No, Kamala’s VP Does Not Have to Be a White Guy
I wish we would just stop
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Kamala Harris — who went from “so unelectable that we have to stick with the guy who is 60 percent dead” to “toast of the American left” while you were eating lunch on Monday — needs a running mate. Conventional wisdom instantly declared that the VP must be a white guy. Interestingly, this belief seems to be accepted at all points along the Democratic spectrum; the concept was even agreed to by super-left resistance liberals who normally have the level of disdain for white guys that Emily Post has for people who shit their pants during the salad course.
A vice president has two jobs. The first is to be someone people can imagine as president without breaking into a fit of laughter mixed with panic; since 2008, this has been known as the “Palin threshold”. Their second job is to make the ticket more electable. This criteria gives armchair pundits something to do; it leads to us spending our time googling battleground state governors instead of bonding with our children or, better yet, playing a really fun game on our phone. It also encourages us to focus on race: Harris is a non-white woman, so — the thinking goes — her VP must be a white man. This theory is treated as something slightly more established than Newton’s laws of motion.
But let me throw this out there: No, Harris’ VP does not have to be a white man. The fact that we’re coalescing around this conventional wisdom strikes me as more evidence that our thinking about race and gender is stuck in the past. I think that America might be surprisingly receptive to a process that said “to hell with this crap, we’re just going to pick the best person”. Also, even if we accept that it’s smart to make a clear-eyed assessments of how a candidate will be perceived, I’m not comfortable with where that logic leads. I know that people are trying to be shrewd and practical with this VP pick — and words like “shrewd” and “practical” normally get me all hot and bothered — but allow me to argue that it’s time to update how we think about these things.