How ignorant and racist are some Republicans being about Vice President Kamala Harris? Ignorant and racist enough that even former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., felt the need to criticize members of his party, if only because their rhetoric has limited appeal outside of a GOP primary.
Speaking with NBC News on Tuesday, McCarthy was asked what he thought about the likes of Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., dismissing Harris as a mere “DEI hire,” referring to corporate diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
“Look, I disagree with DEI,” McCarthy said, “but she is the vice president of the United States. She is the former U.S. senator. These congressmen that are saying it, they’re wrong in their own instincts.” The California Republican described it as one of two “totally stupid and dumb” lines of argument from his party, the other being that President Joe Biden should immediately resign and hand the keys to the White House (and the power of incumbency) over to the new presumptive Democratic nominee.
It’s not just elected Republicans who are focusing on the color of Harris’ skin, but the entire right-wing ecosystem. Astonishingly, it seems no one, from Donald Trump to the programming director of Fox News, actually prepared for the possibility that Biden would step aside, despite insisting for years that he lacked the mental fitness to do the job. That has forced conservative lawmakers and television personalities to just go with their gut response to seeing a woman of color.
“The only reason she is in the White House is because of the DEI deal Biden cut with Bernie to seal the nomination,” Jesse Watters, Fox News’ prime-time replacement for Tucker Carlson, said Tuesday, inventing a deal to be mad at (it’s not clear why Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would have struck a deal with Biden to pick a vice president that he himself has yet to endorse)
To be clear, in this context “DEI,” like “affirmative action hire” before it, functions as a stand-in for a racial slur — “as a pseudonym for the n-word,” as Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross put it on CNN.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former spokesperson for the Trump White House turned critic of the modern right, said her former allies were flailing and that their fallback on misogyny and racism would alienate the voters they need to win over.
“Listen, MAGA is in full-blown meltdown right now,” she said Tuesday on ABC. Although they should have planned for a Harris-led ticket, for some reason they did not; a hastily crafted GOP memo on Harris faults her for laughing a lot and liking Venn diagrams. “They don’t know what play to run, and right now they’re running the worst plays they can.”
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The remaining adults in the Republican Party understand that. “It’s certainly not something I’m going to say,” Richard Hudson, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, recently said of the “DEI” line of attack. “I’m going to remain focused on the policies.”
By focusing on “the policies,” Republican leaders mean: taking everything they previously said about Biden and switching it to Harris. The play here is telling voters that the vice president, previously relegated to the shadows, was in fact “the architect of many of President Biden’s worst failures,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told reporters.
Expect, then, claims that Harris is responsible for inflation that ebbed two years ago. Republicans will also falsely claim she is responsible for everything they don’t like about immigration (these days: that it happens at all), conflating her efforts to improve living conditions in Central America — to give people less reason to flee their homes — with being Biden’s “border czar.”
However, there is a serious flaw with the GOP plan to stick with dishonest policy critiques for the next three months: The Republican Party of 2024 is not known for its messaging discipline, nor can it exert much control over the right-wing influencers driving the “DEI” conversation.
“[C]ampaign officials can only exert so much control over a broader conversation that will be driven as much by Elon Musk and Candace Owens as any professional operative,” Semafor noted in a report on Tuesday. “And the person who will ultimately set the tone for the party the most is Trump himself.”
Trump, recall, has already been accused of using the n-word while working on “The Apprentice”; his nephew, Fred Trump, also has a new book out accusing him of repeatedly uttering the slur. We’ll see, then, how the next three months go and whether a campaign led by a racist is capable of dialing down the racism.
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