Sadly, this is being thrust into the faces of us average Americans, riding on Progressive-Democrat Vice President and nominal Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As Joshua Jamerson, John McCormick, and Tarini Parti put it in their WSJ article,

Harris’s rapid ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, expected to become official early next month, has thrust race and gender into the center of the contentious 2024 presidential election, in a country where scars of racial segregation and sex-based discrimination still linger.

It’s true enough that those scars still linger; it’s true enough that there remain instances of actual race and sex bigotry. However, the only ones thrust[ing] race and gender into the center of the current election season are Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and their frontmen of the press. It was, after all, then-Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidate Joe Biden who announced that his choice for his Vice President candidate would be, first and foremost, a woman who was black—qualification was a distant tertiary consideration. Then it was Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden who announced that his first pick for the Supreme Court would be a black woman; her qualification for the bench again was a distant tertiary consideration.

Now pressmen are (see above) making a big deal about Harris’ race and gender as somehow qualifying, in addition to making her merely popular; qualification for office, even her experience as VP, are distant tertiary and quaternary considerations. This is manufacturing racist and sexist bigotry where it does not exist—here, in candidates for office. It’s hard to get any more invidiously bigoted than that. Yet here is where Party is, along with their press communications arm.

This is despite the article’s authors contradicting themselves later in their piece:

A Wall Street Journal poll conducted July 23 to 25, after President Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed Harris, found 81% of respondents said Harris (who is also of South Asian descent) being a Black woman made no difference in whether they would support her for president.

Us average Americans—which is to say, us honest Americans—don’t give a rat’s patootie about Harris’, or any other candidate for office’s, race or gender. We only care that, beyond being old enough and a born-American citizen, the candidate actually is capable of handling the demands of being President. Even those constitutionally mandated minimal eligibility criteria (note: these are not qualification criteria) are background considerations; our primary concern is whether the candidate is qualified for the Presidency, what that candidate’s claimed policies and goals are, and what that candidate’s empirically demonstrated history of achieving those goals is.

For pressmen and Party politicians to give primary emphasis to race and gender in the present season is at once their confession that their candidate has no record worthy of campaigning on, and nakedly insulting to us Americans.