Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a podcast released Saturday that attacks aimed at Vice President Harris claiming she was hired due to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are “a bad look for Republicans.”
Asked about the attacks by The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro said on the outlet’s “The Interview” podcast, Buttigieg argued they are likely to backfire on Republicans.
“Well, I do think that those attacks have been a bad look for Republicans,” Buttigieg, who is seen as a possible contender for likely Democratic presidential nominee Harris' running mate, responded.
“And, you can tell because, when you got somebody like [House Speaker] Mike Johnson [(R-La.)], who is a very, very conservative figure, right, the Speaker of the House, telling his own caucus, like, ‘Hey, cool it,’ he’s basically saying that they are embarrassing the party, and I think acknowledging that they are diminishing the party’s chances by indulging in that kind of rhetoric.”
“And the fact that they can’t think of what else to do, besides go right to race and gender, isn’t just revealing about some of the ugliest undercurrents in today’s Republican Party, it’s also just profoundly unimaginative, because it means that they can’t speak to how any of this is going to make people’s lives better, in other words, certainly not [former President] Trump’s campaign or Trump’s party.”
Earlier this week, Johnson said at a press conference that the upcoming “election … is going to be about policies, not personalities.”
“This isn’t personal with regard to Kamala Harris,” the House Speaker said of the likely Democratic presidential nominee. “Her ethnicity, her gender, has nothing to do with this whatsoever.”
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who had previously labeled the vice president as a “DEI hire,” said Wednesday he regretted calling her that, “but it was the truth.”
