Why Is the DNC Covering Up Its 2024 Autopsy? |
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Why Is the DNC Covering Up Its 2024 Autopsy?
DNC chair Ken Martin has turned himself into the shifty bad guy from Fargo.
Ken Martin speaks to Jon Favreau on Pod Save America.
Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin is a pure product of Minnesota, one of the great bastions of progressive politics. (Minnesota was the only state never to give a single Electoral College vote to Ronald Reagan.) He rose through the ranks of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), the wellspring of the state’s sturdy tradition of economic populism. This robust liberalism has been heroically on display in Minnesota’s ongoing anti-ICE protests, which have blunted the Trump administration’s anti-immigration push (though at the cost of murdered protesters).
Stereotypically, the residents of the state are seen as stolid, earnest, and neighborly, traits distilled in the phrase “Minnesota nice.” But no region is purely one thing. The Minnesota-born auteurs Joel and Ethan Coen are among the greatest of American filmmakers because they have a special gift for uncovering the seediness hidden underneath quirky charm. One of their best movies, Fargo (1998), explores how the flip side of Minnesota nice is Minnesota vice.
Fargo tracks Jerry Lundegaard, a sales manager at a Minneapolis car dealership whose ingratiating unctuousness seems at first glance merely pathetic but is in fact evidence of horrifying moral squalor. Lundegaard, whose jittery, shifty-eyed furtiveness is given unsettling life in a terrific William H. Macy performance, plots the kidnapping of his wife, a harebrained money-making scheme that escalates into a series of brutal murders that are covered up with increasing ineptness. Part of the queasy thrill of the movie is watching Lundegaard move from small everyday fibs (including sales pitches for unnecessary accessories) into ever larger lies as he tries to cover up his expanding culpability in shocking violence.
As unlikely as it seems, Martin himself illustrates the continuum between Minnesota nice and Minnesota vice. On Tuesday, he made a disastrous appearance on the Pod Save America podcast, where he was grilled by host Jon Favreau about the failure of the DNC to release the autopsy it has prepared on the 2024 presidential election loss.
The autopsy is a serious matter. Reportedly, it is 200 pages long and based on more than 300 interviews with officials from all 50 states. Martin had repeatedly promised to release the report, but now he insists that it does not need to be made public after all. His explanations to Favreau for why secrecy is the best policy were so obviously self-serving and disingenuous that they provoked a lengthy Reddit thread where viewers of the Pod Save America interview compared Marty to Jerry Lundegaard (a comparison also made on the Majority Report show).
The interview began with Favreau asking why Martin had backtracked on his explicit promise to release the report. Martin responded:
“Well, look, I mean, what I said all........