"Is America ready for that? Are they ready for a woman of color to be President of the United States?" Kamala Harris asked a month before dropping out of the 2020 primaries.
Five years later, the consensus is not that Harris wasn't ready, but America still wasn't.
"Kamala Harris didn't lose, America did. As a nation, we collectively failed her," John Pavlovitz, a liberal Christian blogger, damned.
"This election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America," Cosmopolitan columnist Jill Filipovic argued.
Americans had the opportunity to elect Harris. And we had failed to live up to her.
"By every measure, she has demonstrated that she's ready," Michelle Obama had warned at a Harris election rally. "The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment?"
We were not ready.
"There is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country," Obama adviser David Axelrod told CNN to explain Harris's defeat. The racism and sexism in America was so bad that Trump won the votes of 1 in 5 black men and a majority of white suburban women.
If only Latino and black men had been able to overcome their racism, and white women their sexism, we could have had Harris. But as Michelle Obama told us, we were not good enough for her.
Perhaps one day we will be. And Harris, along with Hillary Clinton, can wait in the wings, sipping chardonnay and listening to selections from Oprah Winfrey's book club until we show that we are ready for them to finally come and save us from ourselves. Decades may pass. Even centuries. But surely one day Americans will finally be ready for a completely inept president.
Until then maybe some other country in the world is ready for Harris? Finland? Thailand? Somaliland? But not this land, where a jealous nation insisted on voting with their wallets instead of understanding the incredible opportunity before them to elect the first black woman.
Herds of angry liberals wander the aisles of organic supermarkets and wonder how millions of people could have ever put their selfish economic interests ahead of a presidential DEI hire.
America's selfish founders put their desire for cheaper tea ahead of the glory of being ruled by a mad king who talked to trees, and their unworthy descendants want cheaper eggs and beef more than they want to listen to a woman of the right race who speaks in word salads.
It cannot be that Harris failed. DEI hires can never fail, only be failed. Nothing is ever their fault, only that of the systemic racism of the electoral college, the legacy of oppression in Berkeley and the unfair double standard of being expected to state coherent policy positions.
The Democrats also don't need to consider how they had managed to alienate a swathe of the American public so broad that it included crypto bros, the Amish, Latino men, Chassidic Jews, the tech industry and the rust belt, the black barbershop and the gay bars of Miami. All they need to do is accuse them of being racist sexists or sexist racists who should be ashamed.
Telling the American public that they are bad people for not supporting you is not a winning strategy, as Harris, Biden, the Obamas and the rest of the Democrats found out when they pivoted to accusing Republican voters of being garbage Nazis who want women to die.
But there are different kinds of winning. There's the kind where you win a popular referendum of the nation's citizens and the kind where you dismiss the nation as worthless pieces of garbage.
Or as Nikole Hannah Jones of the revisionist "1619 Project" wrote, Harris lost because "racism and misogyny are embedded in the culture", "anti-Blackness is deeply embedded in Latino cultures", and white women are "enforcing a white ethnocracy."
"Black people uniquely understand this nation, and how awful it can get" she concluded.
Or to put it more succinctly, Harris and Jones are awesome and America sucks.
Nominating a widely disliked politician with approval ratings south of spoiled cheese who could never answer the same question the same way twice could be seen as a purity test. For Harris, her aides, donors and party, the goal was to win, but for many leftists like Jones, the test was one that we were always meant to fail to justify their burning hatred of America.
Leftist radicalism is part power-grab and part test to destruction. Radicals push the country to see how much we will take, not in the hopes that we will genuinely replace William Shakespeare with Audre Lorde or agree that being on time is systemic whiteness, but that we will not, and they are suspiciously baffled when we go along with it, and then they act as if it's some racist trick.
Harris's defeat is gloriously empowering because it confirms every one of their prejudices.
After a career of failing upward through multiple prosecutorial positions, a brief Senate tenure and an even less well-regarded vice presidency, Harris finally hit an election where she could not just be promoted based on her identity politics quotient without serious consequences.
And that is where affirmative action usually falls apart. This was where the American people considered the consequences that four years of incompetence in the White House would have on them and refused to give her the job to prove they weren't racist sexists.
America failed Kamala Harris. It let her believe that life was just showing up while embodying the right quotas, smiling a lot and trying to be relatable to the people she's used to socializing with.
Now she doesn't understand what happened.
David Axelrod, Nikole Hannah Jones and the rest of the gang are not entirely wrong. A lot of Americans, including Democrats, who were willing to pander to affirmative action or DEI hires, drew the line at putting Harris in front of the nuclear button or letting her control the economy.
Equity had a red line. And Harris was it.
It would have been kinder for Democrats, Republicans and squishes of no particular political denomination not to reward Harris or ten thousand other DEI hires who fill academia, politics and corporations with positions they are unqualified for to avoid appearing bigoted. Bigotry is not only refusing to hire people because of their race, but also hiring people because of their race.
Biden made no secret of choosing Harris because he had promised to pick a black woman. Americans refused to hire Harris to run the country just because she was a black woman.
Whites, blacks and Latinos of all ages and sexes did the right non-bigoted thing by Harris. But nothing in Harris's life had led her to expect to be judged on merit rather than on her identity.
America failed Kamala Harris. Now it will have to find her a nice position telling us we're all bigots.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Reprinted by kind permission of the author and Front Page Magazine.
TRM