Frank Rich writes in New York:
The deploying of race and gender to try to diminish Harris’s stature and achievements is not the sole province of Trump, his sons, and the Fox prime-time thugs who go right for the jugular. There’s also a subtler form of this animus among conservative commentators who almost to a man and a woman use the same locution. “She checks all the boxes,” writes Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg, a necessity because “a white woman would have been a disappointment to too many Democrats.” Or as the Journal summed it up in an editorial in which it also wielded the Trump-favored adjective nasty at Harris, Biden “checked the essential boxes his party had demanded — a woman, a minority, and a progressive who has moved left as the Democratic Party has.”
Pardon me for noticing that a) Biden had pledged to pick a woman, b) many Democrats said that the woman should be nonwhite (“Klobuchar Drops Out of Biden’s V.P. Search and Backs Picking a Woman of Color“), c) Biden was better off picking someone who had held high elective office and d) Biden’s eventual choice met these criteria. (I even list the three boxes in the column! “Female, nonwhite, plausibly presidential.” That last one is an odd way to diminish someone.)
Among the other analysts who have used the same offending terminology about Harris: David Axelrod. Here’s Time magazine from around the same time I wrote my column:
“She checks a lot of boxes,” says Democratic strategist David Axelrod, who advised then-Democratic nominee Barack Obama on his 2008 decision to put Biden on the ticket.
Molly Ball and Charlotte Alter, writing for the magazine, did not immediately note that Axelrod was trying to hurt the Democratic ticket with his subtle animus. Presumably that’s because they’re sane, rational, and not eager to take a cheap shot.