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.
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.
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