An unpublished chapter in the U.S. Democrats’ “autopsy” report on the party’s loss to Trump in the last presidential election made its way to The New York Times, as Brad Reed reports.
Inside the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Aug. 19, 2024. (Chsdrummajor07 /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
By Brad Reed
Common Dreams
The New York Times has published what it described as a “missing chapter” of the Democratic National Committee’s widely criticized “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential election.
The chapter, titled “What Happened in 2024” and provided to the Times by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, offers criticisms of party consultants who are “self-enriching” and out of touch with the concerns of ordinary voters.
Specifically, the chapter questions whether Democratic politicians and operatives have a grasp on the economic realities facing most Americans, while calling for “a fundamental re-evaluation” of whether Democrats “really understand the wants and needs of voters.”
The chapter states:
“An emerging critique of Democratic decision-making is there are too many people who have become generationally wealthy off politics and drive too much of the decision-making within the ecosystem. This is deeply frustrating to many … who want to try a different set of politics but keep banging their heads up against a system proven to be inflexible and self-enriching.”
The chapter adds that “many of the people who worked at the highest levels of the party” are “financially secure,” and thus potentially insulated “from the realities many Americans were encountering in their lives.”
[See: Hiding Why Democrats Lost to Boost Harris]
In an interview with the Times, Rivera claimed that he personally handed the missing chapter to DNC Chair Ken Martin in a three-ring binder earlier this year.
DNC Chair Ken Martin in 2019. (Marc Nozell /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0)
Rivera said he had no specific insight into why the chapter was not included with the report that the DNC released in May.
“Whether that was a conscious decision on their part to bury the section for the purposes of hiding a paragraph, I don’t know,” the Democratic strategist told the Times. “That’s a ‘them’ question. What I can tell you is they had it, and they made a decision not to release it.”
Martin, however, flatly denied that Rivera had ever personally handed him the chapter.
“This alleged report section was not in any binder I reviewed,” said Martin in a written statement given to the Times. “If we had this in May, we would have released it with the rest of the report.”
Martin also called it ridiculous to suggest that he would have suppressed a section of the final DNC report to avoid offending the party’s consultant class.
“If I or the DNC had report materials that went after self-enriching consultants, we absolutely would have included them,” Martin insisted, noting his own past promises “to hold the consultant-industrial complex accountable and ensure the party only pays for work that actually helps us win.”
The Times’ report noted that the DNC’s autopsy featured a section titled “What Happened” that was listed as “pending” on the grounds that it “was not provided by author.”
Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
The views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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