analysis
Kamala Harris was always going to pick a white male running mate. How will Tim Walz get on knowing he's a 'diversity hire'?
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her newly chosen running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
The Internet's aflame! Memes abound! Kamala Harris has plumped for the veteran Minnesotan teacher and football coach with the quick turn of phrase to be her running mate.
In Tim Walz, she has also fearlessly made flesh what can only be described as a bold concept for a presidential candidate already being chipped for dancing too much: The Harris Walz ticket.
Grab your partners! For the Democrats, the announcement will be about blue balloons and fist-bumps and sticky-inked placards and the still-fresh delirium of being able to attend a campaign rally without fear that their candidate will fall off the stage, or enthusiastically name-check a colleague who's been dead for a month.
But what happens when Tim Walz — a white man chosen from a field of six white men to balance out the first black woman to run for the top job — begins to feel the nasty burn of scrutiny that is part and parcel of being a "diversity hire"?
I mean: Nobody ever even considered the possibility that Harris's running mate would be anything but white and male. How will Walz live with this, day after day? How will he hold his head up knowing that he went into the veepstakes with an unearned but significant advantage over, say, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who didn't even make the longlist?
How will he ever be quite sure that he clinched the nomination on merit, not because of his ruddy epidermis and that crucial Y chromosome?
Did Walz really get there on his own?
Things are tough out there for diversity hires. Just ask Kamala Harris herself, who was panned as a talentless beneficiary of political correctness back when she was chosen by Joe Biden as his running-mate, a critique running on steroids now that she's going for the top job.
Will Walz — who by virtue of his basic stats offsets Harris in exactly the same way she offset Biden four years ago — cop the same critique?
Surely shoot-from-the-hip DEI sceptics will henceforth preface critiques of Walz's rhetoric or presentation or family with the observation that the primary purpose behind his elevation was to satisfy the demented demands of the woke mob. That identity politics is so out of control in America right now that literally any white man could have been picked as a running-mate.
Surely, Walz's background will be combed for evidence that he didn't get there on his own. A powerful white mentor looked after him early on, perhaps? Maybe he got other jobs just because he was white? Maybe this is a pattern? Did he have a relationship with a powerful white woman 30 years ago? Did he sleep his way to the top?
As DEI candidates well know, the on-the-record remarks by rival political figures and mainstream media commentators are only the beginning of the problem.
The internet — the crepuscular, heavy-breathed parts of the internet you hope your kids don't know about — is where things get wild for diversity hires.
It's the place where theories twine darkly and unrebuttably, shared with malice; theories to which it's impossible to respond without getting covered in goo.
I mean, is Tim Walz really white? Is he really male? Are we absolutely sure that his marriage to Gwen is the real deal? Doesn't it sound… a bit too good to be true?
Many female candidates have had their credulity assaulted
This all sounds extremely far-fetched. Because for Tim Walz, frankly, it is.
But for high-profile female candidates and candidates of colour, there's nothing far-fetched or theoretical about such bizarre and malicious assaults on national credulity. Many of them have lived it.
And lived it in a transfixing pattern that is repeated over generations and in different countries.
"Malign Creativity" is the title of a large-scale study undertaken by the Wilson Center in September and October 2020, when Kamala Harris was a candidate for the vice-presidency.
Researchers monitored six social media platforms and tracked mentions of 13 female politicians from the USA and elsewhere for those two months. They logged 336,000 pieces of abusive content levelled at these women by 190,000 users.
Kamala Harris was the target of a fierce campaign of online abuse in 2020. (Reuters: Stephanie Scarbrough/Pool)
Kamala Harris accounted for more than three-quarters of the material, in which the commonest terms were "Sex", "Bitch", "Sexy", "Witch", and "Ugly".
Harris was subjected to a specific campaign of disinformation claiming that she was secretly transgender. Photos of the vice-presidential candidate as a man called "Kamal Aroush" were circulated to substantiate this theory, which was not taken up by mainstream media.
New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan's Governor Gretchen Whitmer also were alleged to be disguising their status as trans women. Various doctored photographs were circulated as "evidence", just as in Harris' case.
Minnesotan congresswoman Ilhan Omar was accused — via an online disinformation campaign tracked by the study — to be an illegal immigrant who had achieved residency in America by secretly marrying her biological brother.
LoadingWill Walz now cop what Harris did?
This is not exclusively treatment dealt out to left-wing women by right-wing trolls, incidentally. The UK's home secretary at the time, the Conservative Party's Priti Patel, was found by the Wilson Center study to attract significant gendered abuse, of which the most common terms were "Bitch," "Fat" and "Witch".
And more than a decade ago, when Sarah Palin was named as the Republican nominee for vice-president, she was the subject of a conspiracy theory that achieved far greater penetration into mainstream media and even academia than any other listed here.
I refer here to the widely-circulated theory that Governor Palin faked the birth of her fifth child, Trig, in order that his Down Syndrome would underscore a powerful pro-life message. Many articles and books have been written about this theory.
The wild thing is that pretty much every presidential ticket is a diversity exercise.
The moose-blasting Palin was chosen in 2012 to help the Republican Party's right wing overlook the periodic moderate tendencies of John McCain, who was restyled as a "maverick".
On the Democrat ticket that year, Scranton scrapper Joe Biden offset the arugula-munching, cerebral and, yes, black presidential nominee Barack Obama.
In 2016, Uxorious Mike Pence delivered a sobering squirt of midwestern evangelism to cloak the party-bus whiff of the Trump ticket in 2016, while handily reducing its average wife-count. And yes: Kamala Harris, a younger woman of colour, was a counterbalance to Joe Biden's ageing whiteness in 2020.
Her gender and race were relevant considerations, in exactly the same way as Walz's were, and those of every other white guy in the running for Harris' Veep pick this time.
Will Walz spend the coming months embroiled in the same maelstrom of conspiracy theory over his identity as that logged by Harris?
If not, maybe it's possible there's something else going on.