Riding a wave of relief and enthusiasm after President Joe Biden was forced to drop his doomed bid for re-election in November, Democrats and their supporters in the mainstream media have been celebrating a surge in polling which has eliminated Donald Trump’s prior lead in the opinion polls nationwide and in several of the battleground states.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the substitute candidate installed by Democrat party leaders in Biden’s place, in her first major decision of the presidential campaign, chose another progressive liberal, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, as her vice-presidential running mate. She rejected two more moderate picks, including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, and Pennsylvania’s popular Governor Josh Shapiro, either of them would have given Harris’ campaign a much bigger boost in their crucial battleground states and with independent voters than the lesser-known Walz.
Harris certainly did not need Walz’s help to carry his “blue” state in November, because Minnesota last voted to send a GOP candidate to the White House in 1972, when Richard Nixon defeated South Dakota’s liberal Senator George McGovern in a nationwide landslide.
There was also strong reason to suspect that Shapiro was eliminated from consideration as Harris’ vice-presidential candidate because he is Jewish. Shapiro is an outspoken supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself following the October 7 attack by Hamas, and a vocal critic of the pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses across the country.
Shapiro has been proud of his Jewish heritage throughout his political career. He was a student at the Conservative-founded Akiba Hebrew Academy High School in Philadelphia, during which time he visited Israel to work as a volunteer on an IDF base. Shapiro also wrote an op-ed published by his college newspaper at the University of Rochester 30 years ago claiming that peace “will never come” to the Middle East” because the Palestinians “are too battle-minded” to coexist peacefully with Israel.
However, Shapiro has since changed his mind on that issue. On August 2, Shapiro told reporters, “I have said for years, years before October 7, that I favor a two-state solution — Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully side-by-side, being able to determine their own futures and their own destiny.” He has also publicly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu as “one of the worst leaders of all time.”
WAS SHAPIRO DISQUALIFIED AS HARRIS’ VP DUE TO ANTISEMITISM?
But even though Shapiro now talks like a typical mainstream liberal Zionist,” he is still unacceptable to Harris’ antisemitic, progressive, fellow Democrats. They have nicknamed Shapiro “Genocide Josh,” and conducted a nasty and apparently successful behind-the-scenes campaign to discourage Harris from choosing him as her running mate.
During his years in the House, Walz also compiled a generally positive record in support of Israel. He voted to condemn a U.N. Security Council resolution that Obama permitted to pass during the last days of his presidency which condemned the Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal. On the other hand, Walz voted to support Obama’s deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
Since becoming Minnesota’s governor, Walz has adopted a more nuanced approach toward Israel. He did say at an event held earlier this year by a Jewish community relations organization that, “The ability of Jewish people to self-determine themselves is foundational … The failure to recognize the state of Israel is taking away that self-determination. So it is antisemitic.”
But in March, Walz also said in explaining his support of a ceasefire in Gaza, during an interview with Minnesota Public Radio, “You can hold competing things: That Israel has the right to defend itself, and the atrocities of October 7 are unacceptable, but Palestinian civilians being caught in this … has got to end.”
The main policy difference between Walz and Shapiro concerning support for Israel today is that Shapiro has condemned the antisemitic campus protesters by comparing them to the Ku Klux Klan, while Walz has been largely silent about their blatant antisemitism and their open support for the terrorists who carried out those atrocities.
FINDING EXCUSES FOR HARRIS PICKING WALZ
Before Harris announced her choice of Walz as her running mate, Shapiro’s proven popularity, with Pennsylvania voters, and the critical importance of the state’s 19 Electoral College votes, had made him the clear favorite with most political pundits among the names on Harris’ shortlist of probable vice-presidential picks. But after she named Walz, Harris’ Democrat supporters had to scramble to come up with a more palatable reason than raw antisemitism to explain why she had passed over Shapiro.
One such narrative, which Politico has attributed to Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, claimed that Shapiro is “excessively focused on his own ambitions,” and would be uncomfortable serving as Harris’ vice president, even though accepting the nomination would set him up for a potential presidential run on his own in another 4 to 8 years. Another, contradictory explanation, which was also published by Politico, claimed that Shapiro preferred to stay on as governor of Pennsylvania rather than become vice president.
But the simplest and most plausible explanation still is that Harris was afraid that choosing Shapiro as her running mate would alienate the antisemitic left wing of her party. Accepting the political logic of that argument, Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, said at his campaign event in Philadelphia last week, “I genuinely feel bad [for Shapiro because he] had to run from his Jewish heritage because of what the Democrats are saying about him. I think that’s scandalous and disgraceful. . . and it’s insulting to Americans, whatever background you’re from.”
“[The] biggest problem with the Tim Walz pick, it’s not Tim Walz himself,” Vance explained. “It’s what it says about Kamala Harris, that when given an opportunity, she will bend the knee to the most radical elements of her party. . . which is what she always does.”
“Kamala Harris listened to the Hamas wing of the party. That’s exactly what she did here,” Vance continued. “[And] that’s what she’s going to keep on doing as president.”
Later, during an interview with Fox News, Vance added, “The fact that you’re letting antisemites within the Democratic Party drive so much of the conversation, and so much of the decision-making for Kamala Harris, is a really worrying sign.”
Former president Trump has repeatedly called Harris an antisemite, and said that Jews who continue to vote for the antisemitic Democrats “should have their head examined.”
Former New York Congressman Lee Zeldin also wrote, “It’s amazing that despite America’s right, left, and center agreeing that Josh Shapiro was Harris’ best pick for Vice President, at the end of the day, Shapiro being Jewish disqualified him. It says so much about the state of today’s Democratic Party.”
SHAPIRO RETAINS HIS DIGNITY
Awkwardly, Harris appeared at a campaign rally with Walz for the first time last week in Philadelphia, at which Shapiro, as governor of the state, was required to serve as the host. Disregarding any personal disappointment he might have felt, Shapiro was gracious in praising both Harris and Walz in his introductory speech. But in what sounded like a guarded reference to the influence of antisemitism against him in the vice-presidential selection process, at the end of his speech, Shapiro added, slowly and deliberately, “I want to just say this. I lean on my family, and I lean on my faith, which calls me to serve. And I am proud of my faith.”
While nominally endorsing the administration’s policy of supporting Israel’s right to self-defense, Harris has been much more critical than Biden of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. Most recently, Harris promised “not to be silent” in criticizing Israel for the suffering of the civilians in Gaza whom Hamas has been using as human shields.
The most obvious public demonstration of her hostility to Israel was her decision to boycott Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress on July 24. She used a meeting with her Black sorority sisters in Indianapolis as an excuse to leave her chair on the dais behind Netanyahu empty to express her contempt for the Israeli prime minister and to ignore his message about the dire post-October 7 threat to Israel’s existence from Iran and its terrorist proxies.
The next day, she returned to Washington to hold a face-to-face meeting with Netanyahu at the White House. She later described their meeting as “frank,” which is diplomatic speak for hostile.
HARRIS FALSELY BLAMING ISRAEL FOR SUFFERING IN GAZA
To make her meaning clear, Harris added in an accusatory tone, “I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over two million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.”
Harris ignored the fact that hundreds of truckloads of food and humanitarian aid that Israel permitted to enter Gaza are still sitting there waiting for the U.N. to deliver it. According to Israeli sources, any shortage of food in Gaza for civilians is primarily because Hamas has hijacked many of those aid deliveries and is now selling that food on Gaza’s black market at vastly inflated prices.
She is determined to hold Israel alone, rather than Hamas, responsible for, “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months [the] devastating images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety [after being] displaced for the second, third, or fourth time.”
“We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent,” Harris declared, except when it comes to holding Hamas responsible for initiating the suffering with its October 7 attack. She also has failed to condemn Hamas for its cynical use of the civilians of Gaza as expendable human shields. Hamas has been using Vice President Harris and others buying into the false Palestinian victimhood narrative as what Lenin used to refer to as “useful idiots,” in order to pressure Israel into submission to terrorism.
Last week, when pro-Palestinian protesters tried to interrupt a Harris rally in Detroit by chanting, “Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide,” the vice president’s initial reaction was to say, “I am here because I believe in democracy and everybody’s voice matters, but I am speaking now.”
When the chanting continued, she added, “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
HOW HARRIS WAS FORCED TO OPPOSE AN ARMS EMBARGO ON ISRAEL
After the rally, two of the leaders of the group that organized the pro-Palestinian protest at the rally issued a press release claiming that during a brief photo op with Harris during the event, she expressed an openness to their call for a U.S. arms embargo against Israel. When the New York Times then publicized that claim, the Harris campaign was forced to issue a pair of denials.
The first statement said, “Since October 7, the vice president has prioritized engaging with Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian community members and others regarding the war in Gaza.” It added, “The vice president has been clear: she will always work to ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. The vice president is focused on securing the cease-fire and hostage deal currently on the table,” but made no mention of her position on an arms embargo.
That omission sparked a second statement issued the next morning by Harris’ national security advisor, Phil Gordon, who added that Harris, “does not support an arms embargo on Israel. [But] she will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law.”
Unfortunately, Harris’ recent snubbing of the Prime Minister, her harsh and unfounded criticism of Israel’s policies toward Gaza’s civilians, her expressions of sympathy for those calling for Israel’s elimination, and her troubling rejection of a highly qualified Jewish running mate, are not isolated incidents.
WHY HARRIS CAN’T BE TRUSTED TO PROTECT ISRAEL
As Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Zvika Klein pointed out last week, “Over the years, her actions and statements have consistently raised alarms about her commitment to Israel. For example, in February 2019, when Congresswoman Ilhan Omar used antisemitic tropes by suggesting that American support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins” [$100 bills] and accusing American Jews of having “allegiance to a foreign country [Israel],” Harris not only failed to denounce the antisemitic rhetoric by her political colleague but also indicated that her main concern was that the criticism might endanger Omar’s standing within their party.
Klein cites additional examples of Harris’ hostility towards Israel, beginning with her support for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, her call as vice president at the Munich Security Conference in February 2023, for the establishment of a Palestinian state without adequate safeguards against terrorist groups such as Hamas, and her call this past March for “an immediate ceasefire” in Gaza which would have amounted to a victory for Hamas.
Klein notes that unlike Joe Biden, who “has a long history of solid support for Israel,” Harris has aligned herself with the progressive wing of the Democrat party, including figures like Senator Bernie Sanders, who has called Netanyahu a “war criminal” and members of AOC’s squad, including Omar, who vehemently oppose continued U.S. military support for Israel and have “increasingly embraced anti-Israel rhetoric.”
He writes that “Harris’ track record on Israel is fraught with troubling decisions and statements. . . [and] raises serious concerns [that] her potential presidency [could lead to]. . . a drastic shift in U.S. policy that could jeopardize both Israeli and American security interests. Harris’ failure to unequivocally support a prominent Jewish candidate like Shapiro [in the face of antisemitic attacks on his character] only adds to the fears that her presidency could further alienate American Jews and weaken U.S.-Israel relations.”
Klein declares that “American Jews need to understand. . . [that if they] care about the survival of Israel during this tumultuous period, they must recognize that voting for Harris is not an option. . .
“The stakes could not be higher. Harris’s presidency could lead to policies that embolden Israel’s enemies and weaken the U.S.-Israel alliance, posing an existential threat to [Israel].”
Klein concludes, that “while Donald Trump is unpredictable and controversial, his track record regarding Israel was consistently strong. . . His actions have strengthened Israel’s position and security in the region. Harris, by contrast, [as president] could be a disaster for Israel and the Jewish people.”
WALZ IS ANOTHER POLITICAL CHAMELEON
Walz comes from a working-class rural Midwestern background. He went to college on the G.I. bill as a member of the Army National Guard and then worked for a decade as a high school geography teacher and football coach in the small town of Mankato, Minnesota. Walz entered politics in 2006, at the age of 42, by running for a seat in Congress in his local district as a center-right Democrat and defeated the six-term Republican incumbent.
Very much like Kamala Harris, Walz is what Vance has called a “political chameleon,” referring to his willingness to disguise his unpopular liberal opinions from his voters. Walz served for six terms representing his conservative-voting rural district as a pro-gun rights, moderate Democrat.
But after using his relatively conservative congressional record to make a successful run for Minnesota governor in 2018, Walz’s political positions turned sharply to the left. His first executive order as governor was to establish a council tasked with implementing anti-racist training and embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in all statewide agencies. He became a vocal gun control advocate and came out in favor of giving illegal aliens driver’s licenses. As a result, when Walz ran for re-election as governor in 2022, most of his prior support from independent and rural voters outside of Minnesota’s urban Democrat strongholds dried up. In that election Walz also lost the w xxhite working-class voters with whom Trump has been making major inroads, by 8 points, raising real questions about just how many of those voters Walz’s gruff, prairie populist appeal can deliver to Harris in the current presidential campaign.
Walz was also sharply criticized for his initial failure to send in the National Guard to put down the riots that devastated Minneapolis and St. Paul during the days and nights that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white Minneapolis cop on Monday, May 25, 2020. Walz did not fully mobilize the National Guard until five days later, by which time the mobs of rioters had set fire to a Minneapolis police precinct and caused $500 million worth of property damage.
While Walz did not submit to the demands of the violent Black Lives Matter advocates and their progressive Democrat supporters to defund the local police, he did adopt their language, by declaring, “My administration will use every tool at our disposal to deconstruct generations of systemic racism in Minnesota.” He then called two special sessions of the state legislature to pass a sweeping police reform bill requiring major changes in the training of police officers and the establishment of a new independent unit to investigate fatal encounters by minority group members with the police.
WALZ’S SHARP TURN TO THE LEFT
After Minnesota’s Democrats won control of the state legislature in the 2022 midterm election, Walz proposed, passed, and signed into law a long wish list of progressive policies, which became known in liberal Democrat circles as the Minnesota Miracle. They included paid family leave, free meals for all public school students, the legalization of marijuana, a mandate to convert Minnesota to 100 percent clean energy by 2040, universal background checks for gun purchases, free state college tuition for students from low-income families, and a slew of protections for organized labor.
During his years in Congress Walz was an opponent of the traditional definition of marriage. As Minnesota’s governor, Walz signed into law various provisions denying parents the right to protect the moral standards of their children attending public schools.
Walz has tried to capitalize politically by embellishing his record of 24 years of service in the Army National Guard. During a debate over gun control legislation, he falsely claimed that he had carried a rifle into combat when, in fact, he never served in an active combat war zone and resigned from the military in 2005 shortly before his National Guard unit was due to be transferred to fight the insurgents in Iraq. His campaign biography also falsely claimed that Walz retired from the military as a top-ranking command sergeant major and that he had served as the chairman of the House Veteran Affairs committee, when in fact, he was demoted to master sergeant upon his retirement because he failed to fulfill the requirements for the higher rank.
But before Harris picked Walz to serve as her running mate last week, he was best known nationally for having come up with the Democrats’ new favorite attack line against Trump and Vance, by calling them “weird.”
Harris selected Walz as her running mate, in part, because he tries to come across as an old-fashioned moderate Midwestern Democrat, but in fact, like Harris, is still closely aligned with the most radical leftists in the Democrat party. Harris’ campaign strategists understand that the more voters view her as a moderate close to the ideological center of American politics, the better her chances of winning the November election.
THE STRATEGY BEHIND HARRIS’ FAKE MOVE TO THE POLITICAL CENTER
According to Democrat political demographer, Ruy Teixeira, Harris’ half-hearted move to the center, which is designed to counter Trump’s claim that her positions are too far to the left for the comfort of most uncommitted mainstream and independent American voters, is just an illusion.
Harris has taken many now unpopular liberal positions over the years. According to Teixeira, these include but are hardly limited to, banning fracking, banning offshore drilling, backing the Green New Deal, mandatory gun buybacks, defunding the police, abolishing ICE, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, abolishing private health insurance, overruling parental control over their children’s education, and last but not least, cutting off U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel.
Now Harris, with Walz’s support, and the cooperation of the pro-Democrat, anti-Trump mainstream media, is trying to evade responsibility for these issues by simply saying “I take it all back.” In other words, Democrats are expecting voters to believe that whatever liberal ideas that Harris embraced in the past and which now seem looney can’t be held against her because she is now enthusiastically disavowing them.
But her public disavowals come with a catch. Voters and reporters are not allowed to ask her any potentially embarrassing questions about them, such as: What are the details of her new, more centrist policies to replace the liberal views she is now denouncing? What made her change her mind? And why did she take those mistaken positions in the first place?
ASK NO QUESTIONS AND YOU WILL BE TOLD NO LIES
This crucial second part of the Harris strategy, which Teixeira calls, “No questions please — we’re Democrats!” is designed to camouflage the embarrassing fact that nothing has really changed, and that Harris’ current views are still closely aligned with the progressive wing of the Democrat Party and are not remotely centrist.
A corollary of this strategy is that Harris can’t get into trouble by answering these questions if her campaign doesn’t give reporters an opportunity to ask them. Therefore, Harris is being treated by her campaign handlers in the same way they treated Joe Biden, by confining Harris’ public appearances to delivering fully scripted speeches to friendly audiences and only taking questions from friendly reporters who are willing to submit them in advance. After all, as Teixeira points out in his Liberal Patriot blog, “You can’t get in trouble for your answers if nobody gets to ask you [real] questions.”
Teixeira also notes that “the downside is that it makes the disavowals less convincing, leaving voters wondering whether Harris’s views really have changed and, critically, whether and to what extent Harris’ positions are really centrist and close to their own.”
Voters have also been left with no way to check out what Harris’ new, presumably “more moderate” positions are because her campaign website does not even have an issues section. Instead, her website contains only deliberately vague policy commitments, broad, ill-defined “feel good” themes like defending “freedom” and “democracy,” and social media memes that condemn Trump and Vance for being “weird” and poke fun at Harris’ quirky verbal references to such things as “brat” and “coconut tree.”
Another limitation is that this strategy will only work for as long as the major media outlets remain willing to cooperate after having been severely embarrassed by their cooperation in the years-long Democrat coverup of President Biden’s cognitive decline, which was revealed for all the world to see by his meltdown in the June 27 debate with Trump.
WALZ IS THE KEY TO HARRIS’ WORKING-CLASS STRATEGY
According to Teixeira, the third and final segment of Harris’ move-to-the-center approach is the “Hey, we’re working class too!” strategy, which was apparently a major part of the thinking behind the selection of Minnesota’s Tim Walz as Harris’ running mate, instead of Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. The Harris campaign is counting heavily on Walz’s folksy, down-to-earth persona to help them reach the millions of alienated white working-class voters, whose support they so desperately need to win the key Midwestern/Rustbelt battleground states crucial to victory in the Electoral College.
Next week the Democrats will have another opportunity to present Harris and Walz to the American people in a favorable light during the televised segments of their national convention in Chicago. The greatest potential downside of the convention would be disruptive pro-Palestinian protests against continued U.S. support for Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza, as well as in response to an expected increase in missile attacks from Iran and/or its terrorist proxies including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
TRUMP CAMPAIGN STILL ADJUSTING TO ITS NEW OPPONENT
In the meantime, the Trump campaign is still trying to recover its balance and formulate a new campaign strategy after the politically unprecedented July 21 switch in opponents from a failing Joe Biden, running with Vice President Harris, to a younger and more liberal Kamala Harris-Tim Walz Democrat ticket. The switch has re-energized the Democrats and turned the race, in which Trump had held a commanding post-debate lead over Biden, into a virtual dead heat, according to the latest national and battleground state polling.
The Trump campaign has already launched an effort to expose the Harris-Walz, no-questions-asked, move-to-the-center strategy as a fraud on the voters by sending Vance on a cross-country tour shadowing the Harris rallies and challenging their claims. At the same time, Trump held an hour-long unscripted news conference at which he freely answered all reporters’ questions about his economic, domestic, and foreign policy positions in detail, with an emphasis on popular proposals to bring down inflated prices for food and energy, and tax cuts for Social Security recipients and for low-wage service people who work for tips.
The Trump press conference highlighted the embarrassing fact that Harris had not held a comparable press conference or even agreed to answer unscripted questions from reporters on the fly, since she became the Democrats’ presidential candidate.
Trump also wisely retracted his previous refusal to participate in the second televised debate hosted by ABC and scheduled for September 10, which he had agreed to with Biden before he dropped out, unless Harris agreed to modify the ground rules. Instead, Trump now is proposing two additional debates hosted by different television networks, one on September 4, and another on September 25, in addition to the one on September 10, in recognition of the fact that Harris will have a difficult time trying to defend the Biden administration’s record, particularly on the issues of inflation and open borders, as well as her prior liberal positions, despite her recent attempts to “take it all back.”
TRUMP NEEDS TO OVERCOME THE MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA BLACKOUT
Trump’s greatest single problem for the moment is the continued refusal by most of the mainstream news outlets and publications, with the notable exception of the Fox network, to provide fair and unbiased news coverage of his campaign.
Trump will also need to find a way to shake up the campaign again, such as another clear win in his next debate, if Harris agrees to show up, or some external event, such as more bad news due to the failure of Bidenomics, or a serious escalation in the fighting in the Middle East or Ukraine. In the meantime, between now and Election Day on November 5, Trump must stay focused on the key issues on which the Democrats are vulnerable and convince the voters to hold Harris and Walz responsible for inflation, open borders, higher taxes, more government regulation, identity politics and their war on fossil fuels, which are destroying the American economy and way of life. He must also challenge Biden’s policy of appeasing America’s enemies, such as Iran, Russia, and China, which weakens our national security and threatens America’s allies, such as Israel.
Even though Trump and Vance are now down slightly in the polls to Harris and Walz, during their “honeymoon” period with the media, Trump does have a track record of exceeding his poll ratings, which means that he is probably doing somewhat better than the polls currently suggest. In addition, Harris, Walz, and the Democrats will now be forced to defend not only their liberal records, but also the poor record of the Biden administration on too many issues.
In any case, the outcome of this hotly contested election promises to be very close, and to change the course of history, not only for America, but for Israel as well.
