A Sudden Outburst of Concern Over Kamala Harris’s Departure
Photo by Phil Roeder via Wikimedia Commons
Kamala Harris exited the race for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday. This triggered the first outpouring of support for Kamala Harris I have seen. Also new to me were the first lamentations that the Democratic presidential field, despite having way too many candidates, does not have any candidates of color who are performing well.
Kamala Harris officially ended her campaign today, which means that all of the candidates who currently qualify for the December Democratic debate are white (Sanders, Warren, Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Steyer).
White supremacy is not just a Fox News problem, folks.
— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) December 3, 2019
This is not a knock on Duca in particular as I don’t know who she supports, but many of the people who shed tears on Harris’s exit did nothing to support Harris herself as a candidate. In fact, they did everything they could to increase in importance critiques about her background as a prosecutor–a background that was necessary for a black woman to have any hope of becoming a senator in the first place. Harris faced two gates, the first of which required her to pick up a wrench, and the second of which required her to have never have picked up a wrench. Such is life though. Not everyone gets to be president.
The phenomenon I am observing here is a frustration I have long had with the party which I now feel I am stuck with calling my own. If you say you support women of color but don’t support an actual woman of color who asked you for your support, you don’t get to complain about the logical consequences of your choice.
Was Harris supposed to just stick around to keep up appearances? To be the job candidate flown in so that you could say you were open to everyone before picking the person you preferred from the start? If you don’t support these candidates, who should? Just enough so that you don’t have to worry about appearances but not so many that your own candidate loses?
This is something that actually happens in real life. Companies host diversity events and fly employees to recruit at historically black colleges to be able to document their very serious efforts even as the ultimate decisions that actually matter do not change.
Two SITTING WOMEN SENATORS, Gillibrand and Harris, were forced out of this race while non-office-holders Bloomberg and Steyer bought their way in. And it's not just because they can, but because our broken system continues to allows white, male billionaires like them to do it.
— Lauren Rankin (@laurenarankin) December 3, 2019
It may be tempting to blame the white people running. They are the ones who beat Harris! However, Steyer and Bloomberg did not beat Harris, though it might be comforting to think it that is what happened.
It takes a village to respond and nominate a candidate, and more than two-thirds of the village has chosen white candidates in their 70s.
Maybe this is fine! Some white people in their 70s are my best friends! But when I invite them to dinner, I don’t complain to them about no black people having shown up. If they are to show, it is my responsibility to invite them and provide the correct directions. A straight line can be drawn from my actions and choices and who shows up for dinner. To deny it is engage in a very convenient self-delusion.
These lamentations are idiotic. Race and sex have nothing to do with competence, virtue, or having what it takes to win this particular job. I see no evidence that the right woman couldn’t become president. We’ve already established that a black man can and an incredibly politically compromised woman won the popular vote last time around.
Identitarians make excuses, leaders find a way to win. It’s clear what Harris is and even clearer what she isn’t.Report
I just wanted to say that I really like this sentence:
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It’s an interesting contrast between her and, say, Biden, who also has a disturbing criminal justice history.Report
Biden has two things that help him. The first is that his history can pretty well be compartmentalized into the 80s and early 90s where what he did was widely popular and within the spirit of the times, as wrong as all of that has turned out to be. Kamala was doing all of this in the aughts well after the crack epidemic, when spiking urban crime rates were a thing of the past, and when attitudes about things like marijuana and the death penalty were becoming much more liberal.
The second, and more disingenuous, is that he’s just a better politician and knows how to ‘evolve’ with the times, even if it’s in a cynical way. As gaffe prone as he is I can’t see him ever running on his record from that long ago whereas Harris made being top cop central to her strategy.Report
I haven’t seen any evidence that most people care about Harris’ record as a prosecutor. The main people doing Kamala is a Kop are white make libertarians who wouldn’t vote for any Democratic candidate.Report
-Tulsi Gabbard
Harris’ numbers tanked after that debate. I would say that lots of people who will vote Democrat cared.
P.S. Gabbard is neither white nor male…Report
Keep telling yourself that and see where it leads us. That plus what Aaron said.Report
Biden also has decades of building support in the African-American community in a state with a big African-American population.Report
This is similar to the argument that there are no black quarterbacks on the Miami Dolphins. When you reduce something, even something as important as POTUS, to just 3 or 5 (viable; vanity campaigns aside) people, large swaths of the population will not just be underrepresented but unrepresented. This is the law of small numbers.
The more offensive idea is that every important group needs to have the infamous token representation to be taken seriously. Not only does it make a person’s wokeness transparently fake, but where does the line of representation stop? Do we complain that the Democrats are not fielding an Aboriginal for POTUS? How about a Buddhist? Every time someone demands that one demographic be in, they implicitly reduce the value of all the other minorities.Report
And the fact remains that the Democratic Party in recent memory nominated a black candidate, twice. The first time, he beat a seemingly much stronger white opponent. As someone who was sympathetic to a Harris candidacy, I was very unhappy watching it implode. I saw it coming and didn’t like what I was seeing. But for all I could see, it was a personal failure, pure and simple.Report
I tend to agree with this. Harris could have led out of the gate with how her work as a prosecutor informed her later political career. She could have moved people with her personal story – and probably made in roads by pointing out how middle America and apple pie it was. She could have done a bunch of things to move the needle.
She didn’t.
So now shoe goes back to being a Senator representing the 6th largest economy in the world. Not a bad gig.Report
I also have a lot of warm feelings towards Harris, but have to agree that her candidacy just wasn’t coming together, for reasons which were entirely internal.
Which isn’t a criticism necessarily; Not every gifted eloquent official can or even should be President; Harris has a fine future as a powerful voice in the Senate, or AG.
Heck, she’s young enough to run again in 2040 and still be younger than Biden.Report
That. The electorate treated her like a candidate and not as a token. Thats a good thing.Report
“Dang it. The Democrats have a Hawaiian Hindu running for President, and it looks like the GOP’s alternate for 2020 is Nikki Haley, a Sikh, but now they demand we hold out for a Buddhist!”
Harris’s problem was obvious from the moment she joined the Senate. She’s an unlikable, self-promoting hack with blind ambition and a willingness to crush anyone that she finds inconvenient to her quest for power. She seems to be one of those women who will viciously stab all her co-workers in the back so that she gets the promotion. She’s just plain mean. Eventually people noticed.
As an illustration, when she exited the race, she blamed all of you for being racist and sexist. Obviously the GOP voters had absolutely nothing to do with her dropping out of the primary, so clear implication is that Democrat voters are the ones with all the ugly “ism” problems. Yep, she threw you right under the bus.
On the bright side, I imagine that there are few better signs that your life is improving than having Kamala Harris viciously denounce you, pack up her things, and storm out. You should throw a party. I’ll bring beer. ^_^Report
“She’s an unlikable, self-promoting hack with blind ambition and a willingness to crush anyone that she finds inconvenient to her quest for power. She seems to be one of those women who will viciously stab all her co-workers in the back so that she gets the promotion. She’s just plain mean.”
Yes, but she would give us progressive taxes and a favorable SCOTUS nomination, so really, she is God’s appointed one.Report
Zing.Report
Wait, how is she appointed? And don’t you mean anointed? Did Pope Francis do something?Report
As always, a wonderful and insightful piece. Thanks for writing it.Report
The failure of Harris is reflected in her supporters: progressive white women who reinvented the magical negro trope with an intersectional flourish and a handful of elite POC with something to sell them. For this entire campaign, the the mainstream left-of-center press has been telling a story that is being contradicted by the polls. Feeling an obligation to vote on an Oppression Olympics scale isn’t widespread; it’s an affectation that places you in a certain sociopolitical class.
And the best the Lauren Ducas of the world can do is a halfhearted false consciousness argument.
One of these days, someone will notice that all the “representation” pundits represent nobody by themselves.Report