Bakari Sellers: Harris Campaign’s Lack of Self-Awareness and Self-Reflection Disappointing at Best

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CARVILLE: “The vice president was thinking about going on the Joe Rogan show, and a lot of the younger progressive staffers pitched a hissy fit. (...) If I were running a 2028 campaign and I had some little snot-nosed 23-year-old saying, ‘I’m going to resign if you don’t do this, not only would I fire that [bleep] on the spot, I would find out who hired them and fire that person on the spot. I’m really not interested in your uninformed, stupid [bleep] opinion as to whether you go on Joe Rogan or not.”
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BOLDUAN: “Bakari?”
SELLERS: “I mean, look, the Democratic Party is far beyond James Carville. I mean, I’m not sure that he’s in the mainstream. I’m not sure the last time that he actually talked to voters who were in a barbershop or in a college dorm room, or the last time that he had a town hall meeting or visited a town hall meeting or pressed the flesh or kissed a baby. I love the fact that people go to James Carville so that they can have outbursts like that. He’s the Dan Hurley of Democratic politics, where you just have these kind of manic outbursts day in and day out. The Joe Rogan debate is old. If she would have gone on Joe Rogan, she still would have lost this race. Trump didn’t win this race because he went on Joe Rogan. It’s hard to win a race when 75 percent of voters say they were better off four years ago than they are today. And you know, we had this podcast yesterday on ‘Pod Save America,’ where, you know, all of the campaign staffers decided to call up and go to ‘Pod Save America.’ It was disappointing at best, hearing their lack of self-awareness, their lack of self-reflection, the inability to figure out a way in which you could win this race simply providing messaging and saying that we’re up, whereby you don’t believe that in your heart of hearts to be true. I just think it was disappointing. And ‘Pod Save America’ themselves have been relatively disappointing because they were supposed to be our ecosystem to compete with the right-wing Ben Shapiros. We were supposed to have this information chamber that was ‘Pod Save,’ but instead they’ve kind of become this cocoon where challenging them becomes a hissy fit back and forth. Their messaging has not been one that’s been able to prove successful with those same voters that we’re talking about Donald Trump did well with. And so I think everybody needs to take a moment of self-reflection, including myself, to figure out how we can get better for 2025. People are talking about 2028. If we get smacked in 2025 in New Jersey and Virginia, then you blow it up. But until then people just need to stop wanting to hear themselves talk.”