No. of Recommendations: 7
You mean...David Plouffe's management has been superlative.
No - I mean her management has been superlative.
I'm not talking about campaigning against Donald Trump (though that's been decent enough). I'm talking about Harris handling the Democratic party. She - and her team - managed to completely unify the party behind her in lightning fast time. That means that Team Harris managed to massage, placate, ingratiate, and otherwise handle nearly every single major faction, stakeholder, donor, and institutional player in the coalition almost perfectly in less than a few weeks. Everyone got behind her. Everyone felt well-treated enough to be on board. Only Gaza wrinkled that up, but even then the outcome was probably the best feasible scenario.
That's....astonishingly good. Political coalitions are giant, unruly beasts to begin with - and the Democrats are often in disarray even in good times. To get through these last few weeks with an outcome like that required an extraordinarily deft organization executing a well-thought out approach to all those constituencies almost flawlessly. Even while all of Biden's operatives and political lifers were getting their rice bowls broken - some of the (then-currently) most powerful insiders in Washington were getting defenestrated, and Harris avoided any fire from them. Even while the liberal wing was getting disappointed (Harris was never their person and Biden was willing to give them the keys to the kingdom to stay on), Harris avoided any fire from them too. The political skills exercised behind the scenes to get that result can only come from an incredibly adept team hitting every step.
For all I know, she might crater from here. She might tank the public-facing part of the political campaign. But the past month has been nothing short of an historically amazing exercise in internal politics.
