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Kamala Harris’s recent sit-down with Rachel Maddow exposed a striking admission that should alarm every patriot who believes in straightforward politics. In promoting her memoir, Harris said she passed over Pete Buttigieg as a running mate because, in her words, pairing a Black woman president with a gay male vice president in the heat of a brutal campaign felt like “a real risk.”
When Maddow pushed back, Harris doubled down on the context — saying it wasn’t animus but calculation, that the short window and the ferocious nature of the last campaign made her nervous about asking America to accept what she saw as two novelty identities on one ticket. That explanation reads like political cowardice dressed up as realism: leadership is supposed to take risks for principle, not triangulate identity to chase comfort.
Pete Buttigieg himself sounded incredulous when he publicly responded to Harris’s account, calling it surprising and arguing that Americans deserve more credit than being treated like they cannot embrace diverse leadership. Conservatives should welcome Buttigieg’s admonition here — it underlines the point that voters are not the fragile caricature the Left sometimes portrays.
Harris tried to clean up her remarks on air, insisting repeatedly that this was not a reflection of prejudice and that she has been an ally to the LGBTQ community, but the truth is the political class keeps treating the citizenry like a focus group rather than a cross-section of sovereign voters. That kind of paternalistic thinking is exactly why Americans have grown cynical about elites who say one thing at fundraisers and another in public.
This episode is more than a gaffe; it reveals the playbook Democrats use when electability becomes an excuse for ceding principles to pollsters. If your first instinct is to jettison bold, capable allies because of how some focus group might react, you are governing by fear, not conviction, and that is a recipe for weak leadership and continual retreat.
The media’s fawning coverage of Harris’s “honesty” misses the larger outrage: a party that claims to champion diversity openly admits it will sideline that diversity if the calculus gets messy. That hypocrisy should enrage voters on both sides — Americans want leaders who fight for what is right, not those who tack to the wind to save a few points in a poll.
Conservatives should use this moment to press a simple argument: true equality means treating people as equals, not as liabilities to be managed. The GOP ought to stand firm on an inclusive patriotism that rewards courage and competence, wins or loses, and exposes the Democrats’ habit of reducing people to political liabilities rather than celebrating them as Americans.
