Be Like Buffett

Dems can't move forward without admitting mistakes

Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letter has used the words “mistake” or “error” 16 times over the past five years. But the famed investor notes “many other huge companies never used either word over that span… it has generally been happy talk.”

The post-election talk among Democrats has not been happy. But it has similarly lacked many admissions of mistakes.

Over the weekend, an interview with top Biden advisor Mike Donilon went viral via this clip in which he says “lots of people have terrible debates …usually, the party doesn’t lose its mind and that’s what happened here. It melted down.”

He went on to claim forcing Biden out of the race was “insane.”

Reactions were overwhelmingly negative. Obama campaign architect David Axelrod captured many reactions with one word: “Delusional.”

Run For Something’s founder said “This is an insane thing to say out loud - let alone actually believe.” Politico reporter Elena Schneider quoted an article about the debacle: “the more you get into the bunker, the less you listen to anyone.”

Infuriating

But the most important take came from Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki: “The absolute inability to admit wrongdoing, fallibility or culpability is just infuriating.”

What was not said was most important. And not just in that four-minute clip - I watched the full nearly two-hour interview¹ and Buffett’s magical words barely appear.

NBC reporter Sahil Kapur provided some broader context, saying:

“There are some in Biden world who are clinging to the belief that he could still have won after that catastrophic debate. Others have “grown up” — as one put it to me recently — and accepted that Harris, whatever else is true of her, saved Dems from a more devastating wipeout”.

Lakshya Jain agrees:

“Democrats are extraordinarily fortunate that Pelosi chose to stay in Congress despite exiting leadership, and that she pushed Biden out. He had no intention of going, and that would have been *catastrophic* for them at all levels — way worse than a narrow GOP trifecta.”

And Biden has nearly said so himself, although about governing:

President Joe Biden, both reflective and defensive as he discussed his legacy, told USA TODAY he believes he could have won his reelection bid − but isn't sure he would have had the vigor to complete four more years in the Oval Office.

There is a lot of unexplored anger at Biden and his team. He won the primary as a moderate, pivoted to the center for a closer-than-expected general election win, and thought he was FDR against all evidence.

Biden picked a blue state Senator with no track record of winning swing voters as Vice President, then assigned her the most damaging issue (immigration) to lead. He decided to run for re-election, then took too long to drop out.

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Where does Dem frustration go?

Polls show Democratic voters are overwhelmingly frustrated at party leadership. The lack of humility could be playing a role.

It is not just Biden or Donilon. The Harris campaign staff appeared on Pod Save America and … well they basically said they did everything right, they just got unlucky.

Rather than making the case for their approach of not distancing their candidate from Biden, Harris aides blame the candidate for not wanting to upset the President. They complain about SuperPACs, even though Democratic SuperPACs had more money than Trump’s. They complained about the media environment, even though fewer than 5% of journalists are Republicans. They complained that they were dropped into a deep hole they couldn’t get out (even though most were part of the Biden campaign, which dug the hole).

This excerpt from Ross Barkan’s post-election screed on the Twilight of the Liberal Left has been making the rounds since the election:

The liberal-left resistance, meanwhile, will have to stagger into a future they failed, over and over again, to head off. No movement, perhaps, has accomplished less. No movement has done so little to reach what was supposed to be an existential goal. Trump, eight years into the resistance, is at his apogee. The editorial boards and NGO bosses and magazine writers and braying congressmen and MSNBC panelists must contend with this bare, inarguable fact. The electoral map ran blood-red. How? Why? It was the racism of an Arab majority city voting for Trump, the white supremacy of the Bronx, New York’s poorest borough, deciding Trump needed more of its vote than ever before. Pundits prattle about misinformation, as if all the voters were toddlers who needed to be bolted down and told why Brat Summer was so vital for the future of the republic. There are calls now for a feminist Joe Rogan, as if the actual Rogan did not already endorse a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. The liberal-left reaps what it sows. It was not merely Trump that was chosen. It was the not-Democrat

Meanwhile, DNC Chair Ken Martin is saying, "We've got the right message, what we need to do is connect it back with the voters."

But the message isn’t fine. And Democrats don’t have any problem with getting their message to voters, they spent significantly more than Trump’s campaign.

Semafor’s list of What We Got Wrong in 2024 weighted towards one around one issue: centrist pundit regret at not seeing Biden’s decline earlier. Here are excerpts from two of our favorite writers, Matthew Yglesias:

In a lot of ways it’s more embarrassing to have been gullible and wrong when so many people with no sources and no inside info could see it clearly, but that’s what happened - I was just wrong about one of the big questions

And Josh Barro:

I come out of 2024 with a lot of contempt for the president and for the people around him … and also with a fair amount of embarrassment that I didn’t see through their deception earlier.

We have learned a lot from Yglesias and Barro because we think they are often right - and election results often prove them right. But them admitting they were wrong is even more powerful. We can all take their advice with even more credibility now.

If great writers - and the most successful investor in the world - can admit to being wrong, leaders of the party that has now handed a unified government control to Donald Trump should be able to as well.

Voters don’t need groveling, but they deserve to know Democratic leaders understand how badly they messed up - and that they are committed to change. Join us in DC on June 4th at WelcomeFest for a gathering of the committed - learn more and register here.

1. 44 minutes into the interview, Donilon provides an interesting window into another form of White House insanity: during negotiations over major spending bills with Joe Manchin, there was “back and forth” because “people got angry at Manchin, they would tell Biden how they had to attack him and stop talking to him.” Why were people who wanted to attack Joe Manchin in the White House at all?!