"DEI candidate" is a losing attack, but can Dems take advantage?

Will Harris go the way of Hillary, or the way of Obama?

Russell Brand, in an already deleted rant:

It’s not surprising that Brand took this down less than a day after he posted it, because even setting aside the bizarre prose about melatonin and pyrrhic victories, the bigotry of this post is repulsive. And it’s repulsive precisely becaue Democrats have not put significant effort into marketing Harris as a diversity candidate — at least not yet.

Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton ran a presidential campaign that revolved almost entirely around the historic significance of “putting a woman in the White House.” This was largely because her platform was so uninspiring, but it was also because Clinton calculated, as she did in 2008 against Barack Obama, that she could use her identity as a weapon against the opposition. Charges of sexism became her shield against critics and her sword against anyone who dared support Bernie Sanders in the primary, and in the end this cynical rhetoric became so central to her campaign that rivals had no choice but to attack it. In this context it made sense to talk about how empty and dishonest liberal Democratic “feminism” had become because disarming it was the only way to move forward with a substantive debate on the actual merits of the candidates.

Harris may very well adopt a similar strategy, but so far she has barely had time to launch her campaign, and her primary selling point has been that she is not Joe Biden. Absent any significant foray into identitarian rhetoric from Harris 2024, it’s impossible to read this line of criticism as provoked by anything other than the fact that she happens to be a black woman.