The Best and the Brightest

Geniuses ran the Harris-Walz campaign, and now even greater geniuses will be running the Trump Administration. Look out!

Hi all! It’s been a busier week than usual. As I’ve said sometimes in previous issues, when I don’t have something fresh or well-baked-enough to share, I don’t want to strain to just fill space, or waste your time. There’s some juicy stuff coming up next week so fear not!

One story to note before it gets sucked down the memory hole: Sunday, three reporters who covered the 2024 election for the New York Times, Nicholas Nehamas, Maya King and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, produced a blockbuster story on serious incompetence inside the Harris-Walz presidential campaign. Titled “How Alarmed Harris Staffers Went Rogue to Reach Black and Latino Voters,” the story (gift link) laid out a grim picture:

• In the final days of the campaign in Philadelphia, a rogue group of campaign organizers set up their own operation to direct dozens of volunteers to door-knock in Black and Latino neighborhoods that the campaign had neglected.

• “Many of the thousands of Black and Latino voters they talked to said they had never heard from the campaign,” the Times reported.

• Other rogue organizing efforts included an effort to register voters and distribute campaign lit at public-transit stops, and one that brought Black surrogate speakers to churches and barbershops in the city.

• “Campaign organizers in Philadelphia said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods, such as attending community events, registering new voters, building relationships with local leaders and calling voters.” Instead they were told to spend most of their time calling a small pool of volunteers begging them to go door-knock or run local offices.

• Even though the Harris-Walz campaign raised more than $1 billion in just over one hundred days, “many of its field offices in the city were filthy and lacked basic supplies like tables, chairs, cleaning products and printers, staff members said. Several recounted being forced to raid the campaign’s better-stocked suburban offices or to raise money independently. One office received more than 20 boxes of campaign T-shirts, only to discover an embarrassing misspelling: ‘Harriz-Walz.’”

• The article also noted that a planned GOTV bus tour by Pennsylvania’s Black mayors, many of whom represent rural areas, was canceled without explanation.

• It also noted similar neglect in parts of rural Georgia.

Everything in this story tracks with concerns I reported here on October 24 (along with a piece for The Nation a few days earlier). As I noted, an experienced organizer who had been working for the Harris campaign in the eastern part of the state described serious problems with the field effort in Philadelphia. As I wrote:

What they said was hair-raising. “To be honest, this cycle has been one of the more poorly run campaign cycles I’ve experienced as an organizer,” they started out. Among their complaints: that organizing staff have been blocked from contacting local community leaders, including board and committee people; that local volunteers seeking paid canvassing slots were overlooked most of those jobs going to outsiders; that multiple requests for a Latino-oriented field office were ignored and so were many of the Latino-heavy wards of Philadelphia. The same for other immigrant communities, like the Asian, Haitian and African, communities. Most shocking for a field nerd: that all the field organizing is based on how many phone calls are made and doors knocked, not people engaged and vote plans documented. A ward can be counted as canvassed if just one person in that ward is talked to, my source said.

The current mantra among campaign professionals and observers claims that the Harris-Walz must have run an effective, or even excellent, campaign because in the seven swing states where it focused nearly all of its efforts, it lost more narrowly than in the rest of the country. I think this is a dumb argument. It allows a lot of people who were given well over a billion dollars to spend in just over 100 days a giant carpet to sweep all kinds of dirt under.

No, I’m not saying that a better field campaign alone could have saved Harris from defeat. If anything, what this Times story reinforces is how much the Harris team over-emphasized reaching suburban whites and took urban communities for granted. People should be furious.

—Related: Patrick Gaspard, the head of the Center for American Progress, writes in Democracy Journal that “It’s time for institutional insurgency.” I especially like this:

“In or out of government, the center-left must insist on investments to build nimble membership organizations on the ground—of, by, and for the working class—that are connected to material goals. There is far too much reliance on short-term tactical messaging and electoral door knocks as substitutes for actual organizing. Campaigns and their leaders are mercenary by necessity. As a former labor hand, I wince at how loosely the term ‘organizer’ is thrown around by well-resourced campaigns that leave little behind in their wake. Without that deep non-electoral infrastructure in key states, we are well and truly doomed. We know that workers in organizations who are tied together by economic outcomes are a totally different force than atomized people at home watching Fox News and getting sucked into online rabbit holes.”

Stuff I’m reading as the days grow darker (literally and metaphorically)

—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Prisons as Archives of Resistance Stories, and the Toll of Silence and Fear,” Lucid, December 11, 2024. Important lessons for us from Syria from one of the best scholars of authoritarianism.

—Don Moynihan, “You Should Be More Worried About Trump’s Planned Military Purge,” Can We Still Govern?, December 11, 2024. Important lessons for us from South Korea, from one of the best people writing on the innards of government (and tracking Trump’s wrecking crew).

—Garrett Graff, “Chris Wray sends DC a message: Cave to Trump or just get out of the way,” Doomsday Scenario, December 13, 2024. Vital coverage of what is happening to power institutions like the Justice Department and FBI, from one of the best journalists covering those topics.

—Luke Goldstein, “The Money Game: The Democracy Party had more money than God in this election—At what cost?” The American Prospect, December 10, 2024. How corporate and billionaire cash continues to corrupt the Ds, and some speculation about state parties banning the use of corporate and dark money in primaries. (Don’t hold your breath!)

On a lighter note

—Funniest quote I’ve seen yet about AI: “The basic architecture of these things is still kind of a Forrest Gump box of chocolates,” said Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, in a story about why ChatGPT won’t say the names of various people, including his.

—Funniest quote I’ve seen yet about how Internet scammers are avoiding detection (in this case by using an obscure and relatively unregulated web registrar in Iceland that happens to share its street address with the country’s Phallological Museum): “We are a penis museum, yes, but we are a serious penis museum,” Thordur O. Thordarson*, the museum’s chief operating officer, said, expressing his bewilderment at the building’s “links to nefarious activity online.”

One man’s journey

Back in 2016, Uber investor Shervin Pishevar made news when he announced he wanted to lead a movement for California to secede from the United States after Trump’s election. “The horror, the horror,” he told The New York Times, after strongly supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. “We didn’t do enough,” he added. “There were too many people in the tech industry who were complacent. They waited and waited and waited to get engaged in this election. And now we have this nightmare.” Then, in late 2017 he was accused of sexual harassment and assault by six women who worked with him. In 2018-19 he was still donating large sums to Democratic candidates like Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg, but the color of his giving switched to red by 2020-22. Now he’s writing love letters to Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and their as-yet-to-actually-exist Department of Government Efficiency. Seems about right.

Another man’s conclusion

This tweet by tech mogul Marc Andreessen will not age well, I predict. (Indeed, the New York Times has already reported that Massad Boulos, Trump’s handpicked Middle East advisor, isn’t a billionaire but just a “small-time truck salesman.”)

Maybe the future is personal?

Speaking of tech geniuses, a real one, Ev Williams, the co-creator of Twitter and founder of Blogger and Medium, has launched a new social app: Mozi. It has one purpose, to make it easier for you to stay connected with your people. There’s no posting, no influencing, no leader-board, just a way of letting people know or finding out when you’re going to be nearby. I signed up this morning and discovered its value pretty quickly; tomorrow, after a coffee meeting I already had scheduled, I’m going to see an old friend who I haven’t seen face-to-face in a long time. Learn more about Mozi here (it only works on iOS right now).

End Times (the opposite)

Watch this inspiring video of a Syrian prisoner as he was accidentally liberated by a CNN team. May hope spring eternal.

*Could you not come up with a better name for the head of a serious penis museum?