Jon Stewart took issue with Former Vice President Kamala Harris’ admission that she passed on Pete Buttigieg as her running mate during the 2024 election because he was gay.
On Thursday’s episode of “The Weekly Show With Jon Stewart” the podcast host welcomed Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin where the pair discussed the identity issue the Democrats are having at the moment. In the midst of the conversation, they discussed the importance of authenticity and what that word really means in terms of picking a candidate.
“There is a trust issue that we have right now between the rhetoric of our politics and the reality of our politics,” Stewart said. “Kamala Harris’ book. It does a real service. Maybe not in the way that she had intended or that the political parties will be happy about, but it exposes that the conversation that we all think is happening. But we’re told over and over again is not happening.
He continued: “Whether it be when you choose a running mate, are you looking at whether or not they’re gay or Jewish or Black? To the point of when you looked at President Biden, did you think he was strong enough to go up against Donald Trump in in the national election again?”
The decision to pull Biden out of the presidential race created a wave of backlash for the left as the public began to question their trust in the party. Harris picked up the mantle for the Democrats with just 107 days to campaign. The former vice president detailed the experience in her new memoir “107 Days.” In the book she shared that while Buttigieg was her first choice but she passed on him due to mounting political pressure saying “he would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.”
“We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” she said in the memoir. “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.”
Stewart applauded Harris for her candor about the conversations being had behind closed doors but also pointed to it as an example of “a fundamental foundational problem of erosion of trust.”
Martin said that “this is where authenticity matters” but Stewart was quick to push back that authenticity has simply become a “buzzword” in campaign strategy.
“But that’s the point,” Martin continued. “The reason we’ve lost trust is because people don’t believe that we actually believe the sh-t we’re selling them. That we’re saying, that we’re telling them what they want to hear.”
“To my point,” Stewart interjected. “In the book when she says, ‘I didn’t go with Pete Buttigieg cause he’s gay. And that’d be too far.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh my God, it’s actually reverse affirmative action.’ It’s like, ‘What!?’”
You can watch the full “Weekly Show With Jon Stewart” episode in the video above.
