The Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Fails to Confront the Truth

The document is full of disclaimers and does not address fundamental issues, including Gaza and the Biden-to-Harris transition

By Norman Solomon, The Guardian

When the Democratic National Committee finally released its autopsy on the 2024 election disaster, not even the DNC chair could defend it. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report,” Ken Martin conceded as the autopsy went public on Thursday. After several months of withholding the autopsy on the grounds of not wanting it to be a distraction, Martin fessed up at last: “When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close. And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning.”

In response, a former Obama speechwriter, Jon Favreau, summed up eight stages of Martin’s tortuous process that has spanned more than a year: “Promise to release autopsy; put incompetent friend in charge; incompetent friend produces incoherent product; announce you’re not releasing the autopsy; lie about why; gaslight people who ask, saying they’re the problem; face internal revolt; release autopsy.”

Now released, the draft report is floating in a weird zone of being and not being the DNC’s autopsy at the same time. A disclaimer in red at the top of every page declares that “this document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC,” and the DNC “cannot independently verify the claims presented”. What’s more, most pages include red boxed insertions taking issue with claims in the autopsy (“No sourcing provided for several claims in this section” on one page is followed by “Appears to conflate family and sick leave” on the next), with the DNC in the strange role of a schoolteacher critically marking up an assigned term paper.