DEI

 

IDK I really like women who laugh. Talking to UNITE HERE at Culinary Union Hall, Las Vegas, photo by Ellen Schmidt/Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Mrs. Vance isn't laughing:

Here's somebody who went to Yale from freshman through J.D. and picked up an M.Phil. in modern history from Clare College, Cambridge, along the way, and has clerked for Judge Kavanagh before he was elevated to the Supreme Court and Justice Roberts after he was, and has been a really high-powered lawyer with a bicoastal practice (Los Angeles and Washington) at the firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, described as a "top contender in the cool, woke category" of law firm in 2019, when

Munger has elected eight new partners, and 60 percent of them are women or lawyers of color. What’s more, three of the new partners...took parental leave during the year they were up for partnership—and one of them is a male. The audacity!

(She quit the firm last week after her husband was nominated to be the Republican candidate for vice president in the November election, not because it was too woke there, but maybe to get more in line with her husband's well-known policy positions,

It turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more "freedom" in the paid labor force.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) April 29, 2021

so she could spend more time with her kids in the family's third home, in Ohio, the state for which the husband has been serving as freshman senator since January 2023. Of course their kids' daycare isn't crap, but the finest money can buy.)

I don't know that you'd want to call her a diversity hire herself, though she is a woman of color (Dravidian by "race", the child of Telugu speakers from Andhra Pradesh). I'll bet she has had a terrific work ethic and fabulous grades throughout her education and career, and I'm told her admired writers include Zadie Smith and Vladimir Nabokov. I have no doubt she's fully qualified for every school and every company that's taken her on.

Nevertheless, when she's thinking about civics, as in the tweet above, it's pretty much at a mediocre seventh-grade level. I mean it's embarrassing. 

I know it's common for presidential candidates to claim their VP choice is just the best possible person for the job, as if there was a qualifying exam and they just picked the one with the highest score, but are you seriously believing them? Dan Quayle? Sarah Palin? 

That isn't how it's done. Picking a vice president is a complex job, weighing a number of different factors. First and foremost, of course, should be whether the person is qualified, in intellect and temperament, to step into the presidency in the event of a disaster, as Quayle and Palin really weren't, and Democratic candidates generally are, like Mondale or Gore (though there was the Eagleton blunder, really an injustice, willingness to seek help for mental illness should be taken as a good sign, not a bad one; and John Edwards turned out to be an awful blunder, though the guy did give great speeches). Then, it's nice if they bring some political benefit to the ticket, typically geographical: John Kennedy, the Massachusetts Catholic, went for Texan Lyndon Johnson to help quiet the nation's Know Nothing fears (though Johnson also brought extraordinary influence over Congress, which greatly helped him, after Kennedy's killing, to push through the JFK agenda). Johnson in turn chose the Minnesota hyperliberal Hubert Humphrey, as Carter would later choose Mondale.

Then there are ideological contributions: Reagan picked G.H.W. Bush to appease the people who feared his ideas on economics were too crazy ("voodoo economics", as Bush had called it during the campaign), Obama picked stalwart old Joe Biden in part for similar reasons, reassuring the public that the Black man wouldn't be too radical (ironically, Biden as president was able to bring much more radical ideas forward than Obama had been). Trump is too stupid to be able to think this way, but Paul Manafort (not just a grotesque criminal but also a skilled Republican operative, which is not a contradiction) did him a solid in 2016 by literally forcing him to pick the pious Indianan Mike Pence, bringing across the white Evangelical community that has become the most loyal component of the Trump coalition, with its bizarre but sincere belief that Trump is what Jesus wants—Trump really wanted an outer-borough insult comic like himself, New Jersey's Chris Christie, I believe because he thought standing next to Christie made him look slimmer. 

Freed from the restraint of people who know what they're doing, this year he's made a historically bad choice, chameleon JD Vance, performing as Trump's Mini-Me (a different approach to accessorizing Trump, perhaps), and bringing in not a single vote over and above the votes Trump was already guaranteed to get, and a résumé considerably thinner than Sarah Palin's was (we like to call her a "half-term governor", but that was her fourth election, after one for Wasilla city council and two for Wasilla mayor, while Vance is as of yet a one-third term senator who's only ever gotten elected, and barely, in a thoroughly red state against that idiot Tim Ryan, once), and apparently a colossally bad public speaker (unlike Kamala Harris, whose much-maligned laughter is generally associated with something that's funny, his seems to be a response to losing his train of thought as completely as Biden did that one time during the "debate", and he did it a lot more than once). But he's descended from Kentucky "hillbillies", and that's what he was chosen for. That's the opposite of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. But it certainly is what it looks like when you go with race instead of qualifications.

Starting with Bill Clinton, and it's something we ought to give him serious credit for, even Carter didn't really think of it, presidential candidates have typically sought vice presidents who could find something to do with their time while they waited for the president to die. His choice of Al Gore, another wonky white guy from the non-deep South, was wildly unconventional, but the two complemented each other, with their different temperaments and subjects and their similar culture, and formed a real partnership, and Gore's signature initiative, "Reinventing Government", really did something [though as commenter Aardvark Cheeselog suggested after this was posted, the hollowing out of the civil service and massive privatization that ended the "era of big government" was not a great thing]. W. Bush's equally out-of-the-box naming of a fellow Texas oilman pretending he was from Wyoming, Dick Cheney, to compensate for his own lack of education and experience and interest in the job, didn't work out so well, of course (I always say Bush really wasn't such a terrible person, but in so far over his head it took him six years to realize how badly he was doing, when he got his father's lieutenants in to rescue him from Cheney and Rumsfeld, and by then it was too late to save the presidency, as the mortgage-backed securities crisis loomed), but it reinforced the pattern.

Obama's selection of Biden in 2008 seemed like an attempt at a conventional response to an extraordinary situation ("here's an old white guy to calm you down, we won't do anything that Black"), but it was also meant to compensate for real gaps in Obama's preparation, in foreign policy and national security questions, not that those were the only ones where Biden played a role, and it was extraordinary. Biden deserves credit for it too, for his willingness to look like the administration's comic relief; he was an essential element in Obama's thinking, as a matter of fact, but he wasn't that interested in glory—he was interested in making the policy work.

And Biden's selection of Kamala Harris is on that model: he certainly chose her for her political reach into a world no US presidential candidate had ever tried to reach before—not only women, as Mondale had tried to do in 1984 with the choice of Geraldine Ferraro, but Black women, the element of the party to which he owed his own elevation after the South Carolina primary in 2020; but also for a personal reason, as we know, because his son Beau, as Delaware attorney general, had really partnered with Kamala Harris, as California attorney general, to get stuff done, during the foreclosure crisis of 2011-12:

In her memoir, Harris called him an “incredible friend and colleague” who became a close collaborator. “There were periods, when I was taking heat, that Beau and I talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day,” she wrote. “We had each other’s backs.”

Biden chose Harris for an extraordinary reason: not just for the obvious reasons that had prevailed, I don't know, since 1832, when Andrew Jackson picked New Yorker Martin van Buren; because he knew her as a family connection, with his beloved dead son. If a "DEI hire" is a bad thing, that's not what this was.

Which is more than can be said for the vice presidential candidacy of "JD" Vance, now acknowledged in the Trump camp (writes Tim Alberta) to be a dumb, arrogant political mistake

born...of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter

(the "base" being that white working class that Vance, the rich Peter Thiel protégé, supposedly represents), which Trump is now regretting, while he unexpectedly faces Harris, who I'm sure he sincerely despised as a "DEI hire", as a skilled, smart, vigorous opponent. LOL.