Well, knock me over with a sledgehammer,it appears that
Kamala Harris' Presidential campaign was an orgy of looting by consultants
and campaign members.
This sort of behavior has been one of my primary complaints about the
Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is
the extreme corruption of its professional political apparatus.
After Harris's catastrophic flame-out, other people are noticing:
In the wake of Vice President
Kamala Harris’
defeat, recriminations have flourished inside the Democratic Party with
different factions blaming different policies or
groups to explain
the loss. Critics, however, describe a deeper structural problem with how
the modern Democratic Party runs campaigns, which lines the pockets of party
insiders, bloats campaign budgets and boxes out influences from outside
party elites.
The Harris campaign broke campaign finance
records, raising nearly a billion dollars, but ending the race $20 million
in debt, spending millions on consultants and hundreds of millions of
dollars on paid media.
While most political strategists agree
that some spending on paid media is necessary to win a campaign in 2024,
Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told Salon that
the Harris campaign's spending profile is indicative of a structural issue
with how the Democratic Party approaches paid media and political strategy.
Snipping the bit where Mr. Shakir talks about how political consultants see
the 30 second ad as the Alpha and Omega for campaign communications, because
that is what the consultants themselves say, and because it's really not the
core problem.
Consultants get a percentage of media buys, and so extract a personal
financial benefit from this strategy.
………
Shakir summed up the issue saying that “there is often a
product problem and not a sales problem” with Democratic campaigns. However,
there is another side to the problem with paid media, in Shakir’s view. At
every step in the process of making an ad, everyone is taking
their cut.
“The opportunity to make money off of the firm that has created
30-second ads and the person who has placed the ads is ripe for abuse because
there are hundreds of millions of dollars going into it and everyone is taking
their skim,” Shakir said. “There’s a huge escalation every step of the way
because of a skim at every level.”
According to Shakir, it doesn’t have to work this way but media firms and
campaigns often push for more expensive production strategies like more
shoots, or oversaturating airwaves, because it’s an opportunity for everyone
to get paid. In some cases, Shakir said, even senior campaign staff will get a
cut of ad spending.
(emphasis mine)
Yeah, that's a level of self dealing that surprises me,
Once again, reality trumps (pun not intended) my worst imaginings.
………
Reviewing the ad spending from the Harris campaign, it’s clear that the bulk of the money was funneled through firms run or owned by Democratic Party insiders. For example, Media Buying and Analytics LLC, received upwards of $281 million for media production and ad buys from the Harris campaign in the 2024 cycle and is owned by Canal Media Partners, according to Business Insider, a firm that has worked with hundreds of Democratic campaigns and was founded by Bobby Khan, who has been in and out of Democratic politics since the early 1990s.
………
According to Shakir, however, the problems with the Democratic Party’s structure and the way it runs campaigns go beyond just media consultants and the party’s love of paid ads. The core issue, as Shakir puts it, is that the party political operations are a closed loop with well-off consultants, politicians and donors all taking advice from each other with little outside input.
So the problem with the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is a pervasive culture of corruption among the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment)? Say it isn't so!
This is a feature, not a bug.
This is a racket, and it is a well functioning racket whose goal is to separate political donors from their money.
Winning or losing is irrelevant to this.
This is just a fact of Iron Law of Institutions which is, as I have noted many times, "The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution." (Not my idea or term, this term was coined by Jon Schwarz)
