(CNN) — Vice President Kamala Harris quickly amassed enough delegates to guarantee the Democratic nomination and collected an unprecedented $81 million on the first full day of her presidential campaign. However, several Republicans focused on attacking Harris' race less than a day after she formally announced her candidacy for president.
Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, implied that President Joe Biden chose Harris as his running mate just because she is Black in an interview with CNN's Manu Raju on Monday. He stated, "She is a DEI hire, 100% of the time." DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. "At best, her record is appalling."
Political observers believe Burchett's remarks are reminiscent of Republican strategies from the 2008 election that were used to fuel the conspiracy around Barack Obama's birthplace and warn that this might be a portent of things to come on the already bumpy path leading up to Election Day.
The argument between meritocracy and mediocrity has been going on forever. The reality is that White men were the only group in American history to be taken into consideration for the majority of the country's history, regardless of how mediocre they were. Democratic strategist Keith Boykin compared this to the Republican "Southern Strategy" of the 1960s, in which politicians exploited racial grievances to mobilize White voters.
Boykin went on, "When Black people, women, people of color, and queer people began to enter the workforce and society in public ways, (meritocracy) became a part of the conversation."
Abruptly, the presumption emerged that any individual who was not a heterosexual White guy had no right to be present.
Following Burchett's comments, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson called for the election to be on "policies, not personalities" at a press conference on Tuesday.
Regarding Kamala Harris, this is not personal, and neither her gender nor her race had any role in this. Who can deliver for the American people and save us from this catastrophe is at issue here.
The criticism of Burchett's comments was rapid, with many pointing out that the implication that Harris could be inferior or ineligible due to her ethnicity played into well-worn racist stereotypes about women of color, particularly Black women, in the workforce.
Harris worked as a prosecutor for many years before being elected to the office of attorney general in California and district attorney in San Francisco. Before being chosen as vice president in 2020, she went on to win the US Senate election in California in 2016 and became the first Black and South Asian senator in the state.