After several months of saying he would not make it public, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has released the party’s autopsy report on the 2024 election.
SAM ROSENTHAL; [email protected]
Rosenthal is the political director of RootsAction.
Rosenthal told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “Ultimately, this is an insubstantial document. Before this came out, people like me who had been following the story closely were wondering whether they would not release the [autopsy] draft because it was damning of party policy––that it would point to Biden’s support for the genocide in Gaza and make the planks of Democratic Party politics untenable, whether it would make Harris look horrible and diminish her future changes––or whether it was simply a terrible piece of investigative writing. In the end, this is an anticlimax.
“Many of us wanted to have a conversation about whether the party secretly understands that its positions on Gaza, along with the outsize influence of billionaires on politics, are deeply damaging. Instead, we don’t get to have that conversation.
“The report is really poorly written. It’s a bad piece of writing and a bad research project. It’s embarrassing in terms of what it says about [DNC Chair] Ken Martin’s leadership and about how seriously we should take the DNC in general, that this is the quality of work they’re producing. The embarrassment is compounded by the fact that they’re trying to throw the author, Paul Rivera, under the bus. It’s mindblowing that one person was apparently in charge of this when it clearly should have been handled by a team… It’s clear [Martin] didn’t take the project seriously––likely because there was either an explicit or implicit understanding that any serious report would have reached conclusions that would have been deeply unpleasant for the party to address. In some ways, this outcome may even please donors because it creates an opportunity for Ken Martin to become a sacrificial lamb, while the party gets to kick the can down the road and avoid difficult conversations about Gaza and Palestine. That seems to be the ultimate game plan here.
“Ken Martin is a symptom. He has only been in the role for a brief period of time, so it strains credulity to argue that he alone embodies everything that is wrong with the party. This cannot be pinned on him entirely. What’s really important, when progressives talk about this—and something I wish establishment media were more clear-eyed about—is that the issue is fundamentally about how the Democratic Party has conducted business throughout this century. Without the singular political talent of Barack Obama, the party has become moribund and has struggled badly. That is actually the one point in the autopsy report I agree with: the party is struggling to hold onto its base, and that creates a major opening for far-right Republican Trumpism and fascism in this country. This is ultimately a much deeper conversation than whether Ken Martin should lose his job.”
Earlier this week, before the autopsy draft was released, Common Dreams published an opinion piece by Rosenthal arguing that the Democratic Party has been too eager to focus on superficial messaging issues. Rosenthal said: “Messaging is meaningless if you don’t know what you’re actually messaging about. This draft expresses the identity of the Democratic Party perfectly: it is completely preoccupied with ads, spending, and communications strategy––yet it contains virtually no reflection on the political legacy of the Biden administration or on how Harris positioned herself in relation to that legacy. Our argument all along has been that there has to be a reckoning with the failures of that administration, and that Harris needed to chart a different course if she wanted to win. She did nothing like that, and the party simply does not want to talk about it. In that sense, these debates are all part of the same larger pattern; the throughline runs continuously from one controversy to the next.”