The New York Review of Books offered a Q&A with this person: In Joseph O’Neill’s first essay in our pages, he warned readers that “the Republican Party enjoyed a mystifying presumption of legitimacy,” contrasted with “the curious timidity of Democrats.” In that instance, he was describing the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida, but he has made clear in his subsequent writing to what extent that dynamic has dogged American politics ever since: from an article about Democrats’ failure to win statewide elections—“Their core mission is to practice a ceremonial innocence about the unshakable virtue of American conservatism—and to do so even as the worst, full of passionate intensity, are cleaning their clocks”—to his analysis of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s campaign. “What will they do?” he asked in October. “Stick with the cautious, timid posture we saw at the veep debate, or go on the offensive? It seems extraordinary that this is a question at all.” There’s a lot to it and I don’t agree with all of it. Some of what he says seems contradictory to me. But that said, in contrast to 90% of the ritualized Democratic self-flaggelation pieces in which everyone miraculously discovers that their personal hobby horses are the One True Reason why the party failed, this one struck me as a realistic take on the whole thing without the hysterical navel gazing: I don’t think Harris lost because of campaign missteps. To put it another way: it’s hard to think of a campaign she could have run that…