It’s considered inappropriate by Democrats to discuss how exactly she got into political office in the first place.
Will Saletan argues at the Bulwark that anyone who referred to Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire” has an obligation to say the same of Tim Walz because Harris herself was very obviously deliberate in considering a short list of running mates composed entirely of white males. It’s amusingly ironic to note that when you hire for race and gender, that leads to . . . more hiring for race and gender by the person who was hired for those reasons.
Of course, some perspective is important: American politics has always been representative. National tickets and cabinets have always been constructed with one eye on an identity politics balance of one sort or another, be it regional balance, a balance of party factions, or a balance of religion, age, or other demographics. As I’ve noted in my two-part history of VP picks, Thomas Jefferson took Aaron Burr because he was a New Yorker, George H. W. Bush took Dan Quayle because he was young, JFK needed LBJ because he was a more experienced Southern Protestant, etc. But the key question is always: Did your ticket-balancing lead you to pick somebody with no business on a national ticket? That was the argument leveled by Democrats against Quayle and Sarah Palin, for example. And it reflects the problem with Joe Biden’s choice of Harris, which ended up bequeathing us not just Harris as vice president but now Harris as a presidential candidate who has never won a single presidential primary.
For all of his political baggage, Tim Walz is a two-term governor and former representative from an electorally crucial region of the country. He did previously represent a red, largely rural House district, even if he’s no longer an appealing candidate there. He has enacted a ton of progressive policy goals into law, which makes him attractive to an ideological sector of the base. At least on paper, he’s a traditional VP pick. (Leave aside for now the fact that Walz was also pretty clearly picked over Josh Shapiro at least in part for being not Jewish.) And unlike Harris four years earlier, the demographic rationale behind the selection of Walz is one of traditional political outreach to a group of voters Harris needs and has to fight for — not an ideological view that white men deserve or need a place on the ticket.
Contrast Kamala Harris in 2020, as a first-term senator:
In her first election to statewide office as attorney general, in 2010, she got 46.1 percent of the vote and won by 0.8 percent. As a Democrat in California. Sure, it was a red-wave year, but she was the only statewide Democrat who couldn’t manage a majority. When she ran for the Senate in 2016, California’s unique system kept Republicans off the November ballot; Harris got 39.9 percent of the vote in the June jungle primary, and then was able to run against a fellow Democrat, Loretta Sanchez, in the fall. In 2019, her presidential bid collapsed without visible support anywhere.
Representing a safely deep-blue state in a safely blue region, with no real accomplishments in office and an unimpressive electoral record, there was no non-demographic reason why you’d consider her as a potential choice for a national ticket. The spectacular collapse of her presidential campaign illustrated that she’s not good at politics. Her performance in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings illustrated that she was capable of playing only to the partisan peanut gallery and not of moderating her attacks to reach the middle of the electorate. She didn’t have a military service record or an inspiring up-by-the-bootstraps story; indeed, it’s considered inappropriate by Democrats to discuss how exactly she got into political office in the first place.
Yet, Biden was under open and explicit pressure to pick a black woman. This was reported at the time. For example:
The Rev. Al Sharpton, for instance, who speaks to Mr. Biden regularly, is to announce his support for Ms. Abrams as vice president as soon as next week, according to those familiar with his plans . . . “Now I’ve told him my preference is for a black woman, but you’ve got to also choose the right black woman,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview. “In the middle of this pandemic, you have to choose someone that people, and particularly black people, believe can govern from day one.”
Amy Klobuchar, a more experienced figure than Harris who had run ahead of her in the presidential primaries, even publicly took herself out of the running on this theory amidst the George Floyd riots:
Amy Klobuchar announced Thursday that she is taking herself out of consideration to be the vice president. The Minnesota senator instead told former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, to pick a woman of color as his running mate. Biden had previously asked Klobuchar to undergo formal vetting for the role.
“I thought a lot about it, and I truly believe that this is a historic moment for our country, really in our history,” Klobuchar told CBS News correspondent Ed O’Keefe on Friday. “And this is a moment to seize. And you have moments in history where you look back at ’em and you think, was that the right thing? And I think the right thing to do right now, and I told this to Vice President Biden, is to put a woman of color on the ticket as the next vice president of our country.”
“I think it would be something that would help heal the United States,” she added. “I think it is something that would really take what has been a tragedy, but also a galvanizing moment and turn it into a moment of joy. And I think our country is looking for that right now.”
You will notice the difference here from a traditional political rationale of “these are voters we need.”
So, why Harris? Because the race and gender criteria at issue left so few choices. Tim Walz was chosen from a list of other traditionally qualified candidates, such as swing-state senator Mark Kelly. Harris, by contrast, was picked largely because there were so few alternatives. At the time, she was the only black woman among the 150 senators and governors in the country. Abrams had lost her one race for statewide office. Biden could have looked deeper into the Democratic bench — I argued at the time that he might be well-served picking Alabama representative Terri Sewell, a more experienced and low-key figure than Harris from a region of the country that wasn’t already locked up by Democrats — but Biden, ever a creature of the Senate, doesn’t seem to have given her much thought.
Knocking Harris for being a poorly qualified vice-presidential choice four years ago is far from the most effective line of attack on her. But it was a fair criticism then, and it still is.