THE DNC AUTOPSY: From one who was there

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Hi, I want to weigh in on this really sophomore conversation going on about the Democratic Party's autopsy of the 2024 election. And I think that um I know some things that other people might not even know. An autopsy is where you open up the body and you see what went wrong. A real autopsy means we go deep into what happened on the inside. What happened on the inside was that the Democratic Party deviated from its own principles.

[00:00:29]two principles specifically, one a commitment to democracy and the other a commitment to the values which the Democratic Party purports to stand on.

[00:00:40]Now, first of all, let's look at the democracy issue. What happened in 2024 and this should be primary in this autopsy is that a handful of people decided that it would be Biden. They decided that Trump uh represented such a threat to democracy. About that they were right. But they felt that that entitled them in this race to suppress democracy because they were the ones who knew what it would take to beat Trump.

[00:01:08]They felt that they had beaten him once before and so Biden was the best bet to beat him again. Only problem there is that that's not how democracy works.

[00:01:18]That is not the role of a small group of people in Washington who work out of the White House or whatever. And it's not the role of the Democratic Party or any political party. The role of the party is to stand in the background to facilitate the process of democracy and then the voters decide and then the role of the party is to come forth at that point in order to make sure that that candidate wins. Now, a memo went out clearly to Democratic senators, Democratic governors, etc. Basically, this time we're not even going to do a primary. We're all going with Biden and we're all supposed to just fall in line.

[00:01:54]But it seemed to me obvious that Biden was not the best person to run. Now, this is about the voters who should have been given as much of an array of possible candidates as was possible so that the voters themselves could decide.

[00:02:08]That's the organic wisdom that emerges from democracy itself. So the party I remember um when I heard Jamie Harrison, the then uh chair of the DNC say the role of the DNC is to make sure that Joe Biden gets reelected. Well, no, that's not the role of the of the party to make sure that Joe Biden gets reelected when in fact the voters have not really weighed in on that. So there was, and I can tell you this because I was there and I experienced it, an absolutely vicious decision made by this group of people, whomever, there was this deliberate attempt to make sure that the voters would have no sense that there was any option other than Joe Biden. So there was a complicity here. Also, it wasn't just the party, it was their media partners.

[00:02:59]What they do is they created a narrative, a kind of doppelganger that is quickly consumed and easily maintained. The point is a small group of elite who decided to throw so much fairy dust in the eyes of anyone who even would consider that maybe we should listen to someone other than Biden. They not only create the doppelganger so that you would think, "Oh, I'm a serious person. I would never listen to him or I would never listen to her." and they were very deliberate about this. In addition to that, they said, "Well, we don't primary incumbent presidents."

[00:03:35]Well, I'm old enough to remember when senators Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Robert Kennedy of New York primar Lynden Johnson. The fact that McCarthy did so well in New Hampshire is what made Johnson drop out. You could not look honestly at the Biden presidency and think in terms of how the American people were experiencing that moment and just assume that he was the best guy.

[00:04:01]Part of this autopsy should be that the people who were making this decision rarely leave Sun Valley, the Hamptons, Georgetown, Bair. I know the enclaves that these people um exist within these bubbles. They have nothing to do with recognizing the abject suffering of so many American people. The values of the Democratic Party theoretically is unapologetic advocacy for the working people of the United States. That would have meant that we were doing more than attacking Trump. This issue, all we had to do is attack Trump more. Millions of Americans said he's already been president, so we kind of know who he is.

[00:04:43]And for many of those people, it's important to remember their economic situation they felt was even better under Trump than under Biden. Now, when you have 70 to 90 million people who were uninsured or underinsured medically, over a million people who were uh rationing their insulin, 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, over half of our bankruptcies, medical bankruptcies. Things are not going well.

[00:05:11]And when the Democrats said, "What you got to do is just tell everybody things are going really well." The people for whom America was going really well did not make enough of a constituency to win that election.

[00:05:25]The principle here was democracy and the principle here was the values, the traditional values of the Democratic party.

[00:05:32]As it was, we didn't provide a real alternative to Donald Trump. It was hate Trump, hate Trump, hate Trump. Rather than we are providing such things as universal healthcare, such things as tuitionfree college and tech school, such things as measures that would literally close begin to close the gap in terms of income inequality in this country. What did they run on? They ran on continue what's good under under Biden. Meanwhile, things were percolating. People were caring about the economic inequalities in this country. And by the time the race came along, obviously people were very concerned about what was happening in the Middle East, specifically what was happening in Gaza. You're not even going to mention it. So, you're going to just choose the candidate. Even when Biden finally got out, there were many, I think it was including Barack Obama, who said, "Open this up. We could have had a blitz primary. We could have gone to the floor of the convention. It would have been so exciting. There would have been senators and governors. everybody would have been there coming up with ideas, saying to the Democratic voters, we could do this, we could do that, this could be our platform rather than just ramming a platform down the uh throats of people. And then part of this de I believe autopsy is for enough people to realize Democratic voters who should have known better went along with this.

[00:06:45]Well, the DNC knows what they're doing.

[00:06:47]They treated the DNC kind of like the Wizard of Oz, like there must be something going on behind the curtain that we don't know. What was going on behind the curtain was a few people who knew very little very little about what was actually going on out there in America. And then they thought they could just decide who was going to go next.

[00:07:06]Where's the democracy?

[00:07:09]So that's my autopsy.

[00:07:12]I was