“Never let anyone tell you who you are,” Kamala Harris boasted as advice from her late mother. American voters need to ask themselves whether they really know who she is, or if she even knows.
In a weird, platitude-drenched speech last night, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination as the America’s first diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) candidate for president. That’s an unpopular opinion. Democrats inherently reject any mention of the centrality of DEI to Harris’ life and career as “racist”, while scarcely hiding that it is also a highly effective means of muting any discussion of her competence, experience, and qualifications. Too many Republicans fall for that cheap ploy and avoid the subject for fear of being called “racists” by Democrats. But the fact remains that in 2020, President Joe Biden chose Harris as his running mate solely because she is a woman of color.
It did not matter that Harris’ own campaign for that year’s Democratic nomination was a miserable failure that polled in the low single digits and that she ended it before any primary due to a lack of funds. It did not matter that her four years as California’s junior senator were utterly unremarkable apart from championing DEI initiatives and viewpoints. It did not matter that her tenure as attorney general, in which, she told her listeners, she always represented “the people”, resulted in hundreds of convictions, mostly of poor minorities, that were later overturned due to evidence withheld by her office. It did not matter that her start in public life was given to her during her affair with former California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. What mattered was that Biden, with his own campaign struggling, badly needed Black support in the 2020 South Carolina primary, and cut a sleazy backroom deal to place a Black woman on the ticket in exchange for that support.
Until just over a month ago, Kamala Harris was a bad joke—unpopular even among Democrats, with a favorability rating and polling numbers lower than Biden’s, and a reputation among senior and junior administration staffers alike as a deeply insecure woman who lashed out so acerbically that her vice presidential office had a 92 percent turnover rate.
