White bias not to blame for Harris campaign crumbling
Since nobody else will step up and speak out for them, I will:
No, New Hampshire Democrats are not racists.
I know I’m flying in the face of the meme of the moment. Since Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) dropped out of the Democratic primary, progressives and media liberals have been suggesting — and sometimes stating directly — that white Democrats in New Hampshire and Iowa are too biased or bigoted to back a black candidate.
In an impassioned speech yesterday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) bemoaned the fact that “we now have a campaign for the 2020 presidency that has more billionaires in it than black people.”
“An immensely qualified, widely-supported black woman … didn’t have the resources she needed to continue on,” Booker said of Harris. “What message does this send about our party?”
Progressives think they know the message: Too many white people.
“Iowa is 91% white. New Hampshire is 94% white,” Rolling Stone senior writer Tim Dickinson tweeted, “and yet the Democratic Party gives the electorates in these states effective veto power over the nomination process.”
“It’s structural racism masquerading as tradition.”
Progressive activist Aimee Allison of She The People sees the same forces at work. “As a black woman, I know from personal experience that Kamala has to work three times as hard as some of the other candidates in this race to get half as far.”
And Teen Vogue uber-intellectual Lauren Duca was even more direct, saying of the completely Caucasian field of Democratic frontrunners: “White supremacy is not just a Fox News problem, folks.”
So the reason Harris had to bow out — and candidates like Julian Castro and Cory Booker can’t break the 3% barrier — is because the voters are so bigoted that black candidates have to “work three times as hard,” in a “structurally racist” system filed with “white supremacists.”
If somebody said that about me, I’d be pretty mad about it. But they aren’t talking about me. I’m not a Democratic primary voter.
Everybody understands this, right? That when Castro or Kamala or CNN suggest that candidates of color can’t get a fair hearing from the voters, the voters in question are the same ones who nominated Barack Obama. That the misogynists who didn’t support Ms. “that little girl was me” just nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Instead of constructing some conspiracy theory about closeted Confederistas keeping New Hampshire up front to block candidates of color, let’s try a more simple theory: Kamala Harris was terrible. She was a lousy candidate with an arrogant demeanor and off-putting laugh who couldn’t decide whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be allowed to vote.
Works for me. And for everyone who was paying attention to Kamala’s campaign. Not only was she losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, she had less support from black voters in South Carolina than Bernie Sanders. Yikes!
Here’s the real mystery: New Hampshire Democrats have been attacked as “too white” and racially suspect all week. So why hadn’t a single elected N.H. Dem spoken out on their behalf ? I repeatedly contacted the offices of their top four elected Democrats — Sens. Hassan and Shaheen and Reps. Kuster and Pappas — and not one would defend their own voters from the charge of racism. Not one spoke out to say, “I’m proud to be a Granite State Democrat, we’re good people.” Why not? Because the assumption that America is a white supremacist nation is now part of the Democratic Party’s fundamental platform. To even question the premise that white people are bigots — or at the least insufficiently “woke’ — is simply not allowed.
Who is Jeanne Shaheen to say that her supporters aren’t racists? Of course they are. They’re white, aren’t they?
It’s true that, as the Atlantic said this week, “The Next Debate Stage Won’t Look Like the Democratic Party.” But who’s fault is that? My message to Booker, Castro, et al. is simple: If you can’t do a better job of getting people to like you than Elizabeth Warren, then the problem isn’t with the voters.