One of the attacks Republicans are using against Kamala Harris is that she is a DEI candidate. What they mean by this is that other than meeting a preferred demographic, she is otherwise unqualified and would not be where she is today. Is this a fair criticism?
I went from being a proponent of D&I to becoming a strong opponent of DEI initiatives since the E got added. One of my concerns with DEI has been the risk that when minorities and women do achieve, it’s easy to dismiss their success as being linked to special treatment. I remember when Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court, many on the left chastised him for being opposed to certain affirmative action programs stating that he was a beneficiary of those programs and would never have become a judge, much less a Supreme Court justice, had he not had that leg up.
It seems natural for people to attempt to dismiss someone’s accomplishments based on factors that person can’t really control. Paris Hilton has leveraged her family name to make a fortune on her own. Donald Trump started life with a lot of advantages, but he leveraged those advantages to create his own fortune and create a worldwide brand, both in politics and in business. J.D. Vance is an example of someone who didn’t have those advantages, but has been successful nonetheless. Would Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Clarence Thomas or Kamala Harris have been as successful without family money or the benefits of their skin color? That question is unanswerable, because the only choice each of them had was to play the cards they were dealt.
The vice presidency has evolved a lot since John Adams first filled the role in 1789. There have been 49 of them. Only six have been elected president after serving as vice president. The first two, Adams and Jefferson, were from a period where the guy who finished runner-up in the presidential election automatically became the VP. The last four were part of a ticket, just like today. In my lifetime, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Joe Biden are the only ones to be elected president after serving as VP.
Vice presidents have a pretty limited role, depending on the president. They are typically chosen to help carry a particular state or bolster a particular demographic. Once elected, they attend international funerals and head up task forces that never really have much influence. John Kennedy selected Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in 1960. Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader from Texas, helped secure support from southern Democrats who might otherwise be unenthused by a Roman Catholic from Boston. Kennedy barely defeated Nixon and would likely have lost if he had chosen a running mate from the northeast or California. Richard Nixon’s choice of Spiro Agnew, Governor of Maryland, in 1968 appealed to the law and order electorate who were frustrated with the civil unrest in the mid-late 60’s.
This trend of the candidate at the top of a ticket selecting a running mate based more on the election than succession continued when Trump selected J.D. Vance, from Ohio, ostensibly to strengthen blue collar support in mid-west battleground states. Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris in 2020 to solidify black support. Biden won 92% of the black vote that year and black voters were enthused by the presence of a black candidate and turned out in strong numbers. Many pundits point to this turnout as a big reason for Biden’s victory. At the time of this writing, Harris hasn’t announced her VP choice, but you can bet it will be someone selected primarily for the purpose of helping her win key states or demographics.
So, back to the question. Was Kamala a DEI pick by Biden and now the Democrats? The answer has to be “no.” Like her or not, she’s climbed the political ladder just like most other politicians have – beginning at the local level and working her way to the national level. While Joe Biden did her no favors by announcing early that he was only considering females for the job, she still won the role against some reasonable competition including Gretchen Whitmer, Susan Rice, and Elizabeth Warren.
Was her skin color an advantage? Yes, in that it appealed to a critical voting bloc. But one can say the same about the choices of LBJ, Agnew and J.D. Vance – they appealed to critical voting blocs. Politics is about winning elections.
What about her being chosen as the Democratic nominee without any opposition? Is that a DEI coronation? I suspect that had more to do with the $90 million in campaign funds that Harris arguably has access to that other Democrat candidates would not have.
I believe it is a mistake on the part of Republicans to diminish her professional accomplishments by labeling her a DEI hire. Trump was making substantial gains among black voters prior to Biden’s dropping out. Some analysts have suggested that if he could win 25% of the black vote versus the 8% he won in 2020, he would likely easily win the election. Unfortunately for Trump supporters, the campaign has likely undone much of those gains by personal attacks on Harris related to her race since she became the nominee. The DEI hire criticism itself is unhelpful, but Trump’s answer to a question at a Black Journalists event this week might turn out to be the final nail in Trump’s effort to win a larger bloc of black voters. “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black,” he said. “So I don’t know – Is she Indian? Or is she black?”
The interviewer asked a horribly worded question, but she provoked him into the sound bite she was hoping for. While some people claim that the assassination attempt has changed Trump, and perhaps it has in some ways, this was certainly a throwback line for him. It was reminiscent of his claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and Nikki Haley may not be eligible to be president due to her parents’ citizenship. To me it was also reminiscent of the late 1990s when some white golf fans decided that Tiger Woods was asian and not black since his mom was from Thailand. Somehow losing to an asian golfer is more acceptable than losing to a black golfer? These types of distinctions rightly frustrate black Americans.
It is astounding that Trump continues to make provocative statements like these that can’t help him, but can only hurt him. The only benefit to Trump is that we he says these things, he dominates the next news cycle. He seems to enjoy sending the liberal media into hysterics.
My advice to the Trump campaign is to focus on how its policy positions help blacks, women, and other people of color more so than continuing or expanding the Great Society programs that have harmed more than helped. That’s their only chance of winning more of the minority vote. Right now it might be Kamala’s race to lose. It appears that she’s following Joe’s strategy of campaigning from the basement and letting Trump beat himself. Be interesting to see if that strategy works for her in a post-COVID world. Or if Trump can somehow regain the momentum he had prior to Biden dropping-out.