Campaign Grifters Ironically Killed Dems’ Government Grift
The insignia of a donkey, maybe if bucking its hind legs, can still work as truth in advertising for Democrats. But for the party of the kickback pigs, mobbing the trough seems a more accurate symbol.
Democrats, the party of government graft and grifts, fell victim to graft and grifts this election cycle.
The Harris campaign paid Nu Vision Media $350,000 immediately prior to Roland Martin, who runs that company, conducting a half-hour interview of the vice president that nobody watched. “It should have been a hell of a lot more,” Martin told the New York Times about not his viewership numbers, but the money paid to his group. “More should have been spent on Black-owned media.”
Therein lies the difference between the Trump campaign, which raised about $1.2 billion, and the combined 2024 Biden–Harris campaign, which hauled, according to the New York Times, about a billion more than that. Donald Trump earned free media through dressing up as a garbage man, visiting a bodega in which the proprietor had killed a robber, and working the drive-thru at McDonald’s. Harris needed to pay the very people — liberal, African-American media figures — who seemed most inclined to see her elected.
Oprah Winfrey’s enterprises received something close to $2.5 million for conducting a townhall-style event for Harris. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network accepted $500,000 in donations before his powderpuff interview with the candidate in October. Areva Martin, previously famous for accusing David Webb of benefiting from “white privilege,” accepted $200,000 in consulting fees from the campaign, despite the seeming conflict with her talk-host gig and the seeming superfluousness of it given her friendship with Harris dating back to the early 1980s.
Payola-seekers came from all races and ethnicities.
Bob Brady’s Democratic City Committee in Philadelphia received only about half of the $1.2 million requested from the Harris campaign for get-out-the-vote efforts, which reportedly include an amorphous concept known as “street money.” In response to receiving more than half a million dollars, Brady said the Harris campaign “didn’t show us any respect.”
“If there’s any immediate takeaway from Philadelphia’s turnout this cycle,” Harris Pennsylvania senior adviser Brendan McPhillips said in a statement given to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “it is that Chairman Brady’s decades-long practice of fleecing campaigns for money to make up for his own lack of fundraising ability or leadership is a worthless endeavor that no future campaign should ever be forced to entertain again.”
For some, the campaign, and the boondoggles that went with it, ending infuriates more than the defeat.
A group called the DNC Staff Union blasted the Democratic National Committee as “callous and short-sighted” for laying off roughly 500 workers with no severance and little notice. “Despite record-breaking fundraising,” the group said in a press release, “the DNC failed to provide any financial support to those who have tirelessly served the Democratic Party and its mission.”
The group further complained, “These cuts go far beyond typical campaign turnover and impact employees who were previously told their positions would be retained after the election. Chair Jaime Harrison and Executive Director Sam Cornale refuse to address their staff face to face and have offered no explanation for how these cuts were decided.”
Didn’t the American people explain on Nov. 5?
It all struck as terribly ironic and almost meta to perplexed onlookers. The Democrats hoped to win Congress and the presidency to dole out money to their political friends, but their political friends siphoning off money helped prevent them from winning Congress and the presidency.
Now, after running an overfunded political operation, the Harris campaign finds itself still raising money to pay off debts. One cannot help but see the incontinence of the Harris campaign as the counterfactual Harris presidency in microcosm.
The takers lost. The taxpayers won.
READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn:
Joe Biden Gave Us AG Gaetz, DNI Gabbard, and Trump
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