Democrats Can Do Minorities a Favor By Not Excusing Incompetence

There are an endless number of qualified minority candidates for all sorts of positions. That's why we should stop excusing incompetence from people of all colors who are unqualified.

Biden White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Photo is in the public domain.

Biden’s former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is out with a new book detailing her time serving the former president.

Although it doesn’t appear to be moving a lot of copies (it sits at #2,428 in Amazon’s Top Sellers list), Jean-Pierre has been doing the media circuit describing her time in the Biden White House, with her major theme being that the country wronged her previous boss.

That might be confusing, given that the title of her book is Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines; she announced earlier this year that she was leaving the Democratic Party. But it has become apparent that the reason she chose to do so is because she felt that the party abandoned Biden, who she does not hold accountable in any way, shape, or form for the election of Donald Trump last year.

Jean-Pierre’s media tour, however, has demonstrated how hard it is to make the case for the thesis that it was Biden — who hid his feeble condition from the world until it was blindingly obvious — who was wronged by the country, rather than the other way around.

Take this exchange with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, who is known to be a quick-witted interviewer.

CHOTINER: I’m just still trying to understand. You argue that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. A lot of people thought that Biden was not the best person to go up against Trump in the summer of 2024—after his debate, with his approval ratings in the basement. Shouldn’t those people have tried to give Democrats the best chance to replace Trump? You’re talking about Biden like loyalty was owed to him. Isn’t loyalty owed to the country?

JEAN-PIERRE: No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not talking about that. I’m saying that this is not how you treat somebody.

Is this a matter of how you treat someone, or a matter of putting the country first?

JEAN-PIERRE: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Treating somebody with dignity is not the same as loyalty. I mean, the way he was treated, I had never . . . if you had seen something like that in the Democratic Party, please, please, point that out.

CHOTINER: So what was an example of the way he was treated?

JEAN-PIERRE: I mean, it was nasty articles that were coming out daily. You should go back and see for yourself. You’re writing the articles, right? You should go back and see for yourself. It was a campaign. It was even reported that it was a campaign.

CHOTINER: So you think asking him to step aside was O.K., but there shouldn’t have been nasty articles?

CHOTINER: Look, what I am saying is it shouldn’t have happened that way.

But it should have happened, or shouldn’t have happened?

JEAN-PIERRE: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I don’t think it should have happened. I believe that we should have done everything that we could, regardless of who was at the top of the ticket, and fought extremely hard. He was the one at the top of the ticket, and so, therefore, I believe we should have fought to make sure that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won. That’s what I believed.

Can you infer any train of logic in this?

Yet none of this is surprising. If you spent any time watching Jean-Pierre at the podium during Biden’s four years, you wouldn’t be surprised at how incoherent and uninformed she could be.

But until recently, basically nobody outside the political right would even acknowledge this. Why is that?

We get one possible answer from another stop during Jean-Pierre’s press tour. In a back-and-forth with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin about Biden’s conduct during the Gaza war, she emphasized her demographic background to filibuster when he asked her about things she said defending Biden’s policies.

MOHYELDIN: Do you have any regrets at all for anything you said while you were speaking on behalf of this administration?

JEAN-PIERRE: I — look, I —

MOHYELDIN: It’s just that, it’s a simple yes or no.

JEAN-PIERRE: No no no, you’re asking for a yes or no question. I want to put some context to it too.

MOHYELDIN: Sure.

JEAN-PIERRE: I woke up every day, very proud to be the White House Press Secretary. I woke up every day, as a black woman who is queer, who — no one had ever seen someone like me at that podium standing behind that lectern. It was an honor and a privilege to have that job. And I did it to the best of my abilities.

Did you guys catch an actual answer there? She didn’t name a single issue where she felt the administration was in the wrong or she herself may have been in the wrong. We did, however, get a statement of pride about being a black queer woman who served as press secretary.

Indeed, many of Jean-Pierre’s defenders point not to her conduct or achievements in that role but the very fact that she exists. Jean-Pierre herself says the word “black” four times in response to one of Chotiner’s questions, repeatedly referencing her ethnicity as a sort of trump card for her debate with him.

This repeated use of race, gender, and sexual orientation to justify an incompetent hire by Biden has given the political right an easy target. In a CNN appearance on Tuesday, Katie Miller (wife of top White House adviser Stephen Miller) cited Jean-Pierre as an example of why “DEI doesn’t work.”

“You want to hire the best for the role, not just best on skin color,” Miller told the panel.

It would be easy for Democrats to argue back: she wasn’t hired or retained due to her skin color, gender, or sexuality. But then you have Jean-Pierre repeatedly citing those things over and over during her press tour, putting them up as an accomplishment in and of themselves, as if it was completely irrelevant whether she was actually good at her job.

While the Millers believe in banning entire nationalities of human beings from the United States — which is its own form of racial preferences — it’s pretty hard for Democrats to argue back against them when they can’t let race as the measure of a human being go themselves.

---

I spent the better of my life in progressive infrastructure, and I can tell you that diversity is one of the Democratic Party’s core beliefs.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with diversity — teams, for instance, often work better together when there’s a diversity of thought or cultures which helps members see each other’s blind spots.

But Democratic progressives are quick to suggest that factors like race, gender, or sexual orientation should be used to boost candidates for important positions. While racial preferences in things like college admissions and jobs are deeply unpopular among most Americans, they are considered noncontroversial by many progressive elites.

Progressives are quick to say that considering race or gender for hiring or promoting someone does not mean you will get a less qualified candidate. And yet how many progressives did you see over the four years of Biden’s tenure who could just bluntly say that Jean-Pierre was bad at her job?

I would argue that they felt they had to defend her because of exactly what she told Moyheldin: she’s a black queer woman, in fact the very first one to ever take the position. We need to go easy on her because that’s such a monumental task and she broke through a glass ceiling. Joining in the pile on would simply offer ammunition to right-wing racists and sexists who think minorities lack the same competence as white men.

The problem is deploying this argument in defense of a person who is actually incompetent. Jean-Pierre is so obviously a terrible communicator that she should have a hard time getting a job as a communications director for a state legislative campaign, let alone being tasked with defending the President of the United States against the national and international press corps. This isn’t to denigrate her as a person — she seems nice enough, and I’m sure she has genuine skills in some areas. But political communications is not one of them, because she doesn’t understand basic issues nor does she have the skill to navigate difficult questions.

And while progressives think they are fighting back against racism, sexism, and homophobia by circling the wagons around appointees like Jean-Pierre, they’re actually doing the opposite.

The “first” of any group eventually ends up being held up a representative of that group. It is very important that people who are achieving these milestones are competent.

Jackie Robinson, for instance, was both the first black man in the 20th century to become a baseball player in Major League Baseball, and he also happened to be a fantastic baseball player. Imagine what mid-20th century America — deeply racist and deeply suspicious of anyone black — would think about black people if Robinson was held up as an example and he actually…sucked at baseball. If anything, it would’ve been the opposite of the civil rights milestone that Robinson achieved. It would’ve set black people and other minorities back years.

The same goes for Barack Obama. As the first black biracial president, he achieved an incredible milestone for black people and proved the depths of American tolerance. But imagine if he was as poor of a communicator as Jean-Pierre is. He probably wouldn’t be sitting on a nearly 60 percent approval rating. Heck, he wouldn’t have made it out of Iowa, let alone into the White House (we can look to Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign for a counterfactual).

Progressives think they’re helping us by excusing the incompetence of certain minority staffers and politicians who have been tokenized by the Democratic Party.

But they’re actually doing the opposite. They’re handing the racist and nativist elements of the right ammunition to claim that minorities simply lack the competence to compete with white people. If Democrats really want to help minorities, they have to prioritize competence above all else.