Things got very uncomfortable for former Vice President and failed 2024 Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Monday, September 22, when she appeared on MSNBC to speak to woke host Rachel Maddow, and ended up being pressed on why she didn’t add “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg to her 2024 ticket.
As background, many rumors are now surfacing regarding who will be on the Democratic presidential ticket for 2028, with many of those current rumors indicating that a Kamala Harris-Pete Buttigieg ticket is the favorite of the party’s woke power brokers. However, Buttigieg has near-zero percent support from the party’s African-American voters, who it relies upon to win elections, given that demographics’ near-total support for Democratic candidates.
That makes the matter somewhat tricky to address, particularly as the Democrats need to win both the LGBTQ+ contingent and the African-American contingent, which in the case of Buttigieg are at loggerheads. Adding to the general woes is that Kamala tried addressing the matter in her book, and probably just made it worse.
Specifically, she said she worried that Buttigieg would appear too effeminate for the American people, writing that Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.” She added, “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”
While Harris claimed in the book that the then-Transportation Secretary agreed with her on that, Buttigieg said that he was “surprised” by Kamala’s recollection of events and inclusion of that supposed discussion in the book, suggesting that it might not have happened, or at least not gone the way she said it did.
So, Maddow pressed Kamala on the matter, asking if Kamala really thought that Buttigieg couldn’t run alongside her because he was gay. She asked, “I guess I’d ask you to just elaborate on that a little bit… it’s hard to hear with you, the first woman elected vice president… to say that he couldn’t be on the ticket effectively because he was gay, is hard to hear…”
Kamala was obviously very uncomfortable, and squirmed on air while wagging her finger at the MSNBC host and insisting that that is not what she said at all. Kamala said, while squirming uncomfortably, “No, no, no, that’s not what I said, that he couldn’t be on the ticket because he is gay.”
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Adding to that with more rambling, Kamala said, “My point is, as I write in the book, is that I was clear that in 107 days, in one of the most hotly contested elections for president against someone like Trump, who knows no floor… To be a black woman running for president, and as a vice presidential running mate, a gay man. With the stakes being so high, it made me very sad. But I also realized it would be a real risk.”
She then told Maddow, who nodded along as the discomfited former VP insisted, “You know, I’ve been an advocate and an ally of the LGBT community my entire life. So it wasn’t about any prejudice on my part, but we had such a short we had such a short period of time. And the stakes were so high.”
Watch her here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video