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(JNS/JONATHAN S. TOBIN) – Democrats awoke on Monday feeling happier than they had in weeks. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race relieved them of the burden of having to obfuscate the truth about a president suffering from an acute decline in mental acuity that they spent years denying and covering up. And by uniting around Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement, they’ve ended their brief civil war about whether to give up on Biden.
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But as a budding controversy about who should be the new Democratic vice-presidential candidate indicated, the left-wing baggage of Biden’s replacement may create new problems that will add to those of a campaign that still trails the Republicans, even without the burden of Biden as the nominee.
Though they have several practical reasons for eliminating any semblance of a democratic process by choosing Harris, tapping her for the nomination also raises some troubling questions about the present and future of the Democratic Party.
Tilting away from the center
The clearest sign that the Democrats were serious about defeating Donald Trump in 2020 was that they understood they needed to select a candidate other than the man who was the frontrunner after the early primaries: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt). Rather than offering a socialist alternative to Trump, they needed someone who could be perceived as centrist and not beholden to the party’s increasingly radical left wing. The only candidate who could be presented in that way was Biden. And, despite his lackluster showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, the party closed ranks behind him.
That’s not going to happen now, even though Harris is no more popular than Biden and the polls show her trailing Trump.
But passing over her in a process that sought to come up with the most plausible moderate, and therefore the most electable Democrat, would have been impossible in a party that has married itself to toxic left-wing ideologies about race. Simply put, there was no way a Democratic Party that has adopted the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and intersectionality as among its guiding principles—and which looks to African-American women as its most loyal voter group—would even consider snubbing a woman of color in that manner.
To note this is not to denigrate Harris because of her race or gender. And her opponents this fall would do well to avoid any comments that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as prejudicial or misogynist. It should also be acknowledged that Republicans should also take care not to underestimate her. Her nomination injects new life into a heretofore dispirited and divided party.
She has been every bit as unpopular as Biden and flopped whenever she was given responsibility to solve a problem, such as the administration’s scandalous open borders policy. But the comparison with a man who had trouble completing sentences is flattering to her, even though it’s a very low standard by which to judge a potential president.
Her main asset is that she is now the candidate of a party whose voters actually believe the hyperbole they’ve been fed about Trump and the Republicans being a threat to democracy. Having an alternative other than Biden will stoke their enthusiasm as well as their desperation, even if she is also burdened by having to defend the policies of an administration that has failed at home and abroad.
But the problem with Harris is that her rise gives the Democrats a candidate further to the left than anyone, other than Barack Obama, whom they’ve nominated for president in the last 50 years. But, unlike Obama, whose rhetorical brilliance and political smarts enabled him to pose as a man who wanted to erase the divisions between red and blue America even while exacerbating them, Harris is not someone who can play that game. Despite occasional efforts to play the moderate, she is inextricably linked to those elements in her party that are pushing the country further apart with terrible ideas and policies that divide us by race.
Attitudes toward Israel
The clearest indication of this has been her attitude toward Israel.
It was an open secret in Washington that even in an administration that was staffed largely by Obama-era alumni, Harris was the most openly sympathetic to the Palestinians and the least inclined to stand with a Jewish state that had suffered the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
From the start of the war that was launched by Hamas on Oct. 7, she has been careful not to go too far in denouncing Israel’s effort to defeat the terrorists in Gaza, but she has also repeatedly recycled Hamas propaganda about Palestinian casualties. Though left-wing Jews are already mobilizing to loyally vouch for her, her position is essentially one of moral equivalence between Israel and the people who committed murder, rape, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7, while supporting a genocidal terror group bent on Israel’s destruction.
Take, for example, the instances in which she stood silent while being subjected to lectures calling for Israel’s elimination, or in which she expressed her sympathy and understanding for left-wing antisemites who turned college campuses into no-go zones for Jews.
She is guilty of doing exactly what Democrats falsely claimed that Trump did with respect to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. For Harris, these pro-Hamas demonstrators really are “very fine people.”
In addition, as Al Monitor has noted, she has a record of opposing an American policy that would get tough or punish the terror-supporting Islamist regime of Iran.
Just as troubling, she is the face, along with her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, of an announced administration effort to create a new national strategy for combating Islamophobia. The problem is not that such a plan follows an utterly toothless strategy against antisemitism that has failed to combat the surge in post-Oct. 7 Jew hatred.
It’s that the entire point of raising the utterly fallacious claim that there is an epidemic of prejudice against Muslims is to silence criticism of members of this group who engage in antisemitism. Almost all of what is labeled as Islamophobia is nothing more than taking note that elements of the Muslim community have been radicalized and support Islamist ideology and engage in open Jew-hatred and support for terror groups like Hamas.
This plays very well in places like Dearborn, Michigan, America’s “jihad capital,” to which the Biden administration sent envoys earlier this year to try to appease Muslim-Americans who were angry about the president’s on-again/off-again stance in favor of eradicating Hamas.
It also raises an interesting question about whom Harris will choose as her running mate.
Among the most promising candidates is Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The popular governor of a key swing state, Shapiro is politically moderate though reliably liberal on domestic issues. This makes him exactly what the Democrats ought to be seeking for the top of their ticket opposing Trump. But if that isn’t possible, he is a perfect running mate for Harris.
Is Shapiro’s religion a problem?
However, as CNN’s John King pointed out the day Biden withdrew, Shapiro’s religion might be a problem.
According to King, there were “risks” in nominating Shapiro for vice president because “he’s Jewish.”
King has been roundly denounced for this comment, but this criticism of one of the liberal network’s top political analysts (the ex-husband of CNN’s Dana Bash and the father of a Jewish child) is unfair. Though voicing it understandably raised some hackles, he was doing no more than stating the truth about the current state of the Democratic Party.
King was right that Shapiro may be simply too Jewish and too pro-Israel for a party whose principal worry is energizing a base dominated by left-wing Israel-haters. While there are still plenty of pro-Israel Democrats like Shapiro in Congress, much of the activist class of the Democrats has been indoctrinated in critical race theory, DEI and intersectionality, which all brand Israel and the Jews as “white” oppressors. As we’ve seen in the demonstrations on college campuses since Oct. 7, this grants a permission slip to antisemitism.
So, if Biden with his equivocal stance toward Israel was ludicrously labeled as “genocide Joe” by many in the Democrats’ intersectional base, one shudders to think what they’ll say or do at demonstrations at the party’s national convention in Chicago next month if Shapiro is tapped as Harris’s running mate.
Shapiro is a highly logical choice simply because the number of pro-Israel votes in the political center of a country still overwhelmingly favorable toward the Jewish state outnumber those of antisemites on the left.
But the Biden-Harris campaign has demonstrated all year that it was more worried about the latter, and there’s no reason to think Harris’s brain trust, which is decidedly to the left of those who advised Biden, will think differently.
Adding a vice-presidential candidate who is an unabashed supporter of Israel to the ticket will likely diminish the enthusiasm of a party base Harris needs if she is to have a chance of catching up to Trump.
Seen in this light, the Democrats’ biggest problem at this point isn’t Harris’s manifest shortcomings so much as it’s the way their adherence to woke ideology has put them in a box with respect to choosing candidates who might actually beat Trump.
In a year in which the unlikely and even the improbable seem to have become commonplace, no one should be making any firm predictions about the outcome of a Trump-Harris race. But unless and until they shed their allegiance to dangerous DEI myths, the Democrats are carrying baggage that could sink what is left of their hopes of winning in November.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
solid analysis.