Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Tonight, a meditation on that controversial Pod Save America interview with Kamala Harris’s campaign team, and why finger-pointing critics need to stop blaming staffers or tactics for Democratic losses, and admit that the reason Democrats lost is the guy in the White House.

But first…

• 🎧 The D.N.C. bake-off: The horse race for the D.N.C. chairmanship is already underway, and on this morning’s Media Monday episode of The Powers That Be, Jon Kelly and I evaluated the early contenders, the murmurs surrounding dark-horse candidates, and what kind of leadership the committee actually needs to pull the party out of its post-’24 malaise, among other things. You can listen to the full episode here.
• Raskin vs. Nadler: In last night’s special Sunday supplement of The Best & The Brightest—my new favorite private email from Puck, in which my colleague Abby Livingston previews everything you need to know about the week ahead in Congress—she offered a pithy account of the Democrats’ attempt to recalibrate its leadership in the wake of November’s loss, homing in on the push to depose aging ranking members on key committees, such as Jerry Nadler at Judiciary.

  Well, this morning Rep. Jamie Raskin formally threw down the gauntlet, and announced his bid to challenge Nadler for the post. Abby floated this possibility last night, calling Raskin “a rising star whom many of the rank-and-filers would like to see lead the Democratic side of Judiciary, and who is something of a generational talent. He’s quick on his feet in hearings and achieved legendary status in the caucus as the lead floor manager in the 2021, post-insurrection, second Trump impeachment.” If you missed the issue, you can find it in Puck’s newsletter archives by clicking here.

• My partner John Ourand on the other Harris administration in town: Back when Joe Gibbs was winning Super Bowls with the Redskins, Jack Kent Cooke’s owners box was the province of dignitaries and machers and members of Congress, plus local muckety-mucks like Larry King, George Will, Ben Bradlee, and Sally Quinn. Alas, the owner’s box became a ghost town after the team moved from R.F.K. Stadium to the sticks in Landover, Maryland, in 1996, a situation that was exacerbated by the flagrantly incompetent Dan Snyder, who bought the team a few years later.

  Now, however, the glamour is returning. The Commanders are firmly in the playoff hunt under the ownership of Apollo co-founder Josh Harris, who has leveraged his in-stadium real estate to become the town’s favorite host. On Sunday, he held court with D.C. stalwarts like Fed chair Jay Powell, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser, the perennially embattled Washington Post C.E.O. Will Lewis, and tennis star and local wunderkind Frances Tiafoe, and the real heavy: my Puck partner Bill Cohan.

  There’s more: NBA commish Adam Silver also made the trip down to D.C. to hang out in the owner’s box. Before kickoff, Comcast’s Brian Roberts and Michael Cavanagh were seen on the field, as were the NFL’s Roger Goodell and Brian Rolapp. But Harris is used to playing host: In addition to owning the Commanders, he’s the managing partner of the NBA’s Sixers and NHL’s Devils. I’m told that he personally invited the assembled eminences. —John Ourand

In an interview with pod co-host Dan Pfeiffer, the Harris brain trust dismissed questions about their advertising strategy and lack of response to Trump’s trans attacks; they complained about press coverage of Harris and said Trump escaped criticism for stiff-arming national reporters; they defended the campaign’s podcast strategy and their push to line up endorsements from Hollywood celebrities and musicians; they explained their view that they needed to win over moderates and Trump-skeptical Republicans by closing with a “save democracy” argument and campaign events with Liz Cheney. Plouffe repeatedly stressed that the fundamental currents of the election—tough economic headwinds and a generally sour national mood—were too difficult to overcome.

The reaction to all this? Messy. Bakari Sellers, the CNN analyst and a Harris loyalist, went on TV and reacted with fury. “It was disappointing at best, hearing their lack of self-awareness, their lack of self-reflection.” A lamer response arrived from Jack Schlossberg, the thirsty Kennedy scion (take a number, kid) and very online Vogue contributor, who’d been invited by the Harris team to speak at the Democratic National Convention. Young Jack went on a chaotic posting spree across Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, attacking the Harris strategists and calling on them to be banished from Democratic politics.

Schlossberg probably doesn’t have the self-awareness to understand that he’s the very embodiment of why Democrats are so out of touch: He’s a privileged city-dweller with an advanced degree who would never move to rural Pennsylvania to work on a campaign and thinks that posting clever TikToks moves votes. But he wasn’t the only one going after Cutter. On Twitter, the veteran communications guru took a special round of heat for explaining the Catch-22 of their situation: that Harris was loyal to Biden, and wanted to stick with him despite his unpopularity. “The best we could do, and the most that she felt comfortable with, was saying ‘Look, vice presidents never break with their presidents.’” Just search Twitter for “Cutter” and “Pod Save America,” and you’ll see her getting savaged by Dems, Republicans, and told-ya-so leftists for saying something entirely obvious.

Alas, angry Harris voters, desperate for something cathartic, were never going to be soothed by the curt and dispassionate professionalism of the Obama disciples eavesdropping on what sounded like a humdrum office conversation about missed K.P.I.s, not a therapy session about the end of democracy. Where was the anger? The self-flagellation? The mea culpas? Strategists like Plouffe have folk-hero status in the Democratic Party, which is precisely why so many Dems were thrilled when he signed on to help Harris. But on Pod Save America, he and his colleagues sounded like cold-blooded political mercenaries, because, well, that’s what they are. The whole world got to listen in on the Harris Q4 performance review, and heartbroken Democrats, looking for someone to blame, didn’t like what they heard.

As any viewer of Veep knows, political professionals tend to speak in a lingua franca that sounds antiseptic or even cynical to outsiders. And this is especially true of professional Democrats who came up in the business during the Obama years. Washington is now overpopulated with Democratic staffers and operatives who continue to fetishize tactics and data over human instinct and candidate quality. There is now an entire generation of staffers who believe that there’s a certain winning playbook to every good campaign, a certain way to “deal” with reporters, a certain way to post on social media. (On that note, digital directors, your boring-ass boss in the Senate is not and never was “demure.”)

Democratic fealty to the Obama style even extends—weirdly—to language patterns. Just listen to podium appearances by Biden administration press secretaries like Ned Price or Karine Jean-Pierre, who have come to mimic Obama’s ums and ahs and his upspeak at the end of sentences. Plouffe, Cutter, O’Malley Dillon, Fulks, Pfeiffer—this is their milieu. They all hail from the Obama school of politics. They built it, in fact. And they got the only two-term Democratic president of the last three decades elected. But after Harris’s loss, they’re being told to hang up their trim blue suits and just go away.

But despite her vast improvements as a politician, Harris was bedeviled by her lack of instincts. She has always operated out of caution, spooked by the idea that she might say the wrong thing and piss off the wrong people. She has never had a clear and consistent worldview other than just being a down-the-line Democrat, which is why she staked out so many liberal positions, many of them on camera, during her failed 2020 primary campaign—which came back to haunt her this year in so many Trump ads. In exit polls, she was seen as too liberal and out of the mainstream. That’s on her.

This time around, she made fewer mistakes, but they were costly. That View appearance—wherein she said there was “not a thing” she would have done differently than Biden—was on her. Sure, staffers and consultants can brief a candidate, they can workshop a response and talking points, but it’s always up to the candidate to make the final call. If Harris wanted to campaign more in any particular state, she could have. If Harris wanted to have a Palestinian American speak on the D.N.C. stage, she could have. If she wanted to go on Joe Rogan, she could have. If she wanted to be more critical of Biden, she could have. Candidates work with their teams, but they are supposed to make tough calls. After all, they’re the one who gets to be president.

If the Harris staffers should have been more honest about anything, it was blaming Biden. Like it or not, the election was about Biden’s economy, Biden’s border, Biden’s age, Biden’s enduring inability to communicate any of his successes. And in much of the final year of his presidency, it was about Biden’s refusal to look in the mirror, think about something other than himself, and step aside for the good of his party and the country.

Selfish is the word I’ve heard a lot today from Democrats, privately and publicly, after Biden decided to issue a blanket pardon to his son Hunter, violating his previous pledges not to do so, and gutting his once-virtuous reputation as a supposed guardian of democratic values, a tidy juxtaposition with Trump. Loyalty to family and a scrappy sense of pride were always fundamental to Biden’s brand, and through that lens, the Hunter pardon makes total sense. But the Biden of late 2024 looks so very different than the Biden who won in 2020, and it’s difficult to not view the Hunter pardon through the scope of Biden’s entire presidency, and the many self-interested decisions that have led the country to the brink of Trump 2.0. His virtues now look a little more like sins. Loyalty looks more like stubbornness; pride looks more like ego.

Where would we be if Biden had stepped aside after the 2022 midterms? That’s the only hypothetical that matters. If you’re a Democrat looking for someone to be mad at, skip the podcasts. The buck stops with your president.