Biden’s disastrous press conference last night confirmed what’s been increasingly obvious since 2020—the president of the United States is truly, profoundly unwell and needs to be replaced in the name of political strategy and the ethics of how we treat our elders (if the latter even still exists). But perhaps the worst of these proposed Biden replacements is the one who, on paper, a political strategist might assume I’d be the most likely to vote for: vice president and professional unpopular person Kamala Harris.
CNN commentator Dean Obeidallah recently dropped a hot take on Vice President Harris’ chances of being subbed in for the ailing Biden, loudly asserting that veteran journalist (and my fellow ESG skeptic) Charlie Gasparino’s criticisms of Harris as a beneficiary of America’s DEI phenomenon are “what bigotry looks like.” Obeidallah further claimed that the “suggestion that Harris only got to where she is because of diversity programs… is despicable.” His critique is disingenuous in the extreme. Never mind that Biden picked her after saying he was going to pick a woman and specifically discussing the race of his veep candidates weeks before the 2020 DNC. Never mind that James Clyburn explicitly urged Biden to pick a black woman as his VP candidate because “African American women need to be rewarded for the[ir] loyalty.” Never mind that Biden’s chief of staff expressly named racism and sexism as driving factors of Harris’ criticism while in office. It’s likely true that some of Harris’ critics might be bigoted in their reasoning — but the vast majority? Pretending that a lack of enthusiasm around a heavily progressive, tough-on-crime, former California senator is completely attributable to “black woman equals bad” is a level of insularity from the real world only possible when you spend far too much time thinking about the color of people’s skin.
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