All you have to do is take one look at $81 million in the first day of her candidacy to realize that Kamala Harris is suddenly likely to be the next President - at least she is barring a third, fourth, or fifth world historic event in the next few weeks. She still might not. She has yet to undergo the coming orgy of Republican slutshaming (she started in politics as the girlfriend of legendary San Francisco mayor Willie Brown), and for all the leftshaming of Harris for being a prosecutor, Republicans will charge that she was disgustingly lax on crime. She'll be thought of as the 'Border Czar,' a thankless job that will cause the right to charge she was absurdly lax on immigration, and the left to charge that she was absurdly strict.
Why is that? Because Kamala Harris has made a career taking on thankless jobs nobody else would take. As California's attorney general she took on what amounted to a political suicide mission and took on the US's five biggest banks all at once and refused an aid package for California of 2-4 billion dollars and even more suicidally, she won. The relief package she got? $18.4 billion! She also took on cases against all the major drug cartels. Imagine the threats to her safety, and all the while she instituted body cameras on police, antagonizing the very people charged with protecting her.
So we may have thought last week that Donald Trump was a shoo-in, but the US is so starved for a new generation of leadership that they will take even the appearance of it.
Kamala Harris may yet prove a greater President than Obama, but does Harris have Obama-level charisma? Let's not pretend she does, but we are all so scared right now that the appearance of any energy that resists Trump's blitzkrieg of negativity is met as though the leader is the reincarnation of Churchill. A number of female politicians can inspire a crowd better than Harris can: Elizabeth Warren most obvious among potential candidates, but unlike Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris can work in a team without burning bridges, she can fade into self-effacement, she can give credit to other people, can you tell I soured on Elizabeth Warren?
So its with maximum schadenfreude that, in this week of reversed fortunes, Netanyahu comes to America. It was supposed to be a Roman triumph of spite to enable Bibi to crow 'Biden's disappearing, but I'm still here.' Instead, Netanyahu is arriving at a moment of maximal Republican panic, and surely must read into the bad timing that his own days are numbered.
And yet... is she good for the Jews?
Kamala Harris would be the first President with a Jewish spouse. The frontrunner to be her running mate is Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania and very, very Jewish - though I still think it will be Mark Kelly. Even if Shapiro is not the Vice-President, this will be, by far, the Jewyest White House the country's ever seen. There is no better time or cover to reorient the US's Middle East policy. What kind of Jew is our potential First Gentleman, ('Doug')? We don't really know, but we do know that his daughter was arrested at a protest against Israel's actions.
We don't really know what Kamala Harris's opinions are on foreign policy. We can guess but they're only guesses. I'd imagine her opinions run much closer to Obama's than Biden's, and even if the difference between the two is much smaller than the difference to any Republican, the difference in approach is enormous. Biden is a man of the 20th century, growing up on stories of the camps and gulags, taking the lesson that totalitarianism is the worst of all possible governments, whether the right-wing totalitarianism of Hitler or the left-wing varieties of Stalin and Mao. Obama literally defined the early 21st, growing up on stories of Hiroshima and Congo, taking from them the lesson that democracy unchecked can be as lethal as any totalitarian power.
Perhaps, being this Jewy, I'm too much a creature of the 20th, but I'm clearly more with Biden than Obama. There are other looming American threats worse than anything in our sometimes shameful history, but most of them would be facilitated by America taking some kind of authoritarian turn. Unfair as I may be, I hold Obama's discomfort with American power partially responsible for the authoritarian turn of the world. Part of Obama is a peacenik who believes that when offered reason, people listen to it. Whether in foreign relations with Vladimir Putin, or domestically with Mitch McConnell, the refusal to wage political war emboldened them. Force occasionally has to be met with force, and not just in those moments when the ends are absolutely definite.
Had Obama been President on October 7th, it's hard to believe he would have tolerated the Israel-Hamas war going on anything like this long, but he would have allowed for a retributive war just like Biden did, and would have been savaged by the left for letting it happen a single day.
And it's reasonable to assume that regardless of what happens, a war like the Israel-Hamas war will never happen under a Harris administration, no matter how extreme the act against Israelis. No matter what her opinion of Israel, with such close Jewish contacts, Harris is particularly susceptible to accusations of collusion, and however she really feels, she will have to go to extreme lengths to give the appearance of impartiality with Israel, no matter how reasonable or unreasonable Israel is in the coming years.
Let's not kid ourselves: Israel deserves a turn against it - how much of a turn is an open question, but the idea that Netanyahu is celebrated in the Capitol tells you all you need to know about Netanyahu or about Republicans. Israel's own authoritarian turn may be gradual, but government by government, Israel turns more and more into the enemies it loathes: an overmilitarized gerontocratic theocracy where constitutional rule of law can be overridden by a leader with no limitations on his power.
Make no mistake, Israel on its worse day is no Iran on its best, but in fifty years on its current trajectory? Are you kidding? The average secular Israeli family has 2.08 children. The average ultra-orthodox Israeli family has 6.6 children. For all the right's handwringing about Islamic birthrates in the west, Israel is being overtaken by its own bellicose fundamentalists so much more quickly. Eventually, all that would be needed is for the ultraorthodox to militarize and the transformation to a halachic state (run by Jewish law) would happen overnight.
But nothing would facilitate that Israeli transition quicker than an economic boycott which dried up opportunities around the country for Israeli business to flourish. Every educated Israeli would move away, leaving nothing but a dried out husk of a boycotted country sitting atop a nuclear stockpile.
None of that is likely, not for a while at least. But if Harris doesn't turn against Israeli defense, the worldwide left will take matters into their own hands, and the spread of a grassroots economic boycott becomes so much more likely.
So brace yourselves, being a Jew is probably not getting easier any time soon.All reactions
No comments:
Post a Comment