Required reading at the Huffington Post: A lengthy, relatively candid interview with Danny Diaz, Jeff Roe, and Alex Conant. Diaz served as Jeb Bush’s campaign manager, Roe worked for Ted Cruz, and Conant was Marco Rubio’s communications director. Interviewer Sam Stein opens by describing them as “[w]ell-compensated, highly intelligent and very publicly defeated,” and it just gets more interesting from there, with a palpable sense of surprised failure and a not very well concealed discomfort with the idea of that Elizabeth Warren could among VP possibilities for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Here are some strange, sad gems:
Was there any backchannel communication to team up against Trump?
Diaz
Look, there’s always backchannel communication. But I think it would’ve taken more than one or two campaigns. I think the campaigns would’ve all needed to come together to say, “Hey, there’s a line in the sand here that’s been drawn, and we need to come together to vote someone off the island.”Conant
In a typical election cycle you wouldn’t need all the campaigns to make that agreement. It would just be recognized by all of them that Trump is a huge threat, not just to the collective but to each campaign, and they would all target him in their own way and put an immense amount of pressure on him and his team. And that just never happened. He got a free pass from most of the other campaigns.
And:
How quickly after your campaigns fizzled did you send your resume to the Trump people?
Diaz
I will be very candid. I have never spoken with anyone associated with the Trump campaign.That was a facetious question.
Diaz
I understand. That was a less-than-facetious answer.How about someone like Alex Castellanos? Here’s a political operative who spent the last year criticizing Trump, and he just took a job running one of the Trump super PACs. What should people make of a move like that?
Diaz
We’re in politics. Nothing is surprising.
Not surprising at all?Diaz
Nope.Conant
After the last six months, nothing surprises me.
And here’s where they talk, all squirrelly, about Elizabeth Warren:
On the flip side, who do you not want Hillary Clinton to pick as her VP?
Diaz
Elizabeth Warren.You think Elizabeth Warren would be problematic for the Republican ticket?
Diaz
I, Danny Diaz, would not want see Elizabeth Warren as vice president of the United States of America. It would be an incredibly liberal ticket, and a ticket that would be incredibly damaging to America’s economy.All right, you’re dodging the question. What about you, Jeff? Which VP candidate gives Hillary the best chance of winning?
Roe
I believe in base elections, and I believe in turnout. I believe that this election will be condensed into seven to 10 states and the actual number of people who still need to make up their mind is very small. We chase these people relentlessly. In actuality, though, if you’re trying to get another 10,000 votes in Loudoun County, Virginia, I think you can find those 10,000 votes more easily with people who already believe in you but aren’t likely to vote than you are by getting undecideds to vote for you. So I fear Democrats running a base campaign, directed toward liberals, maximizing that vote, and electing a devastating ticket. But if her philosophy is based on capturing the ever-shrinking middle, then she should do Tim Kaine.Conant
It depends on where the race is in mid-July. If it looks like it is going to be a close race, then a senator from Virginia or Ohio is probably the safest, smartest move to make. If she continues to have trouble uniting her base, I would fully expect her to look to someone like Warren. But if we are going into mid-July and Trump’s candidacy has imploded, or if he’s down by double digits, I would not be shocked if she went big and picked [former Secretary of Defense] Bob Gates or somebody like that, who could turn it into a real blowout in November. She would have to have tons of confidence that her base wouldn’t go anywhere. But a Clinton-Gates ticket would be very attractive to a lot of moderate Republican voters.
They also sound REALLY uncomfortable when Stein asks about misogyny and Hillary Clinton. Go read the whole thing.