Dem Diversity Blues

Forget Varsity Blues. (Both the movie and the college admissions scandal.) Right now the putative Biden Administration is suffering from what might be called the “diversity blues.” Democrats have brought this upon themselves with their opportunistic embrace of identity politics.

This story in the New York Times today reads like the Babylon Bee:

The pressure on the Democratic president-elect is intense, even as his efforts to ensure ethnic and gender diversity already go far beyond those of President Trump, who did not make diversity a priority and often chose his top officials because they looked the part. And it is coming from all sides.

Coming from “all sides”? Who could have predicted that an ideology that demands racial spoils would descend into infighting about . . . racial spoils. Do tell:

When Mr. Biden nominated the first Black man to run the Pentagon this week, women cried foul. L.G.B.T.Q. advocates are disappointed that Mr. Biden has not yet named a prominent member of their community to his cabinet. Latino and Asian groups are angling for some of the same jobs. . .

. . . the rollout of Mr. Biden’s cabinet and White House picks has created angst among many elements of the party. While some say he appears hamstrung by interest groups, others point out that his earliest choices included four white men who are close confidants to serve as chief of staff, secretary of state, national security adviser and his top political adviser, leaving the impression that for the administration’s most critical jobs Mr. Biden planned to rely on the same cadre of aides he has had for years.

“Added consternation,” the leader of one advocacy group in Washington said of Mr. Biden’s initial picks.

Glynda C. Carr, the president of Higher Heights for America, a political action committee dedicated to electing progressive Black women, said there was a feeling of defeat that Mr. Biden had not awarded key jobs in his cabinet to Black women, as the group had hoped. . .

It did not help Mr. Biden’s case with women that he also chose Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, as the health and human services secretary over Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, who was singled out as a likely candidate for the job just days before she was passed over.

Picking General Austin also did not assuage civil rights leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is adamant about the need for a Black attorney general, or at least someone with a background on voting rights enforcement.

You mean picking Kamala wasn’t enough to appease the identity politics machine?

P.S. I’ve been dreading the prospect that Biden will pick Mary Nichols to run the EPA. Nichols, a longtime fixture in California’s green bureaucracy, is a committed environmental radical. So this passage is too much fun:

This month, a group of over 70 environmental justice groups wrote to the Biden transition team urging the president-elect not to appoint Mary Nichols, California’s climate change regulator and one of the nation’s most experienced climate change officials, to run the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We would like to call your attention to Ms. Nichols’s bleak track record in addressing environmental racism,” the groups wrote, saying that she pushed California’s cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gases at the expense of local pollutants, which disproportionately affect minority communities.

Pass the popcorn.

Chaser—from CNN (!!) today:

Trump made big in-roads in Hispanic areas across the nation

A big question was whether Trump’s improvement in Miami-Dade would be replicated in other majority Hispanic areas on the electoral map. The answer from coast to coast is a definitive yes. Trump did considerably better than he did in 2016 across an array of Hispanic areas. . . the movement toward Trump was fairly consistent across the map. . .

One of the more surprising jumps to Trump came in notoriously anti-Trump California. Biden won Imperial County by 24 points, a significant margin. But it didn’t come close to replicating Clinton’s 42-point win in this county — where more than 80% of residents are Hispanic.

Gee, I wonder why Hispanic voters are starting to defect from Democrats?

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