Her voice trembling and almost in tears, Sen. Kamala Harris faced the press after the Democratic field’s last woman standing, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, dropped her campaign to become the 46th president of the United States.
Harris informed us all how very tragic it was, and that it was all our fault. “Look at what’s happened,” she said. “There are no women currently in this race … there is still a lot of work to be done to make it very clear that women are exceptionally talented, qualified, and capable of being the commander in chief of the United States.”
Where to begin? If “a lot” of women were “exceptionally” talented, they would not be exceptional. And if they were rejected by the party’s core voters, often described as nonwhites and women, then it says bad things about those voters, too. It was their party’s base vote of nonwhites and of women who voted for Joe Biden.
Who knew that the Democratic base comprised such terrible people? In a general election, you can always blame the opposite party (in 2016, Hillary Clinton blamed married white women voters) but in a primary, it doesn’t compute.
Another feminist claimed it was “the media’s sexism that determined Warren’s fate.” Actually, “the media” is quite friendly to feminists. It was probably her socialism that was deemed to have been her real problem, as is true too of the Bernie Sanders campaign.
As for Harris, she was done in not by men or the system or the media, but by Tulsi Gabbard, a “woman of color” whose continued presence in the race Harris somehow missed. Gabbard was the one who took a knife to Harris’s record as attorney general and left the bloodless corpse of her campaign on the floor.
Harris was also not helped by being from California, big enough in itself to be also a country, large enough in itself to have given Hillary Clinton her entire popular vote edge and then some, and blue enough that a Republican presence can barely be said to exist.
As a result, she confuses the view from the Left with wisdom itself. This has led her at times to jump in with both feet on the latest idea from a Beto O’Rourke or whomever with a cheerful “let’s do it!” only to pull back in confusion a short while later when it’s condemned by the rest of the universe.
Do this four or five times, and the world tends to notice — as indeed now it has.
But the problem is much less with Harris herself than the rancid idea of identity politics, the strange evil twin of the civil rights movement. It was meant to liberate people, and it turned into something perverse. Recall the Democratic convention of 1984 and the cries of “Run with a woman, win with a woman!” that drove poor Walter Mondale insane? Note that they didn’t say, “Run with Geraldine,” but “with a woman,” as if any old woman would do.
Mondale did and lost 49 states to Reagan. Democrats appear to have learned nothing, and that voice is still with us today.
