Did Anyone Notice What Kamala Harris Just Said About Democrats?

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-CA

by Peter Heck: I haven’t been able to shake this comment from my mind since she made it a couple weeks ago. Maybe it’s because Kamala Harris was my confident early prediction for the Democratic presidential nomination, maybe it’s because I still struggle to understand how someone can be so bad at running a national campaign as she has proven to be, or maybe it’s because I wonder why few people have noticed or drawn attention to this.

Whatever it is, her interview with Axios on HBO continues to echo in my head:
In an interview with “Axios on HBO,” Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, said the question of electability had emerged as “the elephant in the room about my campaign.””Essentially, is America ready for a woman and a woman of color to the president of the United States?” she asked.

That may be a seemingly innocuous comment – one that is often discussed on cable news channels. And it could certainly be a sly attempt by Harris to surreptitiously remind people that she checks off two different category boxes in the left’s game of intersectionality bingo.But can we remember that Harris is raising questions about her electability not during a general campaign but the Democratic primary? She isn’t suggesting that her race and gender are causing her problems amongst a general electorate that might choose a white Republican dude over her; she’s suggesting that the left-wing legions who make up the motivated Democratic primary constituency aren’t cool with a lady who is of Indian and Jamaican descent.

I know it’s too much to expect the mainstream media to dig deeper into that, but is it that far-fetched to suggest that the same political party that exploits racism and uses accusations of it to further their pursuit of power might harbor strains of virulent racism? After all, Mona Charen reminds,
The party’s history is pockmarked with racism and terror. The Democrats were the party of slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, and that miserable terrorist excrescence, the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans were the party of Lincoln, Reconstruction, anti-lynching laws, and the civil rights acts of 1875, 1957, 1960, and 1964. Were all Republicans models of rectitude on racial matters? Hardly. Were they a heck of a lot better than the Democrats? Without question.I know any suggestion that the Democrats have a racism issue does not comport with conventional wisdom, but given that the Democrat Media Complex determines what conventional wisdom is, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Offering a foreshadowing of the coming intersectionality obsession we are now experiencing, we shouldn’t forget that the Election of 2008 was often described as the election that would determine if Americans “were willing” to elect a minority president. If you voted for Obama, you were racially enlightened; if you voted for McCain, you were a latent racist.

So is it really unfair to hold the architects of that false choice to the very standard they established? Is it really unfair to amplify the concerns of Kamala Harris and suggest that if the Democrat electorate doesn’t select her as their nominee it’s because they “aren’t willing” to accept a minority woman as president? That there is a latent racism in the Democratic Party that can’t be ignored?

Or would that be unfairly ignoring the multiple other reasons a Democrat voter might pick a different candidate over her that has nothing to do with race or gender? It would be instructive to hear the left’s response to that question, and then to observe how quickly the rules change when the intersectionality card again becomes advantageous.
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Peter Heck (@peterheck) writes for The Resurgent and PeterHeck.com.

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