New York Times couldn’t explain how the most woke political party in history could have allowed this to happen: “Democrats Have the Most Racially Diverse Field Ever, [but] The Top Tier Is All White,” the headline announced last week.
If the top tier comprises three, then you have three whites in their seventies, two of them socialists and one female. If the top tier comprises four candidates, then it includes a third white male — Pete Buttigieg — although his gayness must afford him some victim cred. He feels forced to declare that if he were elected, his administration would have equal proportions of women and men. If he meant what he said, though, he would quit the race now, reducing the numerical dominance of whites and of males over others. Moreover, he would send his backers and money to women and blacks.
He would probably have to send twice as much to Kamala Harris, the only non-white female in the race. She now blames her gender and race for causing her slide in the polls. (Who knew Democratic primary voters were such rank bigots?) But Harris is as non-white and female right now as she was months before, when she first rose in the polls.
And as low as she has slipped, she continues to lead several undoubtedly privileged white male contenders and whose names no one remembers or knows — say, Michael Bennet and Joe Sestak.
Since the Times sees all the world through the lens of race and/or gender, it has to find something to blame for all these misfortunes. Joe Biden, who has been at the top of the polls since the day he announced, seems like a good target. He is male, white (even his hair is white), and one of the oldest. But he’s also sustained by the mass of black voters, whose support for him over all of the others — including the non-white contenders running against him — is formidable.
Are Democrats willing to say that black voters are the ones keeping them from more inclusion? Certainly not, although some may believe it. By the way, Biden was also Barack Obama’s vice president. Also, their black voters are often church-goers and social conservatives, so they’re not likely to back an abortion fanatic, which may turn them from Harris, or Mayor Pete.
Are Democrats likely to say that their most faithful supporters are so hopelessly misled as to oppose “women’s freedom,” which is how they define it now? They surely may think it, but they can’t say it out loud.
True diversity — which comes together when individuals seek careers of their choice and then rise within them, irrespective of race, creed, gender, or circumstances of birth — is a wonderful thing to have happen. And it did happen when two children of Indian immigrants went to the state houses in two of the reddest and most Republican states in the Union.
One of these states, just briefly, had the most diverse leadership in the country, with Nikki Haley as governor and Tim Scott as senator — Sen. Lindsey Graham must have felt lonely as a white male.
This form of inclusion — spontaneous and real — is more erratic and scattershot than the Democrats’ method of selection by quota. Yes, the metrics of “inclusion” may seem much more steady when it’s all planned in advance. But then, one’s rise through such selection may not correspond to one’s having the talent to succeed.
