102 Days: The Identity Politics Game
Touting One Attribute Of A Candidate Compromise The Nominee
“I’m with her.”
“White Women: Answer the Call!”
These are subjects and headlines for some of the posts I’ve seen this week on Facebook and Substack since it was announced Kamala Harris will be the likely nominee for the Democrats in the 2024 Presidential election.
The idea of identity politics1, especially if based on racial, sex, or gender, seems off to me. Even more so in light of Democrats and Republicans publicly arguing about the term “DEI”, that’s “diversity, equity and inclusion” for the uninitiated, and whether that term applies to Vice President Kamala Harris, who was chosen by President Joe Biden after saying his vice president nominee would be a woman2, and his nomination for the Supreme Court (Ketanji Brown Jackson) would be a black woman.3
Those were the requirements. He mentioned nothing about qualifications, but regardless, if you were a man or a white man, you were effectively eliminated from consideration.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a white, gay man who attained the rank of lieutenant and served as an intelligence officer with the U.S. Navy in Afghanistan, graduated from Harvard and attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, was probably at least as qualified as Harris for the vice president nomination.
Might be interesting to also ask yourself how the Afghanistan withdrawal would have been different if it was Mayor Pete in the Oval Office advising Biden, instead of Harris, an attorney general and Senator from California.
In 2020, Buttigieg had won the Iowa Caucus, placed second in New Hampshire’s primary, just behind Bernie Sanders, and third in Nevada.
He had performed as well as or not better than Biden4, the eventually nominee, up to South Carolina, and to this day, he has still earned more national delegates (15) than Harris (0).
Regardless, history cannot be changed, and Harris is now the darling of Democrats all across America, enjoying a honeymoon period like I’ve never seen before in U.S. politics.
In the euphoria of the Big Switch, voters have felt called to action. It is the most energized I’ve seen a campaign since Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, and one that I had called for Democrats to make.
It was Obama who originally told Biden to “stand down” in 2016, favoring Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee, instead of his own two-term vice president.
The “I’m with Her” slogan, however, backfired on Hillary Clinton in 2016. Much to Democrats’ shock and dismay. Will it turn off another round of voters from checking the box for Harris in 2024?
I hate to think voters would vote based only on a candidate’s sex, gender, race, religion, or pet-ownership status5. But I see traces of what seems to be that type of thinking on social media.
To me, it reeks of ignorance.
We know every woman will not vote for Kamala Harris. We know every man will not vote for Donald Trump.
Will every cat owner now vote for Kamala? Will every Catholic vote for Trump, whose vice president, JD Vance, is a Catholic convert?
Catholics makeup about one-fifth of the electorate in the United States. It’s a large contingent. Luckily for the candidates, they are pretty much evenly split between parties, leaning Republican at 48 percent to Democrat at 47 percent.
Catholic Joe Biden won the election in 2020, and one might wonder how much of the Catholic vote bolstered his win? And could it do so again in 2024, this time for the Trump-Vance ticket?
If every woman — women outnumber men in the United States — pulled the lever for Harris, she would likely be the clear winner in November, depending on the Electoral College, of course.
In Sari Botton’s latest piece, “I’m With Her,” she writes:
I mostly try to avoid polarizing politics here at Oldster, but we’ve arrived at a terrifying juncture in the American Democratic experiment that leaves me no choice but to speak out on this platform
Personally, I believe she is overstating the stakes of the election. And I also find nothing as polarizing as “identity politics.”
Like it or not, Harris will need to run while defending Biden’s policies. She was the vice president, after all. And she was the one Biden put in charge of the southern border.6
Donald Trump has already served as President for four years. America survived, and in fact, many Americans feel they flourished during his term, more than they have during the last three and a half years of President Biden’s term.
Under Trump, meanwhile, Putin was happy with the Crimean peninsula he’d stolen during Obama’s watch. Iran was still poor and not supporting terrorists, like Hamas, to attack Israel, and we’d not seen an embarrassing U.S. military operation as bad as the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The entire “threat to Democracy” trope that Democrats have been screaming about since 2015 looks like hypocrisy when their own party’s elite force the rightful, democratically chosen nominee to “stand down” once again.
Hollywood actor George Clooney (“Roseanne”, “ER”, Ocean’s Eleven) has more say about the next presidential nominee than 14.5 million Democrats. But we’re to believe Trump is the threat?!
It is the Democrats, including Biden and Harris, who threaten to mold the Supreme Court to their liking by first expanding and then filling it, and favor abolishing the Electoral College7.
Playing the “identity politics” game only cheapens your presidential candidate. It cheapens your nominee for the Supreme Court.
As Americans we should be above it. I hope we’re all for that.
Defined by Merriam Webster as “politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/15/biden-woman-vice-president-131309#:~:text=And%20he%20also%20commits%20to,Video%20Player%20is%20loading.&text=Democratic%20presidential%20candidate%20Joe%20Biden,to%20win%20the%20party's%20nomination.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is a black woman.
He’s 1,000 percent more eloquent than Biden ever was.
“Friend” Jennifer Aniston has brought being female and pet ownership, especially cats, to the forefront of the election cycle, citing comments made by Republican VP candidate JD Vance’s in a 2021 Fox interview when he said: "We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, so they want to make of the country miserable too.” Aniston has dealt with fertility issues.
Please note I did not call her the Border Czar. Oops!
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/434870-kamala-harris-says-she-is-open-to-abolishing-electoral-college/