How much fun is it to watch the Democrats flailing around in the diversity nightmare they worked hard to wish on themselves?
They couldn’t just work at the time-honored and difficult task of trying to find an electable candidate; they had to make it still harder by adding a whole set of race and gender expectations that had to be bowed to before the inclusivity gods would be appeased.
They caught a break early on when former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg turned out gay, or “such a nice young man” in old lady language. And they managed to get into their presidential field four women, two blacks, Julian Castro, and “Beto” O’Rourke, a rich Irish kid with a bad driving record who at least liked to pretend he was either Hispanic or Robert F. Kennedy.
But by early last week, the field had lost one of its blacks (Kamala Harris, who is Jamaican and Indian) and two of its women (Harris and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, an abortion fanatic whose poll numbers touched zero), while several others still hung by a thread.
In the top tier, those set to appear in the next debate later this month, are Buttigieg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (who identifies more as a socialist than as a feminist heroine), Sen. Bernie Sanders, age 79 and also a socialist, and former Vice President Joe Biden, a dewy-eyed youngster of 78. Three of them, Sanders, Biden, and Warren, are 70 years old or older, two of them much older. And every last one is snow white.
Picture the shock when the polling was analyzed, and it turned out that the rise of the white and un-woke former vice president had been powered largely by blacks, the one voting bloc the Democrats could not charge with bias — not that they aren’t tempted. Hence the reluctance to say what had, in fact, happened: that Harris and Booker were deserted by black voters, Harris and others deserted by women, Castro by Hispanics; and all of them deserted by their constituents, and indeed by everyone else. Hence the need to lie to make people feel better.
“For Latinos, he was living proof that a Hispanic deserved positive national attention,” Raul A. Reyes wrote of Castro’s campaign for CNN. He argued that Castro “showed America that a progressive Latino can compete at the highest level of politics and hold his own.” Of course, he did not “hold his own,” or he still would be in the race. And the Hispanic breakthrough on the national stage had already been accomplished by two Hispanic Republicans a full decade earlier — that’s also something no liberal would ever dare say.
In 2010, Marco Rubio, son of two Cuban immigrants, defeated a popular moderate governor and survived a bitter three-way general election race to become junior senator in his home state of Florida; two years later, Ted Cruz in Texas would do the same thing. In 2016, both ran for president, losing to President Trump but winning votes and states in the process and leaving Caucasian contenders behind. They did it without the help of identity politics, diversity programs, or things of that nature.
So did Tim Scott of South Carolina, the first black senator in the South since Reconstruction. He got his start when he ran in a primary for a House seat in Charleston against one of Strom Thurmond’s sons. He won and was later appointed to his Senate seat by Gov. Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants and Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations.
Neither Haley nor the other Republicans I mention here try to play on gender or ethnic background to arouse sympathy or gather support, but it is clear these are not their main source of identity and not what they think of when they see other people. The difference between this view and that held by the Democrats is the fundamental difference between our two parties. Which do you think serves us best as a nation?
