Certainly, the leading anti-Semites in the Democratic Party celebrated the choice of Walz raucously

Democratic strategist Van Jones admitted that Harris had sought to appease “anti-Jewish bigots” (PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK / JAMIE LAMOR THOMPSON)

I greeted with immense relief Kamala Harris’s announcement that Minnesota governor Tim Walz would be her running mate, and not Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. Pennsylvania is the biggest electoral prize of all the so-called battleground states, and Shapiro carried it by 15 points two years ago and continues to enjoy sky high approval ratings today. He could well have swung the state for Harris. (The latest polls show her leading in Pennsylvania anyway.)

Shapiro was clearly Harris’s choice until the very last moment, which is doubtless why she chose to launch her campaign in Philadelphia. And for the obvious reason: She wants to win.

But in the end, he was just a bit too Jewish and a bit too ardent in his love for the Jewish state for the progressive wing of the party — Kamala Harris’s home base — to stomach. He was also an outspoken critic of the outbreak of anti-Semitism at the University of Pennsylvania after October 7, likening the demonstrators at one point to the KKK.

Van Jones, a Democratic strategist, candidly admitted on CNN that Harris had sought to appease “anti-Jewish bigots” and the “darker parts” of the Democratic Party. He conceded that the choice of Walz provided Harris with a better chance of reaching Muslim and younger voters, but did not back off on his central claim: “But you also have anti-Semitism that has gotten marbled into this party.” Even before Jones’s statement, CNN’s John King, during a discussion of possible vice-presidential choices for the Democrats, had mentioned that Shapiro’s religion could be a problem.

Certainly, the leading anti-Semites in the Democratic Party celebrated the choice of Walz raucously. Leading Squad member Ilhan Omar, who is from Walz’s home state of Minnesota, posted a celebratory emoji and a photo of herself next to Walz. Fellow Squad member Jamaal Bowman was similarly excited, posting a video of himself shouting, “It’s Walz, baby, let’s go!”

Former MSNBC host Nehdi Hassan, who lost his show after repeatedly criticizing Israel after October 7, was similarly enthusiastic. And Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, who has written that she will “never forgive” President Biden for defending Israel’s right to exist, boasted that the Democrats were “finally paying attention to the Internet and social media.”

A SECOND REASON for my relief that Shapiro was not selected. It is safe to say that the majority of American Jews have few elective affinities for Donald Trump, and they will grasp at any straw to avoid voting for him. Nevertheless, many have been horrified by the outbreak of open anti-Semitism on campuses and elsewhere and the dark wishes expressed for the destruction of the only Jewish state.

Shapiro would have provided the excuse for not making the leap to Trump, on the grounds that if such a proud Jew and avowed supporter of Israel is her vice president, then Kamala Harris’s foreign policy cannot be that anti-Israel. Wrong. As vice president, he would have had little input on foreign policy. That will be managed by holdovers from the Obama years and their acolytes.

The chances of Harris influencing Shapiro are likely greater than the reverse. Even before she made her final decision, he had already begun scrubbing his website of his more ardent pro-Israel statements and downplaying what he had once boasted of — volunteering as a teenager at an Israeli army base. As a college student, he wrote that while he yearned for peace, he was skeptical that the Palestinians were yet prepared to live in peace. Those sentiments, expressed when he was 21, have been proven prescient more than 30 years later. Nevertheless, Shapiro felt compelled to retract them and plead youthful indiscretion.

FINALLY, I’M DELIGHTED that Harris picked a fellow progressive. Just as she was graded the furthest left senator, so has Walz proclaimed himself the most progressive governor in America. I’m happy that Kamala has not triangulated to the center. Recall H.L. Mencken on democracy: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” If progressive governance à la California is what the American people want, let them have it.

As it happens, I don’t think that is what the American people want, and fortunately, Walz comes with plenty of baggage to alert them against the effects of progressive governance. Under his watch, Minnesota became a sanctuary state for youth seeking usually irreversible “gender-affirming” treatment and surgery, of the kind barred in almost every European country. He also signed into law a requirement that female products be found in every school bathroom, even those marked for males.

During the riots following the death of George Floyd while in the custody of four Minneapolis polices officers, Walz fiddled in response to requests to send in the National Guard from the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul. By the time they finally arrived, after having been first queried about the extent of their DEI training, the Third Precinct police station house had been burned to the ground, over 1,500 businesses and buildings had been torched, and an estimated half a billion dollars in property damage had been incurred.

Yet Walz’s primary response was to valorize the rioters — victims of systemic racism all — demonstrating “the visceral pain [of] a community trying to understand who we are and where we go from here.” This is what happens, he explained, when a society does not put equity and inclusion first. His wife told an interviewer that she had left open the windows of the governor’s mansion as long as possible, as the surrounding city burned, to savor the results.

And the results of this progressive governance? Homicides in 2024 are 114% above their 2019 levels, and in the Third Precinct three times as high. Was the systemic racism of the police the cause? As Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald points out, 309 black people were shot in 2021 in Minneapolis, only one by a police officer, who was returning fire. Almost all the rest were shot by their fellow black civilians. Under Walz, Minnesota’s crime rate surpassed the national average for the first time, and its GDP dropped under the national average for the first time. Achievement scores in its once-enviable public schools plummeted, even as spending skyrocketed. Not surprisingly, Minnesota has now joined other high-tax blue states — California, New York, and Illinois — in experiencing a outflow of residents.

During Covid, Walz ruled under emergency orders for 15 months, imposed draconian closure orders, and created a hotline for citizens to report violators. “One man’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness,” he remarked, ironically.

The state spent millions on purchasing and converting a huge building to serve as a morgue during Covid, but it was never used. And Minnesota was home to the largest Covid fraud scandal to date. The state education department spent $250 million to reimburse an organization called Feeding Our Future for millions of meals never delivered.

IF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY ever chooses to return to normalcy, Josh Shapiro may be delighted to have been snubbed. In 1956, a very young Massachusetts senator contested the vice-presidential nomination with the far older and better-known Senator Estes Kefauver. Eventually, he withdrew, and the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket went down to a landslide defeat. But four years later, the young senator who had come to national attention, despite losing the nomination, was elected president.

Could lightning also strike Josh Shapiro?

Get Out of Your Own Way, Donald

IF Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim Walz as her vice-presidential candidate was an unforced error, in the description of the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, her opponent, former president Trump, has made nothing but a series of his own unforced errors ever since his interminable acceptance speech at the Republican convention. And many of those errors have only served to reinforce among independent voters why they find him so grating.

He has deliberately and needlessly insulted potential allies, such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp, whom he called a “bad guy” at an Atlanta rally, but whose assistance he needs to win the crucial state of Georgia.

He keeps talking as if he were still running against Joe Biden, or longing to do so. Rumors of Biden’s possible withdrawal from the race — forced or otherwise — circulated for months and reached a crescendo after his disastrous debate performance. Any serious campaign should have anticipated Kamala Harris being substituted in, and prepared for that eventuality. But the Trump campaign appears to have been caught off guard when deprived of the issue of Biden’s enfeeblement.

While Biden’s decline is largely removed as an issue, what remains is that Harris repeatedly and over a long period of time participated in the deception of the American people concerning the president’s mental capacity, pronouncing him “fit as a fiddle,” even as the New York Times reported that he was fully engaged no more than six hours a day. Tim Walz was a full partner to the deception. After a meeting between Democratic governors and the president, just days before the latter’s withdrawal from the race, Walz took the lead in a post-meeting press conference in pronouncing his full confidence in the president’s abilities.

Trump has engaged repeatedly in childish sparring contests over who is attracting larger crowds, reminiscent of nothing so much as a playground spitting contest. He would be a lot better off if he just dropped his obsession with his crowds and concentrated on winning over voters who will never be part of his base. Four years ago, I wrote that part of the reason for his 2020 defeat was that he craved the adulation of his fans more than he did winning the election. And that obsession continues to lead him astray today.

Nikki Haley had excellent advice for the Trump campaign: Stop whining about Harris’s avoidance of the press. For one thing, whining makes you look weak. Second, that avoidance can be used to Trump’s advantage, allowing him to hang the vice president’s own words around her neck like a collar. Far better that Trump or Vance frame the questions than for fawning mainstream journalists to throw her the inevitable softballs to which she can respond by flashing her dazzling smile and reprising Obama’s hope-and-change routine from 2008.

But to do that, Trump will have to be able to rattle off, in machine-gun fashion, a list of the many Harris proposals that are anathema to the majority of voters, and the failures of the Biden-Harris administration, with concrete facts and figures, not just conclusory insults and invective. Most Americans grew weary of his Don Rickles insult comedy shtick years ago.

No need to remind voters that the presidency has become another DEI position: Trust voters to remember that prior to selecting Harris, Biden said many times that he would pick a black woman as his vice president. That pretty much left only Susan Rice and Kamala Harris as plausible candidates. (I assume the genuinely accomplished Condoleezza Rice was not available to run on the Democratic ticket.)

KAMALA HARRIS, it should be remembered, is not exactly an electoral juggernaut. She dropped out of the race in the 2020 primaries before the first ballot was cast in Iowa. Over the last four years, she has consistently registered the lowest approval ratings of any vice president in history. So low that Biden could plausibly argue until the last minute that he was staying in the race because she could not win. Pollster Frank Luntz advised Trump to keep repeating one ten-word question: Can you name one thing she accomplished as vice president?

Harris was rated the most left-wing senator — to the left even of Bernie Sanders. And among the policies she advocated in her 2020 presidential bid were abolishing private medical insurance, banning fracking, defunding the police, decriminalizing border crossings, and exploring racial reparations. In 2019, she expressed her openness to packing the US Supreme Court. Nor has she personally disavowed any of those positions, rather leaving it to campaign staffers to do so.

Jim Geraghty at National Review Online offered an extended seminar on how Republicans can put her on the defensive. A few examples (paraphrased):

• In March 2021, President Biden announced that you would “lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle... in stemming the migration to our southern border.” But the border patrol’s reported encounters with those trying to enter the country from January 2021 to June 2024 showed substantial increases every month. Would you call your efforts as “migrant czar” successful? What in the world did you mean when you pronounced our southern border “secure” in 2022?
• The Biden administration built 20 miles of new border wall in October 2023, waiving more than 20 federal laws and regulations to expedite the building. If fences don’t work, why did your administration build more of them? And if they do work, why have you staunchly opposed additional construction?
• You have pledged to go after “price-gouging” from Day 1 in office. Rumor has it that you are vice president. Did you suggest any of your proposals to President Biden? If so, what was his response?
• You have boasted that you were the last person in the room with the president before he announced the precipitous withdrawal for Afghanistan. Were you on board with leaving behind over $6 billion in the most advanced military hardware for the Taliban to use or sell?
• In February 2022, roughly a week before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, you met with Ukrainian president Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference. He requested preemptive sanctions against Russia and flood of weapons into Ukraine— anti-aircraft systems, fighter jets, and heavy artillery. You rejected both requests. Why? With the benefit of hindsight, would you give the same answer today?

TRUMP SHOULD DEFINITELY go after Jewish voters stunned by campus anti-Semitism and the lethal hatred of Israel after the barbaric assault of October 7. He could start with some of her appointments. As director of Jewish outreach for her campaign — again, against a background of pressure from progressive groups — she appointed Ilan Goldenberg, who calls Israel a “Jewish-dominated, non-democratic state,” and who criticized Joe Biden’s pro-Israel views as “old school,” at a J Street organized briefing.

Goldenberg opposed Trump’s moving the American embassy to Jerusalem and his recognition of Israeli sovereignty on the Golan. He supported President Obama’s abstention on a UN Security Council resolution late in his second term, basically calling upon Israel to return to its 1967 “Auschwitz borders.” He has also opposed the Taylor Force Act, which cuts off funding to the Palestinian Authority if it continues to subsidize the families of terrorists.

Nasrina Bargzie, an Afghan Muslim immigrant, is Kamala Harris’s deputy counsel, and has been named one of the “fabulous four” of Harris loyalists who did not flee the vice president’s office in the face of her frequent temper tantrums. After 9/11, Bargzie’s criticisms of the War on Terror were so frightening that her own friends reported her to law enforcement, and she posted in 2008 about “wearing orange” at the Today Show in solidarity with Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and other terrorists being held at Gitmo.

In 2010, when a Jewish student, Jessica Felber, sued UC-Berkeley after being assaulted by a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, Bargzie ridiculed the idea that calling for the destruction of Israel was in any way threatening, and accused Jewish students of “threatening” the speech of Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine. But when the American Freedom Defense Initiative took out ads addressing the roots of Islamic terror, she worked furiously to have the ads removed. Hatem Bazian, the co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, thanked her for “being constantly engaged in everything related to Palestine.”

This woman joined the Biden-Harris team vetting new hires.

IN SHORT, Donald Trump does not lack for issues upon which to win the election. The latest Harvard-Harris poll, show that a majority of voters support all the key planks of the Republican platform, and 54 percent approve Trump’s performance as president.

But to get the message across will require a level of discipline and focus from Trump that he has heretofore never demonstrated. Meanwhile, says Luntz, he is “giving away the election.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1025. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)