opposed to Old Man Withers, the ever-popular villain …
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