File Under, "Well Duh"

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)