DEI attacks on Harris leave a bad image for the GOP

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg arrives for a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee oversight hearing on the Department of Transportation’s policies and programs and the President’s budget for fiscal year 2025, in the Capitol on Thursday, June 27, 2024.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a podcast released Saturday that attacks on Vice President Harris claiming she was hired because of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives “reflection poorly on Republicans.”

Asked about the attacks made by New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro on the network’s podcast “The Interview,” Buttigieg argued that they would likely prove to be a mistake for Republicans.

“Well, I actually think these attacks have cast a bad light on Republicans,” responded Buttigieg, who is considered a possible candidate for vice presidential nomination of Democratic presidential candidate Harris.

“And you can tell that when someone like Mike Johnson (House Speaker, Republican, Louisiana), a very, very conservative politician, as Speaker of the House, tells his own caucus, ‘Hey, calm down,’ basically saying that they’re embarrassing the party, and I think he’s admitting that they’re hurting the party’s chances by indulging in that kind of rhetoric.”

“And the fact that they can’t think of anything other than dealing directly with the issues of race and gender not only says a lot about the ugliest undercurrents in the Republican Party today, it’s also profoundly unimaginative. Because it means they can’t talk about how any of this will improve people’s lives. In other words, especially not Trump’s campaign or his party.”

Earlier this week, Johnson said at a press conference that the upcoming “election will be about policies, not personalities.”

“This is nothing personal to Kamala Harris,” the House Speaker said of the likely Democratic presidential candidate. “Her ethnicity, her gender, have nothing to do with this.”

Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who had previously referred to the vice president as a “DEI employee,” said Wednesday he regretted calling her that, “but it was the truth.”