A ticket with a Catholic woman from Queens lost Catholics and women—and narrowly won Queens.
Maureen Dowd took it on the chin Saturday for stating in her New York Times column that “it has been 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket.” Hillary Clinton, who you may recall won the Democratic nomination in 2016 and chose Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate, was among those pointing out the error.
Ms. Dowd’s column was mainly about whether Joe Biden’s running mate, who we now know is California Sen. Kamala Harris, will have to endure the same indignities that Rep. Geraldine Ferraro did when she joined Walter Mondale’s ticket in 1984 to challenge President Reagan. The more interesting question might be the extent to which blunt appeals to gender and race still animate the American electorate today. As George Will put it after Ferraro died, “she was an instrument—Geraldine Ferraro was—of identity politics, a Catholic woman from Queens.” The result? Mondale lost Catholics and women. Reagan even came close in Queens.
Like all presidential candidates, Mr. Biden was looking for someone to help him—or at least not hurt him—geographically and with certain voting blocs. His campaign has made no secret of his strategy to win back white working-class residents of battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who left the Democratic Party to vote for Donald Trump. It’s hard to see how Ms. Harris will help him with those voters. Barack Obama won them over in 2008 by playing down racial differences on the campaign trail. Ms. Harris’s most memorable moment during the primary was to suggest that Mr. Biden was a racist for expressing opinions about forced busing in the 1970s that turned out to be nearly identical to her own.
The inconvenient truth for progressives is that primary voters bypassed several female and minority candidates—including Ms. Harris—to nominate Mr. Biden. If having a woman on the ticket were a priority for most Democrats, why did Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar flame out? In addition to Ms. Harris, black voters might have opted for Cory Booker if race was a top concern, yet they overwhelmingly went for Mr. Biden. Perhaps liberal elites and their media allies care more about a presidential ticket that “looks like America” than the average Democratic voter does.
Because of the pandemic, Mr. Biden hasn’t been able to execute a traditional general-election campaign and regularly expose himself to voters and the media. It hasn’t hurt his ability to raise money and maintain a lead in the polls, but it has allowed Mr. Trump to knock him as a physically fragile and mentally unfit puppet of the Democrats’ progressive wing.
Historically the vice-presidential candidate hasn’t carried much sway with voters, but Mr. Biden would be the oldest president ever, so 2020 might be an exception. Still, if anything the circumstances called for prioritizing experience and readiness in a running mate, not race and sex. Ms. Harris may be ready for the job, but who really believes it’s the reason she was picked? John McCain’s odd choice of Sarah Palin in 2008 was an act of desperation, an effort to jump-start a flagging campaign, and he later conceded that it had been a mistake. It’s doubtful that Ms. Harris will harm the Democrats’ chances in November, but Mr. Biden’s decision to make a big show of tapping a woman only serves to validate Mr. Trump’s critique, and the bow to left-wing pressure groups doesn’t augur well for the country under a President Biden.
As Americans can deduce for themselves from the coast-to-coast summer mayhem we’re witnessing, symbolism is at the center of progressive governance. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that homicides are up this year by an average of 24% in the nation’s 50 largest cities. The cities experiencing the worst of it are almost all run by liberal Democrats, who in recent years have enacted policies that place the welfare of criminals ahead of victims and then scapegoat law enforcement for the results.
So-called bail-reform measures have made it more difficult for police to keep suspects off the streets while they await trial. Early-release programs liberate criminals before they have completed their sentences. Ending “mass incarceration” and reaching racial parity in the prison population have become more important than keeping communities safe for law-abiding residents. The results have been predictable.
Mr. Trump spends a lot of time trying to make Mr. Biden as unpopular as Mrs. Clinton was four years ago. He would do better to focus on making the case for his re-election at a time when millions are jobless and a deadly pandemic is keeping the country on edge. If Mr. Biden prevails in November and decides to do the bidding of the hard left and not the average Democrat, expect the chaos to continue.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal