Whatever Happened to Kamala's A-Team?

It's hard to think of a Presidential campaign being managed worse than this.

When we talk about the inadequacies of a political party, a party nomination campaign or a Presidential campaign we often focus exclusively on the leader. Those who hate Trump talk exclusively (and obsessively) about Trump. But those who hated Biden and hate Kamala will to some extent do the same.

This is understandable. The candidate IS the campaign, to a great extent, and ultimately it is the nation’s judgement of the leader (excluding the intervention of fraud) which carries the day.

One of the curious features of modern times is that even where people have realized that the leader is usually a puppet controlled by a whole host of vested interests (from billionaire donors to whole sectors of corruption like Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex or even to interfering transnational bodies like the WEF and the UN) we still tend to focus on the candidate.

That’s strange, in a way. After all, if the candidate is a puppet, shouldn’t we trace the strings and see who is actually in charge?

But its an understandable error. Even the most cynical of us want to still act as if the Big Seat matters and there is only one hand picking up the Red Telephone or one voice supplying the nuclear launch codes. There’s a certain reassurance, perversely, in the idea that only one person can Really Fuck Things Up.

If that’s true, the disasters and errors all go away just by picking the Right Person to occupy that chair.

And the difference between Trump’s first term and Biden’s term certainly seems to support that One Man Makes the Difference narrative. There is SOME truth in it. But its not the full truth.

The full truth is that not only are huge networks of corruption entangling the entire ‘democratic’ process, not only are there people the future President must bow to both before he wins in order to get into office and after he wins in order to repay the money and power they deployed to get him (or her) there, but there is also the associated matter of an entire backroom ruling class that must be nurtured, flattered and rewarded too.

There’s the campaign staff, for instance, and the policy advisors, and the people who worked on your campaign waiting for some plum administrative role when the spoils of victory are divided. All these people have big salaries and their own sense of destiny and importance. All of them come from the same ruling class.

We may never hear most of their names, but they know each other. And they make very sure that the candidates know who they are too.

I want to talk about those people a little, as a class. I’m going to say a few things that might already be very obvious to you, but hopefully put them together in a way that is a bit novel. Let’s go back to August 2nd 2024.

Biden’s personal decision (hahahaha) to step down as the Democrat candidate had been publicly aired on July 22nd, following his disastrous debate performance on the 27th June and horrific private polling figures that persuaded senior Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama that he had to go. Initial rumblings about an upcoming Convention seeing some sort of fresh choice being presented to party members swiftly evaporated, together with even the slightest pretext that the people constantly talking about threats to Democracy even know what it is.

By August 2nd, Kamala Harris was the new, uncontested, sole Democrat Party Presidential candidate, having never acquired a single solitary vote from anyone, never faced any public contest with anyone for the role, and never been challenged as to why she was any better a pick than her ousted and immediately eulogized boss. The Convention at the end of the month would be the Harris Joy Convention. Already, on the 2nd August, she (or the people controlling her) were re-assembling her campaign staff.

On the 2nd August we find a now somewhat hilarious article from NBC News announcing the crack team of expert election winners who would be steering the Harris campaign from that point on (‘This is the A-team’: Harris campaign brings on new hires as it sprints to Election Day’). The tone is one of breathless excitement, giddy confidence and (of course) near religious zeal:

“Quickly flush with cash, flooded with volunteers and greeted by jubilant crowds, Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly minted campaign has now made a major move to help manage it all, bringing on some of the biggest names in Democratic politics. 

A flurry of high-profile hires announced Friday — including David Plouffe, who managed President Barack Obama’s first White House run, and veteran Democratic operatives Stephanie Cutter and Jennifer Palmieri — comes as the Harris campaign rushes to transform away from Joe Biden’s operation and make a mad dash to November. 

“This is, let’s take Trump down once and for all," said a person with close knowledge of the process around Harris. This person, like others in this story, requested anonymity to speak candidly.

With fewer than 100 days to the election, Harris aides must tackle a series of consequential moments and decisions that would typically be stretched across months. That level of intensity in a short period of time necessitated a crew of hardened professionals, several sources with knowledge of Harris' strategy said.

“Today, accept a nomination. This weekend, pick a vice president. Next week, a major campaign swing, then the convention and then it’s the debate,” one person with knowledge of Harris’ strategy said.   

Some of the high-profile staffing additions are meant to focus on messaging, polling and paid media, which had been helmed by longtime Biden operatives Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti.

Obama had recommended to Harris that she bring on Plouffe, according to one of the sources, who will act as a senior adviser on strategy. Cutter will be a senior adviser on message and strategy. Mitch Stewart will act as a senior adviser on battleground states, and Palmieri will serve as senior adviser to the second gentleman.

The core of the operations around states’ work, communications and the advance team will mostly remain the same, while Harris’ communications personnel — like senior adviser Brian Fallon — will be elevated, and there will be extra help across the board. That extra assistance will include advance staff, given that the campaign is having far more robust events in larger venues and is hosting many more of them. Harris has also brought on a new speechwriter, overseeing message consistency.

“This is the A-team,” longtime Democratic strategist Pete Giangreco said. “It means the vice president is in it to win it. It speaks well of the kind of president she would be. She’s surrounding herself with top-level campaign talent … These are people who are winners and have played at the very highest levels of politics and government.”  

I’ve quoted a large chunk of it because it all speaks to the early Harris Anointment confidence, the palpable relief with which these people ditched the Living Corpse of Joe Biden. But it also speaks to the nature of their perhaps central and defining delusion.

The delusion that they are the experts.

These are the biggest names. They are top-level campaign talent. They are people who are winners. They are people who have played at the very highest levels. They are the A-Team. They are a crew of hardened professionals.

Blimey. This wasn’t just any old campaign team. These people were going to storm the election the way the SAS stormed the Iranian embassy in 1980. I pity the fool who would stand in their way, as Mr T might have said at his most eloquent.

Isn’t it extraordinarily childish? This type of reportage, this type of achingly fantastical, non-critical judgement of their own type…because that’s the real truth behind this political and media class as a whole, this entire shoddy and laughable ruling elite so invested in their own importance and self-perceived brilliance.

These are children masquerading as adults. Fanatical, zealous, hypocritical, dangerous, hate-filled, spoilt, emotional…children.

The people who always describe themselves as the adults in the room are the people who are always perpetual adolescents, the people who have never had to mature into fully formed individuals via an adult reckoning with adult problems.

Will any of those hardened professionals have a background like that of any ordinary person? Will they really have ever had to worry about whether mum and dad are employed or can put food on the table? How many of them have ever been from a background that isn’t comfortable and rather more than merely comfortable?

I’m not even talking about coming from an Appalachian underclass or a JD Vance level background. You don’t need a broken and a dysfunctional background to become an adult. It’s not that the only good administrators, executives, campaign managers and political operatives had a Mummy who was a crack whore and a Daddy who was a fist swinging drunk.

Its more that all the really bad administrators, executives, campaign managers and political operatives, the dumbest class of the most useless people, have ALWAYS had things given to them by a rich Daddy and a rich Mummy and a rich, spoilt, affluent background of easy contacts, easy money, easy opportunity and easy achievement.

It’s that the present ruling class in most cases didn’t build a thing or achieve a thing on their own at any point in their lives. Any more than they ever had to actually worry about a mortgage payment. These are the people, almost every time, who have played at the highest levels without ever having first to prove that they can play at all.

I read the other day about an obese goalkeeper for an obscure football club. This guy is massively overweight and terrible at his job. He can’t play. He is physically unable to play at even a semi-professional level. Since he was first put in the team, they have dropped two divisions. But his parents own the club and keep playing him because he wants to play at the highest level.

I identify as a professional footballer. Ignore my weight.

Yes, honey, you are. Oh look, we lost another game.

It’s not just the money. It’s not just the nepotism and the overly supportive network of friends and family propelling these people from one ‘individual’ but unearned triumph or post to the next.

Its the ideology too. Unite that real social and financial advantage to a bullshit ideology that deflects the idea of advantage onto other shoulders (like claiming its a race thing rather than a class thing) and you have what we have.

A ruling class that can’t tie their own goddamn shoelaces but who think that they are the people best quipped to save the entire planet from some other bullshit they also believe in.

The people who can’t repair a bridge or fill in a pothole and who are yet the same people who sneer at a man who delivers space rockets that reverse dock themselves using breakthrough technology to totally new landing frames.

These are our experts in everything.

Of course they are incompetent. They have never had any risk of any real setback. They have drifted through life with the Governor coming to dinner and the Senator finding them an internship and the Judge who is also Uncle Fester to their particular Addams Family finding them Not Guilty when their high school high spirits see them crash a car under the influence of drugs.

Rich people have been doing what Haitian drivers also do for a long time, and not just in fiction like the hit and run that takes place in The Great Gatsby. Remember good old Ted Kennedy? In both instances under a very old corruption (having money) or under a very new ideology (the sanctified blackness of a migrant) the cause of that two-tier reaction doesn’t matter. People who can get away with it will notice, and do it more.

Give them the keys of the car we all sit in (the nation) and of course these feckless spoilt retards who know nothing but see themselves as highly competent will drive it straight off a cliff.

As Fitzgerald also writes they’re not like you and me.

Money can indeed be a marker of great competence or great achievement. I’ll admit that Elon Musk is a technical genius, and that even someone as malign as Bill Gates probably is too, in certain limited ways. I’m not a Marxist hating on wealth and capitalism or even hating on the existence of an upper class. But wealth without competence, a post earned purely by privilege, a job given as a favor, a profession built on cant and corruption and a class that have lost all connection to the common man and all the shared ties of loyalty to the same place and principles…these are the conditions of collapse and the harbingers of self-destruction.

Especially when their failures are never punished and their crimes never accounted for.

Especially when they are allied with ideologies that teach them to care about pronouns but sneer at real competence when it rudely interrupts their playing at the highest levels.

What did the hardened professionals deliver for the anointed Kamala, anyway? Has it been a competent campaign? Of course not. It’s veered from one car crash to the next, even with the mainstream media setting out guys with flags to direct the traffic. Kamala, given the nomination in the same way one of these perpetually indulged kids is given the keys to a sports car on their birthday. is representative too of the Given Everything and Call It an Achievement modern elite.

If they manage to perform enough fraud she will be handed an election victory too.

But its true of ALL of them.

Think of just how many rich people are getting richer drawing a fat salary as supposed political experts. How many were drawing those salaries and offering that ‘expertise’ when Hillary lost in 2016? How many such ‘brilliant’ and ‘seasoned’ professionals have lined up to be wrong on every topic there is since 2016, drawing more money to be wrong yet again?

And these are the people who schooled Kamala and Walz on how to get through even a friendly interview without making fools of themselves? That schooling does not seem to have worked very well, as far as I can see. These are the people who picked the campaign strategies? The policies? Who must have said sure, great idea when Kamala said I know, food price controls like Stalin, that’s the winner! And then said, better ditch that one….

All these Media Strategy Coordinators. All these Campaign Managers. All these Assistant Directors of Holistic Interface Solutions. It’s almost as if its just wankers giving themselves meaningless titles, ism’t it?

Surely not.

Even if they somehow now drag the Kamala Carcass across the finish line better than they were dragging the Biden Corpse around, these aren’t mighty necromancers, seasoned Wonder Workers, and Super Competent A-Team campaigners. They are the Joke Professionals of the Clown World, the 35-55 year old’s stuck with the same little minds they had at 14 or 15.

A win won’t be by their brilliance, professionalism, insight or advice. It will be by fraud or assassination.

For god’s sake, they appear to have managed to pick a pedophile as a Vice Presidential candidate after already having delivered a pedophile as President. We might start to think they are ALL pedophiles….

Surely not.

The fact that there is a whole troupe of top-level campaign talent behind Kamala should be remembered. The fact that Democrats were saying in August that this is the best they have got should be remembered. Because it’s actually true in one sense.

This is the best they will offer us.

The best this whole class can do when they need to win.

I think we who detest and oppose them have argued for far too long over a binary choice of understanding between are they incompetent or are they malign.

Face facts. They are in one way as exceptional as they have always considered themselves to be. They aren’t just incompetent and they aren’t just malign.

They the very best there is, at both.