'Everyone's Telling Them They're a Band of Idiots' - 2012 Obama Campaign Manager on Harris Campaign

M. Spencer Green

By this point in a political campaign, with two weeks to go until the general election, everyone on both sides is feeling a little wiped out. The Kamala "Queen of Word Salads" Harris and Tim "Great Walz of China" campaign is no exception, and their polling numbers can't be helping any.

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Jim Messina, who we remember as Barack Obama's 2012 campaign manager, has some rather direct comments for the Harris/Walz campaign team.

Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina said on MSNBC Sunday that the Kamala Harris campaign team is being forced to make tough decisions in advance of the election. 

"[I]n politics you have three things: you have time, you have money, and you have volunteers," Messina said. "And the one thing of those three you can’t go get more of is time. So there’s really difficult decisions being made in Wilmington right now about what you do with her time, what you do with the surrogates' time." 

"It’s why you see these campaign people on TV and they look absolutely exhausted, because everyone is telling them they’re a band of idiots, and they should do it their way, and they have to make really, really difficult decisions," Messina said of Harris' campaign staff. 

That's a little harsh — the "band of idiots" part, that is. It may be warranted, but it's harsh. But some of the campaign's actions are a bit hard to explain otherwise. Of course, we can understand the lack of interviews (especially after the disaster that was the Bret Baier interview) and the lack of unscripted press conferences, or unscripted events in general; Kamala Harris just isn't any good at them, and each attempt, each failure, just sinks her even more.

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To be fair, Messina is correct to note that there are a lot of moving parts in a campaign, especially at this late stage — but he misses one thing.

Messina explained that in a presidential campaign, multiple teams are vying for the attention of the candidate. 

"There’s competing things," Messina said. "[T]he press team wants her on these TV interviews, the fundraising team wants her to do one more big event in X city. The battleground states are saying, ‘We’ve gotta have her three more times in Michigan.’ And so making those decisions becomes the most important thing." 

It's not a matter of competing things. It's a matter of the candidate being incompetent.


See Related: Nate Silver's Latest Numbers—and His 24 Reasons Why Kamala Is in Big Trouble

Batya Ungar-Sargon Absolutely Nails the Reason Men Don't Want to Vote for Kamala Harris


Yes, it's late in the game; yes, there are a lot of demands on the time of all the candidates involved. But the Trump/Vance team seems to be handling those demands all right, and even seem to be enjoying themselves. What's the difference?

I suspect a good part of it is that the Harris/Walz team knows, on some level, whether they admit it or not, that they're losing. Jim Messina says that "...everyone is telling them they're a band of idiots," but one has to admit, they've brought that title on themselves with this disaster of a campaign.

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And when you've lost Barack Obama's 2012 campaign manager...

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