Kamala Harris Aide Quits with a Savage Letter of Resignation

Californian politicians being bad at their jobs isn’t something that’s exactly newsworthy, but I thought I’d write about it just this once just because of the letter of resignation that came with this particular case.

Kelly Mehlenbacher, Kamala Harris’s campaign’s Iowa operations director, peaced out and left a note that by all rights should’ve combusted with the burns it serves. The letter was published as part of a New York Times piece about how the Harris campaign “unraveled” (read: went to sh*t), as if “poor leadership” and “scraping the bottom of the pander barrel” weren’t reason enough. The letter reads in part:

“This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly. While I still believe that Senator Harris is the strongest candidate to win in the General Election in 2020, I no longer have confidence in our campaign or its leadership.”

It’s worth pointing out that Mehlenbacher immediately took a job with the Bloomberg campaign. “Strongest candidate,” my ass.

“It is not acceptable to me that we encouraged people to move from Washington, DC to Baltimore only to lay them off with no notice, with no plan for the campaign, and without thoughtful consideration of the personal consequences to them or the consequences that their absence would have on the remaining staff,” continued Mehlenbacher. “It is unacceptable that we would lay off anyone that we hired only weeks earlier. It is unacceptable that with less than 90 days until lowa we still do not have a real plan to win.”

“Campaigns have highs and lows, mistakes and miscalculations, lessons learned and adjustments made. But because we have refused to confront our mistakes, foster an environment of critical thinking and honest feedback, or trust the expertise of talented staff, we find ourselves making the same unforced errors over and over. And, it certainly does not help the team to read about campaign discord in Politico (or various other publications) because those with things to say have decided the best way to air their grievances is in the press instead of to leadership.”

And that’s all she wrote (figuratively, not literally). Maybe this will be the final nail in the coffin for Harris, but probably not. I’ve historically been pretty bad at anticipating how low is too low for the 18 people that get polled. But for real, y’all. Kamala Harris can’t even run a successful campaign; why on earth would anyone trust her with the country?