If the Times report is correct, the DNC will blame neither its candidates nor their record in office for their failures.

–New York Times reporters Reid Epstein and Shane Goldmacher did not disguise their dissatisfaction with what the Democratic National Committee is branding its “after-action review” of the 2024 election.

In their review of the “draft document” as described to them by Democratic “party officials,” the reporters relate the drafters’ intention to “avoid” asking painful questions about Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection or whether Kamala Harris was the proper choice to replace him. That is, the Times maintains, a bit “like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.”

That’s a fine metaphor. Something that more closely tracks with the “after-action” report framework would be assigning blame for the disastrous “Desert One” raid to the State Department for putting the hostages that Iran’s revolutionary government took captive in their precarious position to begin with. After all, the Democrats’ report “is expected to place blame with Future Forward, the party’s main super PAC,” which will be alleged to have spent too much time and energy “propping up” Harris rather than tearing down Donald Trump. For what it’s worth, sources close to Future Forward suggest that they are being framed. After all, “just 13 percent of its advertising was positive about Ms. Harris, with the rest attacking Mr. Trump,” the report continued.

Democrats familiar with the drafting process indicated that the Times’ sour verdict is premature. Interviews are still being conducted, and the project’s conclusions have not yet been reached. In addition, a variety of liberal activist groups and Democratic officials are conducting their own postmortem analyses of the Biden/Harris campaign’s failures. But the Times report ends with some context that leads readers to conclude that the self-criticism in any of these products will be muted:

The D.N.C.’s report is expected to be far different from the so-called autopsy that Republicans produced after the 2012 election of Barack Obama. In March 2013, the Republican National Committee released a 100-page “Growth and Opportunity Project” report that declared the G.O.P. was in an “ideological cul-de-sac” and called for moderation on immigration along with a number of other changes.

The paper’s reporters duly note that the GOP adopted the “autopsy’s” conclusions, but Trump himself ran against its recommendations and was rewarded with the presidency for it. Maybe self-criticism is overrated.

Perhaps this project ends up as an effort to shield Joe Biden’s courtiers from criticism. Maybe it glosses over the former president’s decrepitude and his chosen successor’s comprehensive lack of political talent. But if the goal here is self-soothing therapy, the party would probably be better off assigning blame for their exile to the wilderness on their cast of incapable leaders. The alternative would be to scrutinize how Democrats governed the country from 2021 to 2024.

That analysis would find that Democrats at all levels pumped ungodly sums of capital into an already overheated economy, contributing to the inflationary pressure consumers hated with a blinding passion. Meanwhile, Biden presided over American humiliations in the Middle East and Europe, where the two hot wars that broke out during Biden’s term in office rage still. In the Biden era, Americans experienced financial precarity at home and insecurity abroad, and they reacted predictably.

It’s understandable why ideologically committed progressives would like to avoid confronting those suboptimal results, and the Biden/Harris team would make convenient scapegoats. But the Biden/Harris team’s staff still holds sway over the party, and a report that indicts them by implication is not in their interest either. So, if the Times report is correct, the DNC will blame neither its candidates nor their record in office for their failures. Rather, they’ll heap scorn on one super PAC’s media buying strategy for costing them the presidency. The Times’ reporters’ skepticism is well earned.