We’re just about four weeks post-election, and the post-mortems on the failed Kamala Harris campaign have been plentiful. Many of them have focused on messaging and medium, but there has been considerable scrutiny as to the spending — the most ever in a presidential campaign.
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DNC Finance Committee member Lindy Li has added her voice to the chorus of those expressing dismay with the spending — particularly given the outcome. Sunday evening, Li shared her thoughts on the campaign’s (and the party’s) financial woes during an interview on NewsNation.
The clip picks up mid-answer for Li, so it’s not entirely clear to what she was responding, but she begins here by criticizing the nature and extent of the expenditures and calling for a “granular” review of them:
“And no one answered any questions about why millions of dollars were spent on star-studded concerts, celebrities — $2.5 million went to Oprah’s production company. Oprah very well…could have made an in-kind contribution and covered the production costs and her employees’ salaries herself, but she decided…to take payment from the campaign instead.
“And also, we learned recently that $500,000 was given to Al Sharpton just shortly before he interviewed Kamala Harris.
“So, there’s a lot of conflict of interest here, and we need a careful accounting and probably more granular than the FEC report would offer. So, somebody needs to carefully explain why they decided to, for example, spend $900,000 on the Sphere — because if we don’t do that, how are voters and donors ever going to trust the Democratic Party again?”
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Li was then asked by the host if the abbreviated nature of Harris’ campaign presented “a near-impossible task” and whether they’d have been criticized had they not spent every dollar donated, even asking if it isn’t common for campaigns to end in debt. Li’s response to that was interesting, appearing to throw some shade at Barack Obama:
“Well, when Obama ended in debt in 2012, it left the DNC in a terrible position because we had to climb out of debt, and that took a while. And that definitely — even Hillary Clinton cited the 2012 Obama debt as a reason why she lost because, initially, her campaign was at a disadvantage.
“And also, there is no reason why consultants became overnight millionaires through the campaign — there’s no…justification for that. You know, these are everyday Americans, hard-working Americans, a lot of whom just gave $10-15, and that was all they could do. They poured their hearts into the campaign; they need — they deserve — answers as to why these people became millionaires — multi-millionaires.
“Just bear in mind that all the advertising costs — hundreds of millions of dollars — went to just…four well-connected firms. That’s it. You know, the whole thing is very incestuous; friends took care of friends. But it’s not about that. That campaign [money] was supposed to be spent on battleground states, making the economic case to Americans, explaining bread and butter issues, explaining how she would bring inflation down, not on lining the pockets of well-connected Democrats.”
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Some frank appraisal there — will there be an accounting as Li proposes?