I did something stupid

Accountability!

On Monday afternoon, I did something dumb. And, as usual for me, it involved Twitter.

Here it is:

Pride will get you every time.

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I DID think Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro a) made the most sense as the VP pick for Kamala Harris and b) was the clear frontrunner to get the nod.

And, to be honest, I still think Shapiro makes the most sense — on paper. Harris has to win Pennsylvania to realistically win the presidency. And while VP picks never matter that much, they can matter at the margins. And if Pennsylvania is going to be a one or two point race, I did — and DO — believe that Shapiro was the right VP choice.

If you watched the Philadelphia rally last night and caught any of Shapiro’s speech introducing Tim Walz, you see why lots of people agree with me!

What I didn’t calculate is that big personal — and personnel — decisions like this one are never made by just math. Or on paper.

Harris went with Walz over Shapiro more on vibes than anything else. She liked him. She trusted him. And she thought they could work together.

She also was influenced by her own not-great experience as Joe Biden’s VP. Harris was never, really, welcomed into the Biden inner circle. She was always an afterthought. She never felt like she got the proper amount of respect or attention.

And so, when she picked someone for the job she’s held for the last three-plus years, she wanted someone who she could work with, yes, but ALSO someone who was going to be totally for her. Who understood that this was her moment. And who was dedicated to keeping the focus on her.

This, from a great Politico piece on why Harris went with Walz, is illuminating on that front:

In the dining room of the Naval Observatory on Sunday, Tim Walz sat across from his soon-to-be running mate for the biggest interview of his life. His message to Kamala Harris and her vetting team was one of deference.

“I’m at the end of my career. This is not about me. This is about America’s working families,” Walz told Harris and the vetting team, according to a person involved in the vice presidential vetting process who was granted anonymity to discuss the private meetings.

“And if I have to run through a brick wall, if I have to do the hard things,” Walz added, “I’m willing to do it because I’m not angling for anything else.”

Makes sense, right? While I don’t agree with the pick — I am more of a math/numbers guy — I do get it.

Ok, now back to what I did wrong with that tweet. Rather than say — as I did in my writing in this newsletter and in my videos on YouTube — that I thought Shapiro made the most sense as Harris’ pick and explaining why, I veered into asserting that Shapiro was going to be the pick.

Why? Arrogance. And the fact that it takes me three seconds to jot something off on Twitter, which lends itself to, um, less-than-fully-thought-out musings.

(Sidebar: Jeff Zucker, a mentor and my boss at CNN, once told me that Twitter was the dumbest thing I did on a daily basis. “It’s the thing you do every day that could get you fired. And they don’t pay you a cent to do it,” he said. He was, as he almost always was, right.)

Minutes after I sent it, I realized it was dumb. Like, if Harris didn’t pick Shapiro, I would look like an idiot. And having a tweet hanging out there would just be catnip for people who don’t like me to dunk all over me.

Which they did! That tweet has 1.7 million views as of this morning! And 818 comments, the vast majority of which read like this:

Or this:

Or even this:

Good times. Goooooood times.

While I think the online reaction is, er, a little over the top — Breaking news: People on social media are awful! — I mostly get it.

Rather than offer my analysis of why I thought (and think!) Shapiro made the most sense, I veered into predicting it would be Shapiro. Which isn’t what I wanted to do. Or should be doing.

I would LOVE to tell you I won’t make another mistake like this one. That I won’t let a brief moment of arrogance or an attempt at know-it-all-ism creep into a tweet.

But that would be a lie. I am human. I am a work in progress. I say and do things — pretty regularly! — that I wish, in retrospect, I hadn’t.

So, my pledge to you is not that I won’t ever veer into assertion over analysis again. Or that I won’t be wrong about who Kamala Harris picked as her VP. I will. (Ok, it’s unlikely I will be misguided about who Harris picks for her VP again — but you get the idea.)

My pledge to you is that I will always be honest and authentic. When I think “A” will happen and “B” winds up happening, I will tell you why I thought what I thought — and why it was wrong.

That’s what I always try to do. And what I will continue to try to do.

Thanks for sticking by me — an admittedly imperfect guy.