On Tuesday, Senator Booker told Rachel Maddow that, when it came to the possibility of a VP pick, should he be nominated, “We have such a great field of leaders, I think that you'll rarely see a Democratic ticket anymore without gender diversity, race diversity. I think it's something we should have. I'm not going to box myself in, but should I become [the presidential nominee], you know I'll be looking to women first.” This sounds wonderful. In the 240+ year history of our country, the fraternity of major party ticket hopefuls has barely even extended itself beyond Protestants, let alone beyond anything else. To my knowledge, only 7 people (Smith, Kennedy, Ferraro, Lieberman, Palin, Obama and Hillary Clinton) have literally had ANY deviation in racial, religious or gender identity from every president and every VP in the 19th century. It would send a powerful message to the country and the world that “this is the new face of our country, and we have made great strides in diversity, something so painfully obscured by the White Supremacist fascist party in power today, but nonetheless undeniable.” But I think it is emblematic of a larger problem within the Democratic Party.
When Democrats (Steny Hoyer’s mentor, Tony Coelho) started taking corporate money in order to compete with Republicans in 1979, the party’s policies started to become emptier and emptier, because corporations usually have a different, and often opposite, set of incentives than the ordinary voter does. The oil company CEO wants to deregulate the rules to allow pollution, because it is cheaper. The family living by the water supply needs someone who will stop the pollution, because the kids are getting sick. The Democratic model for the last 40 years has largely been “well, the votes of these few families with the sick kids would be nice, but we’ll get a lot more votes if we can reach more people, and you do that by taking a lot of money. Who has money? The oil company! So our policy will be ‘We need to make sure that our children are as safe as possible, while recognizing the economic realities of job creation and growth.’” In other words, “throw a nod toward safety in there, but don’t really regulate the oil company, or else that money will go to our opponents, and then how can we help those sick kids??”
It is a strategy guaranteed to lose on multiple levels. The Republicans are still going to get most of the oil money, because they don’t even make a nod to safety. The family’s kids keep getting sicker until they no longer trust in the government to help them, which turns them Rightwing. Additionally, since the bill is probably going to be weakened by Republican input, they’re going to chip away at the safety protections but keep all of the benefits to the oil company unchanged. And the message that “reaches more people” (with that extra money they have raised) just dilutes the brand, because a policy that “both enables pollution and fights against pollution” really says nothing. Moreover, the Democrat is then forced to defend the oil company, because at any time, if they say the wrong thing, they could offend them and lose the money. Do this enough times, and you’re Hillary Clinton, giving speeches to banks, defending the war effort, denouncing Single Payer, pushing free trade. And then an orange know-nothing just has to step in and say “Aren’t you tired of all the corruption and hypocrisy?” and it resonates, because people have been tired of it for decades. So tired that they’ll ignore the messenger for the sake of the message.
So to combat this problem, Democrats try to take attention away from their policies, such that they’re not scrutinized to the point of people seeing the hypocrisy and hollowness. And the #1 way to do this is to overemphasize the significance of having minorities in positions of power. In and of itself, this is a good thing—our leaders should represent the demographics of our populace, in the hopes that this broadens our understanding of issues and makes for good role models for historically under-represented communities. In practice, though, a presidential ticket of Tim Scott and Marsha Blackburn would horrify us. Our main focus should be on getting the best policies for the most people, and those policies should enable and celebrate diversity when this serves as the outcome of those policies, but the identity of the person pushing the policies should be largely irrelevant. The goal of having a government is to be a shared vehicle toward improving the lives of people who do not have the means to control their own agency, and thus need some help. It is not primarily to celebrate feel-good human interest stories about the politicians themselves. A White Christian Male protecting those sick kids from the oil company’s pollution is a better outcome than a non-Christian Woman of Color advocating for policies that will not help those sick kids. In a perfect world, maybe we’d have everything rolled into one perfect package, a synergy of anything we could ever want in a president, by any metric. But this is rare.
Booker has some positions I support, but in many cases, I do not particularly trust him to fight for these policies if given power. This should be his first instinct—to sufficiently assuage fears that he isn’t simply listing off things that are popular in order to gain votes, while not really valuing their importance. His answer should have been “I will look to whoever will fight hardest for womens’ rights, along with the rights of the citizenry at large, and that includes policies that will help millions of people, like universal health care, raising wages, holding power accountable, aggressively moving toward green energy, cleaning up campaign finance corruption, etc.” These policies would help women also, as a consequence of the good they’d do for the vast majority of the country. Or even if he wanted, as an emphatic plank in his platform, “I will concentrate specifically on the advancement of women in this society, something long overdue and vital to our national spirit, and in cases where there are equally crucial priorities to pursue, my agenda of advancement for women will be at the top of the list” would have been a better answer. “I will look to put a woman on the ticket” says little to nothing about whether Booker will actually pursue policies that will help women, and while the distinction is subtle, it is important. It is the difference between checking off boxes and having a real passion for reform. And too often such a sentiment, especially as the first thought a Democratic politician has, shows that this nod to diversity might be a substitution for sweeping reform (which we very badly need), rather than an enhancement of it, or a brick in that wall.
After all, it is much easier to pick a female running mate (assuming Booker wins the nomination) than to actually fight against banking malfeasance, where the party’s money and power start coming into threat. The big donors do not mind the gender, race, religion or any other identity characteristics of our leaders, as long as they get their tax cuts. It is an easy way to titillate Progressive voters without really promising to be adversarial to that oil company. And it is ultimately a gimmick that loses Democrats their seats again and again, because the visceral triumph of having a female or non-White VP wears off after a while, but the pernicious actions of corporate malfeasance keep getting refreshed in peoples’ minds.