Sexism Is Very Real. That’s Why We Have To Stop Using It as an Excuse for Kamala Harris's Failures.

Kamala Harris's failure had little to do with prejudice, even if sexism remains a problem.

Kamala Harris’s official government portrait. Photo is open domain.

If you have Netflix subscription and haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend the film Woman of the Hour.

The movie, directed by and starring Anna Kendrick, is about the real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala, who was convicted of seven murders but may have had a death toll closer to 130. Yes, you read that last number right.

One reason Alcala was able to get with it so long during his spree of killings in the 1970s is because many men in power didn’t take women seriously when they tried to warn them about his often creepy and sadistic behavior.

Kendrick plays Sheryl Bradshaw in the movie about him. Bradshaw happens to be a contestant a show called The Dating Game where women would allow several men to compete over the honor of going on a date with them. She has the bad fortune of being matched up with a lineup of contestants that includes Alcala.

Throughout the film, you’re taken aback by just how little American society thought of women during that decade. The way Bradshaw is treated as little more than an object by the men in her life is pitiful; the way the authorities in the film fail to take the warnings about Alcala seriously is appalling.

While we no longer live in the depths of the 1970’s — when was the last time you saw a pair of bell-bottom jeans? — there is no doubt that sexism and misogyny remain a force in American life. Men in power still often treat women as little more than playthings, and women who speak up about abuse or harassment are still often belittled or ignored.

But it can be difficult to get people to recognize this very real problem of sexism if we have people in the political arena using it as a shield from legitimate criticism.

Take the recent interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s senior campaign staff on the popular podcast “Pod Save America,” which is hosted by former aides to Barack Obama.

At one point during the episode, Harris aide Jen O’Malley Dillon implies that sexism colored how voters viewed her media strategy (emphasis mine):

I am not a media hater by any measure. And I think we women don’t get far in life talking about double standards, and that’s not the point. But I do think a narrative — 107 days, two weeks fucked up because of a hurricane. Two weeks talking about how she didn’t do interviews. But she was doing plenty. But in our own way we had to be the nominee, we had to find a running mate and do a roll out, there was all these things you have to factor in. But real people heard in some way that we were not going to have interviews. Which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump that I think that was a problem.

Her remarks are typical of how some elite Democrats and progressives are processing the election.

“To finally break free of the shackles of sexism and racism that stymie our ability to achieve lasting progress in this country, we must all confront and recognize anti-blackness and misogyny in not just our elections; but our everyday lives,” wrote Tamieka Atkins, the CEO of the voter mobilization coalition ProGeorgia, in a piece dismissing the economy and blaming prejudice as the reason why Harris failed.

The argument resonated with people in Democratic infrastructure, like Amaya Smith, a communications staffer for the National Partnership for Women & Families and former communications director at the AFL-CIO.

She called it “smartest post election analysis I've seen to date.”

I doubt these expressions are purely cynical. O’Malley Dillon was born in 1976. As she rose up the ranks of politics, I’m sure she witnessed all kinds of appalling sexism in a world where we couldn’t even imagine that American voters would support a female president.

Yet it’s worth looking at her claim about media coverage in detail.

Let’s remember that Kamala Harris is 60-years-old. She held a variety of public offices throughout her life: San Francisco District Attorney, California’s Attorney General, California’s U.S. Senator, and finally the vice presidency.

With decades in politics and public service under her belt, you would think it would be easy for her to articulate her vision for the country. She would be bursting with ideas she wants to describe and promote; at the very least, she should by the fourth year of her vice presidency be able to defend Biden’s record (she ultimately ended up saying that she wouldn’t have done anything differently than he did).

And yet more than a month passed between Harris being anointed the Democratic presidential nominee when President Joe Biden decided to bow out of the race and her actually sitting down for a televised interview (and she did it alongside her running mate, Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz).

Yes, it’s true that picking up where Biden left off presented real challenges. Harris had to think about how she would frame her candidacy as compared to Biden’s. But she also simply sat on the sidelines for weeks on end as her opponent Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance, blanketed the airwaves with interviews on both major media and alternative media.

One Wall Street Journal tally of interviews the respective candidates did between the summer and October found that Trump was consistently doing more interviews than Harris over the same time period, sometimes more than twice as many as she did.

This aversion to doing interviews wasn’t new for Harris, either.

When she was vice president, she famously did an interview with Lester Holt about immigration (which was one of her portfolios) that went so poorly that she didn’t do another major interview for around a year.

The cynical progressive take on all this is that of course Harris is more gun shy about sitting down with personalities like Joe Rogan — she’s a woman. Women are consistently judged more harshly than men are. They have to be twice as good to break through the glass ceiling of prejudice.

There’s some truth to those claims. There are definitely contexts where people may take women less seriously, evaluate their credentials with more bias, and factor in irrelevant criteria like their tone of voice or appearance into their evaluation of their fitness for the job.

But none of that actually means that Harris was a capable presidential candidate.

Warren serving as a watchdog over the bailouts. Photo credit: C-SPAN.

In 2012, I worked for the main Political Action Committee supporting Elizabeth Warren’s bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts. One thing I never heard from anyone — despite the fact she had never run for office before — was that she handled interviews poorly or didn’t know what to say about the major issues of the day.

On the contrary, even Warren’s public remarks at congressional hearings — where she was tapped to oversee the financial bailout — were electrifying. So electrifying, in fact, that she was elected to the Senate to become an even more powerful watchdog.

Does that mean Warren never faced any sexism in her life? Does it mean that Warren doesn’t face sexism now? Of course not.

But the difference between Warren and Harris is that Warren has convictions. She came to Washington because she was infuriated by the exploitative behavior of America’s financial elite, and she was there to tell everyone that there was hell to pay.

When you’re well-informed and highly-motivated, you don’t have to worry very much about what you say in interviews. You don’t need a detailed script or an army of handlers. You’re speaking from the heart.

That’s something Warren figured out how to do when she was studying financial law as an academic and something, to this day, I think Harris hasn’t. And that means that she likely wouldn’t have been a very competent president.

The Democratic Party’s inability to admit that Harris was a poor candidate because she would have made a poor president makes the battle against sexism much harder.

That’s because while it’s true that women are often unfairly judged as incompetent due solely to societal prejudice, it’s also true that some female candidates actually are incompetent. (And there’s also evidence that societal biases are changing to where it might even be an advantage to be a female candidate.)

Harris was one of those candidates. Does that mean that she was first incompetent candidate in American political history? Of course not! American political history is replete with examples of buffoonish politicians — mostly men — running disastrous campaigns. At least Harris didn’t pose for a ridiculous photo in an actual tank or imply that almost half of America were just a bunch of moochers.

Yet the Democratic Party’s desire to shield any and all female and minority politicians from any criticism, lest they be engaged in age-old prejudices, is creating a perverse outcome.

Harris, after all, did not win a single Democratic primary or caucus when she ran a full-fledged campaign for president in 2020. There’s a reason for that. She is not a very good politician. She’s never had to compete on her own anywhere outside the state of California. She didn’t know how to handle the modern Republican Party. Why did she think the country is full of Liz Cheney fans? Probably because she’s barely experienced the country outside of a few blue bubbles. We should be able to admit this.

But if progressives can’t admit when someone is actually bad at the job, they end up elevating incompetent candidates. The general public does not share the paternal progressive desire to shield women and minorities from criticism. Ironically, this elevation of incompetent candidates only makes life worse for women and minorities — because the public doesn’t see the best among us.

This country is full of brilliant Indian American women — who are finding more and more family, financial, and cultural success. I’m confident that one could be elected president one day.

But we can only find that person by putting them through the ringer — making sure they go through the same trial by fire that Obama did. By defeating the powerful and notoriously cynical Clinton political machine, Obama proved that he was among the best politicians in America. That’s why when he was elevated to the highest office in the land, he earned the respect of millions and continues to be one of the country’s most well-regarded public figures.

Does that mean he didn’t face racism? Of course not. But he rose to the top through his own merits, clawing his way up through so many obstacles — of course he was an excellent politician.

That’s a very different set of circumstances from Harris, who was plucked from her job as a California Senator and dropped into the vice presidency; she was the first Democrat in decades who was then made the presidential candidate without having to win the favor of a single Democratic voter. This series of steps allowed her to hide her political deficiencies until it was too late.

I’m sure many progressives think they’re doing women and minorities favors by lowering standards for us. But they’re actually doing the opposite. They’re elevating people who are far from the best among us, and they’re sending a message to the broader public that we wouldn’t be able to rise to the top without set asides, quotas, or other forms of racial preference (like the ones at America’s colleges and universities that it took a conservative Supreme Court to outlaw).

My message to Democrats and progressives is this: stop lowering standards for women and minorities. Treat us as you would anyone else. That way, you know and we know that we earned our way to where we are today. We believe in our own competence. It’s time you started to as well.