By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
When one of our two major parties loses a presidential
election — and particularly when the loss is a heartbreaking one, causing angst
among both the donor and activist classes — we turn to a hallowed political
tradition: the election autopsy. What went wrong? How could we have blown it
so badly? Here’s an official 100-page report from the party, complete with
charts and appendices, explaining exactly why we’re going to be sucking wind
from an exhaust pipe for the next four years and how to prevent this from
happening again.
Those of you with long memories may remember that the
national GOP engaged in this very same exercise back in 2013, as it reeled from
Mitt Romney’s firm rejection by the voters. The GOP, in its infinite wisdom,
concluded that the Republican Party lost because Mitt Romney was too
anti-immigration and that the GOP would need to support amnesty and/or a “path
to citizenship” in the future to ever have a hope of assembling a winning
national coalition. (Keep that thought in your back pocket.)
Now — with Donald Trump speedrunning through his second
term in office like an amphetamined bull in a china shop — it’s the Democrats’
turn for official recriminations. And of course the writing of the “autopsy”
itself has become a football for warring factions of Democrats to punt around.
This weekend, the New York Times reported — with the sort of headline snark you would expect
from me, not the Times — that the “Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described
as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death.”
Party officials described the draft
document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the
presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then
reviewing the salad.
Oh, how catty of you, New York Times! In
other words, the autopsy is not expected to focus on matters such as Joe
Biden’s decision to run for reelection in the first place or Kamala Harris’s
inadequacies as a candidate. The Times is transparently miffed about
this.
And I find myself in the curious position of taking the
side of the Democratic Party in this case. Noah Rothman wrote about this story yesterday afternoon and covered many
of its salient points, but I would add that “autopsy reports,” because they’re
public, are inherently political documents intended not to soberly and honestly
analyze what went wrong so much as to signal to interested parties a party’s
proposed future course of action. What good in that case would come from an
autopsy focused primarily on Biden and Harris? (“Well, I guess we learned not to do it
again.”) You can’t undo the past. Furthermore, any such approach would do a
disservice to Democrats by lulling them into a dangerous belief that the
problem was their candidates rather than their underlying issues with the
electorate.
Alas, according to the Times, it seems that the
Democrats’ autopsy report is going to arrive at a laughable conclusion anyway,
assigning the lion’s share of the blame to the super PACs and outsider groups
that failed to get the job done for Democrats. Apparently, they failed to “change
the conversation” and make the election about Trump, as it properly should have
been. (Far be it from me to suggest that no national election of my lifetime,
not even 1996, was more fiercely litigated on the specific ethical and
political merits of one man than was 2024.)
Friends, better super PAC messaging wasn’t going to save
Democrats in 2024. A Democratic Party that refuses to acknowledge that it lost
because of the border, inflation, and its cultural alienation from the great
mass of American voters is not a party properly reckoning with its failures.
(An honest autopsy would report the cause of death as suicide.) But recall,
this is not the true purpose of an “autopsy” report. The true purpose is to
dictate the party’s prospective positioning. My real point is that it will
probably fail there, as well.
Remember that thought I asked you to keep in your back
pocket, about the GOP’s own post-2012 “autopsy” report? Well, when Trump ran
for president in 2015, he basically ran against every plank of that autopsy, in
deed if not by explicit word. Even more importantly, he won, and in so doing
reshaped the GOP coalition. Let this be a lesson in how seriously to take
autopsy reports.
The WNBA’s All-Stars Don’t Want to Get Paid What
They’re Really Owed
The WNBA All-Star Game was held on Saturday, July 19 —
but, then again, you didn’t need me to tell you that, did you? I’m sure you
were all tuned in to the big game on ESPN. There, the ladies of the court
caused a stir — primarily on social media — when they began their warm-ups
wearing matching black T-shirts that said “Pay Us What You Owe Us,” a demand for higher salaries and
profit-sharing among the players. Then they played a game that nobody watched.
(Who won? I did — I was reading a book at the time.)
The reaction to this on social media was instantaneous
and brutal, however, perhaps even to the point of overkill. Who exactly is
owed what by whom? tens of thousands of online accounts asked
simultaneously, as if with one voice. My first reaction was that if WNBA
players want to be paid what they’re really owed, then my offer, like Michael
Corleone’s, is this: nothing. (The Babylon Bee was even less forgiving
in its calculus: “Uh-Oh — WNBA Players Demand To Be Paid What
They’re Worth And Now They Owe The NBA $400 Million.”)
But I think many commenters are incorrectly attributing a
“woke” social justice element to the (minor) protest. It is no such thing. It
is instead little more than a prosaic labor dispute, coordinated bellyaching
about the terms of the current collective bargaining agreement the players’
union signed with the WNBA back in 2020, which is set to expire after the 2025
season.
Back in 2020 — in other words, before Caitlin Clark
brought a new level of attention, in 2024, to what had been, prior to her
advent, a flagging niche league — the WNBA players’ union negotiated a
revenue-sharing agreement guaranteeing them 9.9 percent of league revenues.
Meanwhile, NBA players currently get a CBA-determined 50 percent of all
basketball-related income distributed to them. That is up for grabs in October,
and that is specifically what the WNBA players were making a statement about.
Which gets directly at why their complaints ring so
hollow: The NBA essentially pays for the WNBA — which has lost money
every single year of its existence — subsidizing it out of a progressive sense
of “corporate social conscience.” The WNBA would not make a profit on its own
and, in fact, would collapse (or at least contract) were the NBA not propping
it up. During the 2023–24 season, the NBA generated $11.3 billion in revenue;
the WNBA somewhere around $100–$200 million. Its television ratings are
similarly minuscule compared with the NBA’s (which, as an aside, has become an
incredibly boring product in recent years itself).
The players would argue that the zeitgeist has shifted
and that the WNBA is suddenly in a cultural sweet spot for growth because of
the buzz surrounding Indiana Fever phenomenon Caitlin Clark, hence they deserve
to lock in a better deal for themselves prospectively. It’s a curious argument
to hear coming from athletes who, by and large, have been brutalizing Clark on
the court this year in a comically obvious league-wide case of Mean Girl
syndrome. Clark is currently nursing an injury, and ratings and interest in the
WNBA have dropped accordingly; she was the only person on that court on
Saturday with any plausible right to complain, and if she wanted to sport a
shirt saying “Pay Me What You Owe Me,” it could have been just as easily
addressed to her fellow All-Stars.
Donald Trump: American-Indian Rights Activist
For those who don’t pay attention to Trump’s Truth Social
account — for those who only hear about it when he’s gone and said something
bonkers enough to earn coverage here or roil the waters of larger social media
platforms — I really cannot emphasize enough how relentlessly unhinged it is.
It’s the nonstop nature of it that surprises: He’s out there beavering away at
all times of the day and night, pumping out ten times more “content” than you
probably realize. (This is a man with a pretty important day job.)
I mention this because I figured out long ago that Truth
Social is Donald Trump’s emotional weather report, and when the winds pick up and he
begins to bluster online, it’s usually a sign of internal storminess. Want to
know how the president’s feeling today? He’ll tell you himself, inadvertently!
I noted just last week that most of Trump’s wildest ideas
(such as stripping Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship) emerge on Truth Social
when he’s feeling put upon by political circumstances — in that case, the
continued fallout of the “Epstein files” debacle. Out comes a shiny new
distraction to refocus the media on something harmlessly silly.
Keep that in mind, because on Sunday morning, Trump felt
the need to share a new idea with the world: The “Commanders” is a horribly
lame name for a football team.
The Washington “Whatever’s” should
IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team.
There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the
six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in
massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is
systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they
were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense.
OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!
This wasn’t quite enough to stir outrage and engagement,
apparently — after all, what fan of the film Major League doesn’t want
to see Chief Wahoo and the Indians return? — and so, several hours later, he came
back to up the ante:
My statement on the Washington
Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way. I may put a
restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original
“Washington Redskins,” and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, “Washington
Commanders,” I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington. The
Team would be much more valuable, and the Deal would be more exciting for
everyone. Cleveland should do the same with the Cleveland Indians. The Owner of
the Cleveland Baseball Team, Matt Dolan, who is very political, has lost three
Elections in a row because of that ridiculous name change. What he doesn’t
understand is that if he changed the name back to the Cleveland Indians, he
might actually win an Election. Indians are being treated very unfairly. MAKE
INDIANS GREAT AGAIN (MIGA)!
Whatever you say, Billy Jack. This is all transparent
bloviation, of course, despite the casual threat to throw his presidential
power around. First of all, threatening me, as a conservative, with the
withholding of federal funding for a sports stadium is like threatening me with
a three-week all-expenses-paid vacation. (“Please, Mister Trump, whatever you
do, don’t interfere with this egregious taxpayer boondoggle, don’t toss me in
that briar patch!”) But the real takeaway from this strange outburst is that
Donald Trump is fishing for distractions, looking to see which one moves the
needle with either his fans or the media and shifts the topic of discussion
away from matters that prick his presidency directly.
And frankly, speaking as a childhood Redskins fan who
grew to despairingly hate the franchise during its apocalyptic Dan Snyder era,
I don’t even want Washington to restore the Redskins name. It’s not
about purported racial offensiveness; it’s about my traumatic relationship with
the team, what Snyder’s rancid exploitation and degradation of the Redskins
brand did to my feelings about it. The old Redskins — beloved though they were
in my youth — are truly dead and gone. If the new ownership wants a fresh
start, then I suggest that it take pride in the new roots of this franchise.
Yes, it’s time to reclaim a grand tradition; it’s time to bring back the Washington Football Team.
No comments:
Post a Comment