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As context, Harris's campaign did a lot better than we expected, and than the democratic establishment expected. They made a very visible pivot towards the center, especially on immigration and the border. I'm not sure many of us would've predicted Harris, if she ran, would be able to brand herself as a "tough border-state prosecutor" a year ago. It's easy to have an impression that 'harris campaign maximally bad' without keeping context in mind.
Also, of course, what these people are willing to say in public is probably different from what they'll say in private. Criticizing people they worked with, and especially the personal decisions of the candidate, isn't going to do them any favors in the future. That this is true is still a failing of the progressive social system, but keep that in mind.
That said, if I were a progressive, listening to that interview would've left me infuriated. The apex for me was, when discussing why Harris didn't break from Biden more, how they dismissed the idea of directly disagreeing with Biden on any issues. They treated it like it wasn't even an option. Oh, there'd be so many stories contrasting that to her past positions! And she'd be personally uncomfortable with it. With no attempt to weigh that against the benefits of coming out against the currently extremely unpopular president. This is how she ended up saying things like, in response to a question about what she'd have done differently from Biden, "There is not a thing that comes to mind." It's the kind of thing that happens in organizations that don't cultivate agency, where you select for people because they saying the right things, knew and were loyal to the right people, did the tasks assigned to them, nobody has the practice at taking personal ownership of a risky and surprising, but overall good, decision. (Directionally, at least, they still did fine, see first paragraph).
Would a Harris campaign that had openly criticized Biden but done nothing differently won? Probably not, but it should still sting if you're a progressive that these were the people making the decisions.
I think the idea was correct. Democrats do much better by campaigning to the right. Clinton was a good ole southern boy, Obama was against gay marriage, Biden was a return to normal. Sure these were all obvious lies, but they worked for a part of the electorate. But Kamala was incapable of selling the lie. She couldn't get even one step outside of her talking points without crashing and burning, and that was the problem. She was quite keen to tell us all that she was "the only one in the race who had prosecuted international criminal organizations" but oddly she was never able to elaborate on this. No names, dates, stories. Its almost like that was a fabrication.
Kamala was potentially an ideal candidate for this kind of narrative. In San Francisco, she was on the "Right," a prosecutor who actually prosecuted and got criminals off the street. She also has her race and gender: she had much more space to jettison the more extreme ideologues without getting called racist and misogynist.
The issue comes down to intra-Democratic culture. The type of person to succeed isn't the type of person who embraces personal agency and is willing to take risks. Success in the Democratic Party (particularly, the CA state party) isn't something that comes to those who are willing to rock the boat, but to those who are team players. This selects for people who can excel at following the rules of a controlled system but doesn't produce individuals who are constitutionally capable of competing in open systems.
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Given that the measure of a campaign's performance is election results, is the contention here that the Democratic establishment expected Harris to lose the election by an even bigger margin than she had? I don't think that was the case.
I should've been more specific back before the drama about Biden's debate performance, the more reasonable people in the Dem establishment had negative views of Harris's electability. One of the reasons cited for why Biden shouldn't drop out was that Harris was a poor candidate and wouldn't do much better. Matt Yglesias was against harris's VP selection in 2020. And Harris did a lot better than other incumbents did worldwide.
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