DNC chair Ken Martin has turned himself into the shifty bad guy from Fargo.
Ken Martin speaks to Jon Favreau on “Pod Save America.”(YouTube)
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 neighbourly, 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 along, even when I ran for this position, is that we were going to focus on the things that will help us win the upcoming election, right? Making sure that we learn the right lessons that could help inform our victories. And that’s what we’ve done.
We said this when we sent out the press release back in November, saying we weren’t going to release the report. We were going to actually keep our focus on those lessons. And we released those lessons.
We continue to do that. And it’s important for me, instead of naval gazing and looking backwards and trying to re-litigate 2024, I don’t know about you, Jon, but I don’t have a time machine. I don’t think you do.
No one does. So we can’t change what happened in ’24. The only thing we can do is actually change what happens in the future, including the ’26 election cycle, ’28, and beyond.
That means we do need to learn the lessons. We need to make sure they help inform our decisions that we’re making. And we’ve been releasing those.
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To his credit, Favreau refused to accept this obfuscatory response and kept pushing. But Martin, in the true spirit of a Jerry Lundegaard, blathered on with his pre-set and evasive talking points, even at the expense of destroying his credibility.
When Favreau asked why a report that cost hundreds of thousands of donor dollars to produce is now being hidden away, Martin implausibly contested the premise of the question:
Martin: We didn’t spend a lot of donor money on that. And that’s just inaccurate.
Favreau: You spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on it, right?
Martin: No, we did not.
Favreau: It was a free report?
Martin: We did not spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on that. The person and people who were involved in it were not paid to do this work.
The problem with this claim is that it raises more questions than it answers. Is Martin saying that no money at all went into this report? Did the DNC really hand over so important a task as the 2024 autopsy to pro bono volunteers rather than professional consultants?
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Martin repeatedly insisted there was “no smoking gun” in the autopsy. That seems likely, since the 2024 election defeat obviously had multiple causes. But if that’s so, why not release the report? Martin said he was worried people would “want to weaponize the report in a way to look backwards, to point fingers, place blame in a way that actually doesn’t keep us focused on the upcoming election.”
The comment about the perils of the report being weaponized gets to the heart of the matter. If the autopsy has no “smoking gun,” it might still give prominence to a few issues that the DNC and powerful donors don’t want discussed.
In February, Axios reported, “Top Democratic officials who worked on the party’s still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza.”
Israel/Palestine remains the great taboo issue that Democratic party leaders are trying to avoid. The so-called ceasefire in Gaza has merely slowed down the killing of Palestinian civilians, not stopped it. Meanwhile, the US and Israel are engaged in a reckless war against Iran that threatens to capsize the global economy.
Israel has become very unpopular with the American people, especially Democratic Party voters. Summarizing a recent poll from The Economist and YouGov, Truthout reported that “56 percent of Democrats say the U.S. should decrease military aid to Israel, including 35 percent who say the practice should stop altogether.” Among the general population, only 19 per cent want to keep funding to Israel at the current level.
This general disenchantment with Israel stands in contrast to a political elite and donor class that is still strongly wedded to maintaining the US/Israel alliance. Last August, Evan Robins noted in The Nation that “the Democratic elite—which has played a crucial role in enabling and perpetuating the slaughter in Gaza—is still clinging to the status quo. And nowhere is that more evident than in how Ken Martin, the recently installed chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is handling the issue.”
This description of the problem is even more apt now than when Robins originally wrote those words. Martin has decided the best way to deal with Israel/Palestine is to sideline the issue and not talk about it. This entails covering up the 2024 autopsy. But, like Jerry Lundegaard, Martin is finding out that covering up misdeeds is not so easy. Lies build on lies, and each new untruth requires more and more deception. Throughout his Pod Save America interview, Martin kept up a veneer of chirpy friendliness, but his oily demeanor made the dishonesty even more obvious.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.