The offensive is an expression of the GOP’s values and its policy agenda, which, for this brief moment, is on display in all its ugliness.
Less than 48 hours after Vice President Kamala Harris won the support of enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, Republican Party leadership had a modest proposal for members: Please stop being so overtly racist and sexist.
“House Republican leaders told lawmakers to focus on criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ record without reference to her race and gender,” Politico reported, “following caustic remarks from some Republicans attacking her on the basis of identity.”
Having to make such a request means that it’s already too late. Several Republican members of Congress had by then started referring to Harris as a “DEI hire,” a reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but in reality an assertion that Harris is the nominee only “because of her ethnic background,” as Republican Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin put it. The conservative activist Tom Fitton engaged in some neo-birtherism, implying that Harris’s Jamaican and South Asian parents render her ineligible to run for president. The former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway called Harris lazy, saying, “She does not speak well; she does not work hard; she doesn’t inspire anyone.” Republican Representative Harriet Hagemen of Wyoming declared, “Intellectually, [she is] just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”
Read: What the Kamala Harris doubters don’t understand
Then there were those who fixated on Harris’s gender rather than her race, or on both at the same time. Right-wing activists on social media criticized Harris’s dating history and accused her of having “slept her way to the top.” The former Trump-administration official Sebastian Gorka told Fox News that Harris was the nominee “because she’s female and her skin color is the correct DEI color.” Other right-wing activists argued that Harris shouldn’t be allowed to be president, “because she doesn’t have biological children.” This sentiment seems to be shared by Trump officials—liberal activists resurfaced a clip of J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, attacking Harris, who is married and a stepmother to two, as one of the Democratic Party’s “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.”
Republicans will eventually refine these kinds of race- and gender-based attacks into more coded form, but this is not the same as rejecting them or their underlying premises. Trump-campaign officials told The Bulwark that they were planning to “Willie Horton” Kamala Harris—referring to the 1988 George H. W. Bush ad campaign that sought to foment and exploit racialized fears of crime. The first reason to take note of these attacks now is that they are being made when GOP officials are responding to President Joe Biden’s exit from the race, and are therefore expressing their unguarded thoughts, shorn of the sanitizing message discipline that is sure to follow. They are saying these things because they really believe them. The second reason to take note is that their policy agenda is shaped around these beliefs—which when plainly expressed are repulsive to most voters, even many Republican-leaning ones.
Virtually everything being said about Harris was also said about Barack Obama. Questioning Obama’s citizenship was how Trump became a right-wing hero in the first place. Conservatives called Obama an “affirmative-action president” instead of a “DEI hire” because this was years ago and the right-wing vocabulary was different. They called Obama dumb and lazy just as they are calling Harris dumb and lazy; they called him unqualified and said he achieved what he did only because of his racial background. Harris’s politics might be too liberal for many Americans’ tastes, but she was a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and then a vice president. She has not only more experience in elected office than Obama did when he ran, but more than either of the white men running on the Republican ticket.
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