Who Are the "DEI Candidates"?

with John McWhorter

We’re in that phase of the election where the pundits are playing the qualification game. What qualifies the candidates for the big job? What have they done and what will they do? John and I got one such question about JD Vance in our latest Q&A session. John briefly suggests that JD Vance is a “DEI candidate”—that he was chosen for his identity as a white Appalachian as much as anything else. But is that really what we mean by “DEI”?

VP picks often serve as supplements to perceived weaknesses in the candidate and to signal to potential voters that the candidate is taking their concerns seriously. Obama chose Biden as his VP in part to alleviate concerns about his own inexperience. Trump chose Mike Pence in part to alleviate concerns about his own shaky adherence to his belatedly professed Christian principles. Today we’ve learned that Harris has selected Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her VP pick. Walz is white, he’s from a small, midwestern town, and he emanates that prized political commodity, “folksiness.” But he’s also won local and statewide races in districts that have gone to Trump in the national election, a fact that I’m sure was not lost on Harris’s team. Is he a DEI pick? You’d have to stretch the definition pretty far to say so. I’d say the same about Vance.

But really, Vance is beside the point. If Trump wins, it will be Vance’s job to promote and execute Trump’s agenda. If Harris wins, she’ll be the one setting the agenda. We can look back through her record as a prosecutor, as California’s attorney general, as a senator, and as vice president to try and guess what her administration will look like and do, but that’s the problem: we’d only be guessing. We’ve seen no indication of how she means to use the office, of how she means to lead, of her vision for the country, or if she even has a such a vision. For all we know of Harris’s past, we know little of how she intends to take us into the future. The best way for her to slap down the DEI accusations would be to go out and tell America what they’ll be voting for. But so far we’re only hearing crickets.

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GLENN LOURY: Okay, this is from Michael.

What do you make of the GOP's identitarian attacks against Kamala Harris since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee? Harris, by the way, has twenty years of service in various elected offices—DA, state attorney general, senator, vice president—none of which had or has a reputation of being easy for black people to attain. When Biden chose Harris as his running mate, she was far more qualified for the position than JD Vance was when Trump chose him, and Vance was indeed chosen in part because of who he was and where he came from.

JOHN MCWHORTER: That's certainly a good point. To be honest, yes, as has been said by a few editorialists, JD Vance is a DEI pick himself.

Oh, really?

In that, yeah.

Then everybody's a DEI pick, because everybody has an identity. I'm not sure I follow what you're saying.

In that he was chosen partly because ... no, let me take that back. Of course, when you have VP candidates, there are various reasons that you choose them. But I was particularly moved by Lydia Polgreen's editorial in the Times the other day, where she was saying that Vance would have been an affirmative action pick at Yale because of his background. He wasn't chosen just because he was JD Vance, it was because of what he represented. And yet we don't think of him as DEI in the same way as we would think of Kamala Harris. But he got a leg up based on his background and he's talking about that background. That's why we know who he is.

Can I comment on that? Because I find that to be very interesting. A weaponization, it's a bank shot. It's a reverse-english on the DEI tip. And it's really about qualification. How smart is JD Vance and how smart is Kamala Harris? Those are the real questions.

Okay. So JD Vance wrote a best selling book called Hillbilly Elegy. That's not too bad. He got through Yale Law School. I assume he didn't do that badly there. That's not too shabby. I don't know a lot about his career, but I gather that he made a name for himself working under Peter Thiel and some kind of venture capital stuff with the smart finance guys, I assume. He decides, before he's 40 years old, to get himself elected to the Senate from a big state in the United States, Ohio, and served there more or less ably.

He looks a lot like Barack Obama to me. JD Vance looks a lot like Barack Obama, except he came from a different slice of America and he has a different ideological orientation. Think of what it would have meant to call Obama a DEI candidate.

So there's real fraud. There's real DEI fraud going on, which mostly involves people of color getting appointed to jobs for which they are not qualified, like the president of Harvard University. There's real DEI. And then there's this smear: “You're not really qualified in the face of somebody who's actually done something.” That is JD Vance. I'm not comparing him to Kamala Harris. She can speak for herself. I'm just saying, not too shabby, JD Vance. Not too shabby a resume for somebody who's not 40 years old.

Come on. He's not qualified? He's a DEI? Come on, that's bullshit, John, in my humble opinion.

I didn't say that he wasn't qualified. It's just that you could say that he was chosen for reasons other than how good he is. For example, being at Yale. I'm not saying that was a bad thing. I'm not against that kind of preference in itself. The issue is just whether or not he was as good as everyone else. I genuinely don't know.

Okay, I guess I can't speak to that either. And my argument is the presumption should be that he was. But I don't know.

But what bothers me is a kind of a bait and switch that's being pulled, which is that Biden openly said, “I'm going to pick a black woman.”¹ So that leaves out everybody but black women. And that means that Kamala Harris's being a black woman was quite crucial to her being picked. So you can call that DEI, whether it's the good kind of the bad kind, but it's there.

But then it's become unfashionable this week to say she was a DEI pick. And so it seems as if you're supposed to think that DEI is a wonderful thing, but then you're not supposed to state that anybody was chosen because of it, which is just like with affirmative action. Which is essentially the same thing, where you're supposed to love affirmative action, but a black student is insulted if you say that they were admitted because of affirmative action. I find that a little hard to have a coherent discussion about.

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I agree with you a hundred percent on that. It is, in my view, a reflection of the corruption of the whole thing. You want the honor attendant to meritocratic selection. You want to be able to say to the person, the black person whom you're putting in this position, “You rightfully can garner the honor and status associated with this appointment.”

On the other hand, therefore, if I call to your attention the fact that you've been benefited by affirmative action, I'm somehow undercutting the honor. For example, “We're going to have the first woman black vice president.” This is Biden. “I'm going to do something for history's sake.” The idea that she might not be competent for that is a complete contradiction to what it is you're trying to do.

On the other hand, you wouldn't have to do the extraordinary measure if you were overrun by competent people who were doing it. They would just be there. They would just be doing it. It wouldn't have to be a designated program. Behind all of that is the presumption that there's some unfairness that has heretofore prevented qualified people from being able to emerge into these positions.

But you're comfortable that Kamala Harris. Vice President Kamala Harris is fit to represent the Democratic Party and to lead the country? Isn't it really extraordinary, being catapulted into that position from obscurity? Three and a half years of service under President Joseph Biden, when she's been essentially a non-entity, and then to be foisted on us as a standard bearer for the major progressive party in the United States.

Who's really in charge? I want to know. Okay, for example, will she pick her own vice president or will Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama pick her vice president?

The thing about her is that—and we've talked about her a little bit before—I wish her well. There's a part of me that likes the idea that next president might be both a woman and black and South Asian.

That's interesting that you think of her as primarily black. You don't just say that she's Tamil South Asian, you say South Asian and black. But you can say that she's just black. Notice that black is somehow defining. That's what my next New York Times piece is about. The optics of that are great. I'm not sure, and maybe I'm missing something, but in terms of her history, I'm not sure what she's shown herself to be especially good at, is the thing.

Now she's attained some positions, and, she's won some offices, but what is it that she's good at, other than actually getting a job? She's good at prosecutorial questioning. She's good at that. There's a thinness that I sense, and maybe—just like people said about Trump—maybe she'll grow into the job.

Some people would say that she's incompetent. I'm not quite sure I see that. But for example, what does she stand for? George Bush, the father, openly said he didn't have the vision thing. What is she about, beyond the biography and, big surprise, she doesn't like what happened to Roe v. Wade. Fine, but I would be hard pressed to describe, based on her history in California, what she's done as vice president. What's she about?

Now, maybe she'll tell us over the next few weeks.

She damn well better tell us. She's got to sell herself to the country. She's not Trump, and she has that going for her. But she has to define herself for the country and has to have some coherent, easily articulable account about what her ascendancy represents. It's gonna be hopey and changey and “We are the ones we've been waiting for” and “Fight, fight, we fight. When we fight, we win” and “Don't turn back the clock to the 1950s” and whatnot.

She's not great off the cuff, actually. She's good at asking questions, but when she has to answer a question, she tends to retreat to boilerplate. She says the same thing over and over again. That's fixable at her age. And I'm not knocking her, because she and I are the same age. But it's fixable. Whereas with Biden, it's clearly a matter of decline and Trump doesn't have to try. But she needs to be better at giving real answers to questions. And I'd be interested to hear what those real answers are going to be.

1. Ed. note: This is slightly inaccurate. Biden initially promised to select a woman as his running mate. Later in the race, Biden said his candidate pool included four black women.

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