The Democratic Party talks an awful lot about the need to lift up women and people of color — but is the DNC disavowing old white men? Not so fast.
Kellyanne Conway tore Democrats apart Tuesday for their hypocritical obsession with identity politics, wondering aloud if Democratic voters are “racist and sexist” because Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are leading in the primary.
“What is the problem with the Democratic primary electorate, are they racist and sexist?” Conway asked reporters on the White House driveway. “Do they not want all these women who are running, all these people of color? Because apparently you’ve got the two old white straight men career politicians in the lead.”
Conway shreds “racist, sexist” Democrats
The adviser was speaking one day after Biden delivered his campaign kickoff speech in Pittsburgh. The 76-year-old former vice president’s official entry into the race means that the two frontrunners are the old straight white men that progressives are always calling on to step aside; Sanders, 77, is in second place.
The Democratic Party’s obsession with identity politics has been a tangible thread of the primary debates, with slavery reparations coming into focus as a policy issue. The scandals facing Biden at the outset of his campaign, from his handling of Anita Hill’s allegations of misconduct to his tough-on-crime record, leave little doubt that woke politics is a factor in the primary.
But the Democrats’ fixation with intersectional theory doesn’t seem to be impacting the primary race all that much. Of the 20 candidates, 6 are women: Sen. Kamala Harris (CA), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (MN), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (CA), and New Age self-help author Marianne Williamson. The primary also includes several non-white men and one gay white man, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, IN.
About half of the candidates would qualify as belonging to the coalition of the ascendant that the left talks about lifting up, so it’s not for lack of options that they’re so enthusiastic about being led by septuagenarian white patriarchs. But the only women or minorities polling and fundraising competitively are Harris, Warren, and Buttigieg.
Biden and Sanders are far ahead of the pack in polls, and Sanders leads with unique donors by a big margin. Biden raised over $6.3 million in less than 24 hours of his kickoff, more than the roughly $6 million that Sanders and Beto O’Rourke had within the first day of their campaigns.
Liberal hypocrisy at its finest
The Democrats have a difficult balancing act to play between choosing a candidate who checks off their ideological boxes without sacrificing electability. The candidate who can beat Trump may not be the most progressive or “diverse” one, and the urgency of getting Trump out of office has many Democrats second-guessing support of women, minority or far-left candidates.
There is no doubt that identity politics is important to the media and ideological elites, but diversity isn’t that important to average people, apparently. A Monmouth University poll found that Democratic voters aren’t very concerned with a candidate’s race or gender.
Certainly, identity politics gets a lot of play among the chattering classes. Democratic candidates including Harris, Warren, and Booker appeared at a presidential forum last week, She the People, where women of color expressed frustration with the attention given to Sanders and Biden.
And Biden’s own senior adviser, former Bernie Sanders press secretary Symone Sanders, said in 2016 that “we don’t need white people leading the Democratic Party right now.” Yet Symone Sanders is now working for an old white man who slurred and stammered his way through his first campaign speech.
Not worried
All the same, Kellyanne Conway came out swinging against those old white men. But she’s not too worried, she said; they’re “not necessarily” Trump’s biggest threats.
“I know [Biden] said that, ‘I asked President Obama not to endorse me, I am too busy getting the endorsement of the firefighters,” Conway said. “Do any of you believe that? You let him get away with his first lie. Why did you do that?”
As for Sanders, she said, “I think Bernie Sanders doesn’t care what his party thinks, is connecting directly with people, and is raising money in small amounts, and goes out and has very specific points of view, which is why he’s got a following.
“He’s a lot like Donald Trump,” Conway added, “except for good ideas, and ideas that are mainstream, and ideas that are part of a democracy and not socialism.”
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