Some of Joe Biden’s allies and top supporters are campaigning against Sen. Kamala Harris as a potential vice presidential pick because, get this: She’s too ambitious, and … they just find her somehow, mysteriously, sort of … well: “I don’t like her, and I don’t like the way she campaigned. She seems not loyal at all and very opportunistic,” someone identified only as a Chicago-based businessman told CNBC.
Gentlemen. When Kamala Harris was campaigning against the former vice president now running for president because ambition, her job was not to be loyal to Joe Biden. And no one in the history of ever has become a vice presidential nominee without having been ambitious. Yet somehow it’s women for whom this is a disqualifying charge. Go f’ing figure.
Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon pushed back:
But while this is definitely about Kamala Harris, and she is definitely getting hammered extra hard because she’s not just a woman but a Black and South Asian woman, it’s not just about her. The charge of ambition—which in women so often gets framed as opportunism—has been leveled at so many women before her.
(To be fair, the Harris headline there is on a Helaine Olen-authored piece that’s sharply critical of the “ladies can’t be ambitious” strain of thought. But this tweet sure shows how pervasive this is.)
Mississippi Free Press reporter Ashton Pittman compared the treatment of ambitious women in politics with ambitious men, offering a string of complimentary descriptions of Paul Ryan as ambitious, setting them against not just the current string of stories about Harris but against the longtime treatment of Hillary Clinton. Pittman even searched newspaper coverage for the phrase "too ambitious" paired with presidential candidate names, and, yup, Clinton was the runaway leader with 1,166 such mentions. Biden, who has run for president repeatedly, drew just 106.
Fellow former presidential candidate Julián Castro tweeted: “@KamalaHarris was the first woman to serve as AG of California, the second Black woman to serve in the Senate, and the third Black woman to run for President. They’d only deride a woman—especially a Black woman—as ‘ambitious’ for that. Her success is the result of hard work.”
Kamala Harris is ambitious. Of course she is. Literally no one gets into the U.S. Senate without having first been ambitious. No one runs for president without having first been ambitious. The question is why that’s suddenly a bad thing when it’s a woman. The answer to the question is sexism, of course. But everyone participating in it needs to get that. Every Biden supporter and ally and donor who is all in for Biden, with his decades of naked ambition, yet finds it icky in Harris, has to own their sexism and misogynoir. And if more of them had the nerve to be quoted by name, we could call them out on it directly.