David Axelrod Needs to Move On

David Axelrod is always good for some self-congratulatory second-guessing:

Axelrod called the 2016 race a “miserable slog” and said nobody in America wants to relive it “except the combatants who keep going back to it.”

This is absolutely laughable — indeed, Clinton has been berated for not spending enough time issuing post-mortems of the 2016 campaign. It’s not that people want her not to talk about the campaign; it’s that they want her to say that she and she alone was responsible for losing, particularly if they’re journalists who spent the campaign writing about Clinton’s email server.

So what was wrong with Clinton’s comments?

“She has a legitimate beef because Comey’s letter was instrumental I think in her defeat, so in a narrow sense she is right about it,” Axelrod said.

Oh, she’s not wrong that Comey’s letter was decisive. But she’s right only “narrowly.” OK.

Anyway, what trenchant critiques does David Axelrod, campaign SUPERGENIUS, have for Clinton’s campaign?

“But Jim Comey didn’t tell her not to campaign in Wisconsin after the convention. Jim Comey didn’t say don’t put any resources into Michigan until the final week of the campaign,” he continued.

I dunno, if you’re going to say that it’s wrong in principle for Clinton to honestly discuss the factors that led to her defeat, you really need to do better than making points that are both banal and transparently wrong. We’ve been through this before, but 1)these states were not decisive; 2)the fact that Clinton lost the conveniently omitted Pennsylvania despite spending huge amounts of time and money should indicate there’s no reason to believe that spending more time in the other two states would have changed the outcome; 3)you can’t just yadda-yadda the Comey letter when discussing Clinton’s campaign strategy. In September and October they were thought they were winning Michigan and Wisconsin, and by Axelrod’s own admission, they were right! When it was clear that the Comey letter shifted the race, they reacted accordingly. Now, there are more plausible criticisms than this, but they’re all unfalsifiable speculation.

There’s another reason this annoys me. Axelrod is a perfectly cromulent operative, and if you want to tell me he’s more able than Robby Mook I won’t argue with you. (Penn goes without saying.) But his implication that his winning campaigns had a similar or greater degree of difficulty is ludicrous. 2008 was essentially an unloseable campaign for the Democratic Party. In 2012, Obama won by roughly the margin you’d expect an incumbent in a decent economy to beat a medicore opponent by. Sure, Trump had high unfavorables, but then Clinton outperformed the fundamentals substantially, and Trump’s unusual appeal to white working class voters mitigated most of these disadvantages given the way we select the president.

Axelrod never had to run a campaign into the kind of headwinds Clinton faced in 2016, and it’s really petty that he doesn’t recognize that. He should be more charitable, because if his candidate had narrowly lost the 2008 primaries it could have been him walking into a buzzsaw he had no idea how to deal with. (And, sure, Obama may well have won as a non-incumbent in 2016, but this wouldn’t be because of his campaign team.)