The Exquisite Corpse and the DNC Autopsy

Reality isn't coming easily to the Democratic consultant class.

So the Democratic National Committee has finally, mercifully, vomited out its long-overdue post-mortem on the 2024 catastrophe, eighteen months after the body cooled, and friends … you should read this thing. Not because it’s good.

Read it as a document from a party that would rather lose than offend elements of its own base. Read it as an indictment of a consultant class living on hopium from the glory days of Barack Obama. Read it as a fossil record of exactly why The Lincoln Project exists, why we keep showing up, and why the work isn’t optional anymore.

The report is titled, “Build to Win. Build to Last.” A heroic title for a document whose Executive Summary section literally reads “This section was not provided by author.” The Conclusion? “This section was not provided by the author.” The Appendices? Same. The document is full of redactions and excisions. It’s the Epstein Files of political party autopsies.

The DNC, in a delicious act of institutional self-loathing, has bracketed half the report’s claims with footnotes that essentially say we really don’t want to own the brutal reality of all this. They published it anyway. This is what passes for accountability in the party that lost to a convicted felon running on grievance, gold sneakers, and the cognitive capacity of a ten-day-old sponge cake.

Let me draw your attention to page 72, because this is the part where the patient describes the murder weapon and then politely declines to disarm the killer.

The autopsy admits … in writing, with their own pollsters on the record…that the Trump “Kamala is for they/them” ad was “very effective.” It admits the campaign was “boxed.” It admits … and I quote the bureaucratic euthanasia of the next line … “if the Vice President would not change her position – and she did not – then there was nothing which would have worked as a response.”

Nothing. Would. Have. Worked.

Reading that, you can smell the cowardice and the rot and the suicidal ideation of a coalition inclined to punish internal apostasy even at the cost of victory.

The Democratic Party’s official explanation for getting their teeth kicked in by a $20 million transphobic carpet-bombing is: we had no answer and there is no answer.