Least Shocking Headline of the Year

by dap | Jul 26, 2024 | Outside The Beltway, Politico

Via Politico: Trump is back to insulting his opponents despite reported transformation .

TBH: that happened during his RNC “unity” speech.

Additional Thoughts On “DEI” In Politics

by dap | Jul 26, 2024 | Outside The Beltway, Politico

As we saw on Sunday, within hours of President Biden stepping aside, Trump supporters (including those who post on this website) began to refer to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “DEI” candidate. James did a deep dive into the topic on the following day. Earlier this morning, in his Tab’s post, Steven linked to the Politico article: House GOP leaders urge members: Stop making race comments about Harris . Some excerpts from that article:

During a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning, chair of the House GOP campaign arm Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) and others issued the warning after a series of comments by their members that focused on Harris’ race as well as claims she is a “DEI” pick, according to two people in the room.

In the 48 hours since President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Republican leaders have tried to train their criticism of the presumptive Democratic nominee on her handling of the border and her plan to skip Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress.

But several Republicans immediately took the criticism in a different direction. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said Monday that Harris was a “DEI vice president” and Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) over the weekend questioned if Democrats are sticking by her “because of her ethnic background.” If nominated, Harris would be the first Black and South Asian woman to be a major party nominee.

“This should not be about personalities. It should be about policy. And we have a record to compare,” Speaker Mike Johnson told POLITICO as he left the Tuesday meeting, saying Harris would have to answer for Biden’s record. “This has nothing to do with race. It has to do with the competence of the person running for president, the relative strength of the two candidates and what ideas they have on how to solve America’s problems. And I think in that comparison, we’ll win in a landslide.”

Leaving aside whether or not Speaker Johnson’s policy assessment is correct, its worth noting that his comment that “this has nothing to do with race” gets back to how the DEI framework is often used by conservatives to communicate in a pejorative sense on race (and imply that the individual it’s being used again is somehow “less qualified” for the job.

I realize that some commenters will push back on this and say all the are doing is “stating facts.” I recently came across an essay from a conservative writer that does an excellent job of pointing out the fallacy of that argument. Robert A. George* is an opinion writer for the New York Daily News and punster extraordinaire. Earlier this month, on his “Punstack” account, he wrote the essay Kamala & the ‘DEI’ slur: How the Right Still Gets Race Wrong . The entire piece is worth reading (he also discusses it in a video interview ). Here are key highlights:

The complexities of diversity, equity and inclusion schemes in the corporate space are real. To the extent that there may be certain objective metrics to assess individual talent in hiring and retention, more recent DEI trends may undermine those metrics. … But DEI compulsions aren’t automatically transferable to the political sphere. Corporate America and political culture occupy separate silos. In fact, a legitimate criticism of DEI is that it forces businesses to adopt political/subjective evaluation metrics rather than objective ones.

Earlier this year, following the awful shipping freight collision that brought down the Baltimore’s Key Bridge, a certain X-poster attacked Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott , an African American, as a “DEI mayor.” To the extent that DEI is shorthand for “affirmative action hire that only got the job because of his race,” it is nuts to use this phrase to describe an elected official. Yes, being Black likely helped Scott get elected (he won with 70% of the vote) — but that’s more because Baltimore is 63% Black. Thus, here “DEI mayor” means nothing more than “Black guy is running a city and I don’t like it.”

First and foremost, I really appreciate how George smartly separates the application of DEI in business spaces from DEI in political spaces. I think that’s a critical distinction and is an example of how, as many have pointed out, an individual’s identity (really identities) is always already a critical consideration in the political sphere. To that point, George goes on to write:

A vice presidential selection is all about political attributes that are being brought to the ticket. From time immemorial, the running mate is all about “balance.” Historically, the “diversity” under consideration had been geographic. Thus, a northern liberal might select a southern conservative (back when the parties contained wide ideological spectrum). In more modern times, tickets went for other considerations such as age (Bush I-Quayle, Bush II-Cheney, Obama-Biden), outsider/insider (Clinton-Gore, Trump-Pence) or gender (Mondale-Ferraro, McCain-Palin or Biden-Harris). The latter, of course, adds a new element — ethnicity (Harris being Black and Asian). But, the overall point is no different than any of those other selections: The presidential nominee is making a statement of his vision and values and sending a message to parts of the electorate that he individually can’t embody.

He then turns to examine how branding someone as “DEI” sidesteps actual considerations of qualifications:

[Q]uestions of qualifications bedeviled other tickets (take my word for it, kids, the Quayle jokes were voluminous — and Tina Fey still owes Sarah Palin for at least one wing on whatever home in which she resides). But, as a two-term state attorney general, a one-term US senator and an unsuccessful presidential candidate, Kamala Harris’ resume is hardly significantly different than Quayle’s, Palin’s or Pence’s. If you want to make the case that Harris is inherently as unqualified as those picks, fine. But to smear it with intimations of “inherently unqualified by dint of her race”? Please.

George goes on to note how this typically is an attack that we see from the Right. See, for example, the Ketanji Brown Jackson nomination . George rightly points out the irony in these attacks, given many examples in which Republican presidents publicly used identity qualities as key components of their selection criteria:

[I]t was supremely ironic that Republicans were making this [DEI] argument [aginst Brown Jackon] given that Ronald Reagan had — fulfilling a campaign promise to diversify the bench — appointed the first woman Justice (Sandra Day O’Connor). Or that George H. W. Bush just happened to appoint Clarence Thomas to succeed the first Black Justice Thurgood Marshall. And, no, despite how he is rightly regarded among conservatives today as a lion of the court’s right bloc, Thomas was not seen at the time as the most judicially qualified person Bush could have picked. Indeed, Thomas’s most prominent pre-SCOTUS federal position (save for a less-than-two-year appointment to the DC Court of Appeals) was running the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a post he used to condemn the problem with affirmative action. In other words, in the construct of Charles Gasparino, Thomas’ selection to the Supreme Court would have been, in today’s parlance, a “DEI hire.”

George’s essay lays out how this is, for once, a legitimate case of “both sides”: it’s easy to demonstrate that both sides regularly factor various aspects of identity, including gender and race**, into their selection process.

I think George puts the most important point of the essay in the middle (which, unfortunately, might bury it a bit):

On Twitter, libertarian writer Brad Palumbo tried to [defend the use of DEI] by suggesting that Harris’ resume is absurdly thin and wouldn’t even be considered were she not Black and female. Palumbo said, this is a simple fact and “facts aren’t racist.” But, as I responded to him, “facts aren’t racist, but framing is.”

And that’s the big issue here: framing a politician or political appointee as a DEI candidate*** (a) ignores the context of politics, and (b) often doesn’t actually look at that individual’s record compared to other people who currently hold a similar position. It only serves, to Speaker Johnson’s point, to make the argument about how their race (or gender or sexuality or etc****) makes them inherently deficient. And that’s the definition of racism.

Beyond making a moral and ethical choice not to contribute to the spread of racism, there’s also a practical reason for Republicans to drop the “DEI Slur”–in elections this close, turnout is especially critical. And reminding women and people of color, in particular Black folks, that your party is prepared to use gender and race against a candidate is a great way to encourage more turnout in communities that reliably vote for Democrats (and helped make Donald Trump a former President in 2020).

* – On the topic of identity, George is Black conservative. For those looking to diversify their reading lists, I highly recommend his work. His twitter feed is great –though you need to be prepared for puns… so… many… puns. He also has an OTB connection as he and our late friend Doug used to go back and forth on Twitter back in the day.

** – One note on Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as a running mate. Political Report David Weigle pointed out how a Mandela effect is going on with our collective memory of her selection process.

*** – Shining the spotlight on “my side of the aisle,” liberals and progressives also engage in this behavior too. We just tend to use different language. Saying someone is the “Token [X]” conveys exactly the same meaning as “DEI candidate.” My fellow travelers, if you find the latter distasteful, make sure the former is unacceptable, too. “Calling in,” from and with care, to improve your side is always worthwhile.

**** – A point James raised earlier in the week is that we often reduce diversity to the most obvious and often immutable qualities of an individual. I agree with him that it would be best for all of us to work on greatly expanding our definitions to include a much wider range of experiences and backgrounds. Ironically, this was (to my understanding) the point of “intersectionality.” Sadly, the choice by Conservative provocateurs to make that word politically radioactive ultimately helps lead us back to looking at diversity from a single vector analysis.