“We’re kind of stunned,” said an editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune yesterday morning, not a half-hour after Vice President Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. “He’s a good guy, but the dude was, like, a high school gym coach 10 minutes ago.”
Of course, that’s hyperbole: Walz is a public school teacher and football coach-turned-Blue Dog Democratic congressman-turned-progressive governor. His speech last night here in Philly was a home run: Folksy, plainspoken, and, most importantly, joyous.
Before yesterday, those in his home state who know Walz best had been expecting our governor to be the VP choice. If they had doubts about Walz’s readiness for prime time, it may have stemmed from one of the few things I remember about him — his less-than-stellar performance in the aftermath of the George Floyd execution. I watched those press conferences and saw a governor project nervousness, not to mention a leader who went so far as to blame the Minneapolis mayor for his own delay in sending in the National Guard while the city burned.
That said, like the rest of the country, I fell for Walz’s Harry Truman-like plainspokenness on cable TV these last weeks. He started the whole “those guys are weird” meme and framed his governorship in a way that resonates with any goodhearted American: “I want Minnesota to be the best place to raise a kid.”
I’ve been warning ad nauseam that this election will depend on the votes of Black and White voters who shower after work, and Walz seems like a candidate who can appeal to that cohort — though this ticket still has a ways to go. (Harris is down 15 points in the polls among voters with a high school degree; Biden lost those voters to Trump by only 4 points four years ago).
Walz is a terrific choice, but the process these last days reveals a deep fissure among Democrats, no matter the unified happy talk. They need a more nuanced, less doctrinaire definition of progressivism.
Meantime, while Walz’s stock was rising, a concerted effort to torpedo Shapiro took hold last week. Sen. John Fetterman’s people let it be known that Shapiro’s ambition was not to be trusted, a warning that might have struck a nerve with Harris, who comes across in this Atlantic profile as insecure throughout her vice presidency. Were she and her advisers wary of being upstaged? Bernie Sanders endorsed Walz — who ever heard of such full-throated public endorsements of VP nominees? (Perhaps such noise is an unintended consequence of not having a real primary process.)
Then the anti-Shapiro planted stories started appearing. You gotta admit, the moniker that started floating around on X of “Baruch Shapiro” or “Baruch Obama” was funny as hell. Yes, the oratorical cadence of the guv on the stump does recall the vocal stylings of Obama; once, during the 2022 gubernatorial campaign, my wife came in from another room while I was watching Shapiro at a rally. “Oh my God, from upstairs, I thought you were listening to Obama!” she exclaimed, as the candidate who hails from the mean streets of Abington peppered his speech with a folksy “y’all” or two.
Others hear the same similarities — on The Daily Show, Ronny Chieng devoted an uproarious bit to the prospect of “Josh Hussein Shapiro.” One X commenter posited that Shapiro was Kobe to Obama’s Jordan, essentially studying the master and paying homage by copying his moves.
Just one piece of a larger anti-Shapiro campaign
Of course, this story would be worth little more than a chuckle, but for the fact that it was just one part of the aforementioned coordinated campaign by the intersectional left to deny Shapiro’s selection — for some combination of ideological and (at least in Fetterman’s case) personal reasons.
In short order, stories of a 30-year-old student newspaper column Shapiro penned started making the rounds. It was about Israel and the Middle East peace process back then — we’ll get to the details — but what was really being suggested was that Shapiro isn’t who he claims to be. That he’s somehow inauthentic. For years, as Fetterman’s people reportedly made clear to Harris’ staff, the criticism of Shapiro has been that he’s “ambitious,” as if ambition were not a prerequisite for the seeking of high office. But now that had morphed into something more cutting: He’s so ambitious, he’s inauthentic.
Given Shapiro’s hoops pedigree (just like Obama!), the Kobe/MJ comparison seems apt. But would anyone suggest that Kobe wasn’t one of the all-time greats?
Could that be? After all, this is a Jew who took on the whole of the Catholic Church when he was AG; only in retrospect does that seem like a winning political move. He’s spent political capital doing battle with some of his state’s largest employers — Pittsburgh’s UPMC and Philly’s Penn, respectively — and challenging his own party’s most loyal interest group, the teacher’s union, to put kids first. Say what you will about his policies, but Shapiro has taken some courageous stands, no? Does that a phoney make?
Let’s dissect the Obama karaoke criticism. Given Shapiro’s hoops pedigree (just like Obama!), the Kobe/MJ comparison seems apt. But would anyone suggest that Kobe wasn’t one of the all-time greats? Jordan, who tearfully eulogized him, would be the first to say Kobe didn’t mimic so much as pay homage to the master who had come before him. The Jordan influence didn’t mean Kobe was unoriginal, so much as part of an all-star continuum.
But let’s go deeper. Just what was Shapiro’s relationship with Obama? Well, in 2006, Shapiro, a lowly state house member, was one of the first elected officials in the country to endorse this little-known Senator with a funny name for president, at a time when, ultimately, his governor and the Philadelphia mayor and the entire Democratic establishment were heavily backing Hillary Clinton.
Shapiro and then-Congressman Patrick Murphy were voices in the wilderness for Obama — and Murphy paid the price for it, after Bill Clinton exacted revenge by campaigning for Kathleen Kane against him in the Attorney General race. There was seemingly nothing in it politically for Shapiro to be out on such a limb. But he saw the potential of Obama long before the rest of the country did. That took a combination of vision and guts. If he sounds like Obama now, is that an indication of shape-shifting, as implied, or of long-term influence? When asked this week, Shapiro rightly said, “Barack Obama was probably our most gifted orator of my time, so that’s kind of a weird insult.”
Call it Gefilte Whistling
Then came that digging up of a 30-year-old college newspaper column, headlined “Peace Not Possible.” Yes, Shapiro describes himself in the piece as having volunteered in the Israeli army, an apparent exaggeration. But read the substance of the piece. Shapiro, a 20-year-old University of Rochester student at the time, wrote that the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO would not end the conflict in the Middle East — a prescient prediction, it turns out.
“Palestinians will not coexist peacefully …” he writes. “[They] will not be satisfied with only Gaza and Jericho, they will demand more, such as Jerusalem, the demands will turn violent, and Israel will be in a similar position of having to swap land for ‘peace.’”
Forget about vice president — make that 20-year-old Secretary of State! ‘Cause Shapiro’s prediction basically came true. Seven years later, PLO leader Yasser Arafat would leave President Clinton hanging and walk away from a deal that would have given the Palestinians 95 percent of the land they sought. There has been some revisionism of this lately; but if you don’t believe the memoirs of Clinton (“I am a failure, and you have made me one,” Clinton told Arafat) and Special Envoy Dennis Ross, then you can sure as hell trust the account of Arafat’s top negotiator, Saed Erakat, who testified that Arafat balked for fear of being assassinated if he made peace, just like Anwar Sadat.
The emergence of Shapiro’s precocious commentary prompted a veritable who’s who of Philadelphia progressive groups to demand an apology this week. (“I was 20,” Shapiro responded.) But the whole historical context begs the question: Apologize for what?
Call it Gefilte Whistling: In the last week, Shapiro’s candidacy was targeted by an organized campaign orchestrated by the Philadelphia Democratic Socialists of America, which released a statement full of ad hominem accusations, not least of which was that the governor who has funded traditional public schools more than any governor in history doesn’t “back public schools” because he also favors a voucher pilot for poor Black and Brown students.
Those who are critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza have every right to make their objections known. But Shapiro has been more critical of Israel than any of the vice presidential aspirants. And yet, it is Shapiro — and only Shapiro — who is the subject of the horrendous website nogenocidejosh.org. Explain to me again, progressives, how you win by being as bigoted as Trump?
Make no mistake, as Batya Ungar-Sargon argues in her piece “America Is Ready for a Jewish Veep. The Democrats Aren’t” in The Free Press this morning, a strain of antisemitism fueled the Shapiro backlash. The satiric Babylon Bee had an amusing, if disconcerting, take: “After hearing Josh Shapiro might be Kamala Harris’s pick for Vice President, Democrats worry his name on the ticket might cost them the all-important “Death To America” vote.” On CNN Tuesday night, Van Jones concurred: “You also have antisemitism that has gotten marbled into this party. You can be for the Palestinians without being an anti-Jewish bigot, but there are some anti-Jewish bigots out there.”
Playing a “prevent defense”
Presumably, given talk of his ambition, Shapiro and his team didn’t aggressively engage the backlash these last weeks. Every report referred to him as the frontrunner and it felt like he was playing a prevent defense. There’s a certain irony in a blindspot shared by many of those progressives who were most vocal in their opposition to Shapiro: His Jewishness could, in fact, aid the anti-war effort. If the goal is to stop the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, maybe a Nixon going to China model is in order, which is to say that only a Jew can deliver the type of tough love capable of moving Netanyahu.
The Commonwealth and Shapiro are likely better off now that he’s not on the ticket. The Commonwealth because the people’s business would stall during the campaign and potentially afterwards. (Quick: Can you name the lieutenant governor?) Shapiro because he can use this flirtation with national office like JFK used his near-vice presidential nod in 1956 to catapult himself into a brighter spotlight. Also: Shapiro, a CEO by nature, would have hated what is essentially a do-nothing gig. (Last night, the Washington Post reported that Shapiro told Harris’s team during the interview process that he was struggling with the prospect of giving up his governorship.)
Shapiro — who called Bibi Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time” before Chuck Schumer broke with the Israeli prime minister— has been more critical of Israel than any of the vice presidential aspirants.
Walz is a terrific choice, but the process these last days reveals a deep fissure among Democrats, no matter the unified happy talk. They need a more nuanced, less doctrinaire definition of progressivism. And the irony is that both Shapiro and Walz model how to get there. Despite the protestations from Bernie and the Socialists, when Shapiro fired the Wall Street managers in charge of Montgomery County’s pension funds, or when he took on predatory lenders as AG, or when he passed criminal justice reform as governor, or when he called Bibi Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time” before Chuck Schumer broke with the Israeli prime minister and while Sanders was still calling for a “humanitarian pause,” just who was the progressive?
And, yes, Walz signed into law many progressive priorities, including universal child care, taxes on deliveries from Amazon and gender affirming care for children, but when he cut red tape and reformed the permitting process for companies in the race to profit off a clean energy future, or when he allocated $300 million in new funding for the police, just who was practicing politics from the center?
Because of the weirdness of this election cycle — the absence of a primary, the (anti-democratic) anointing of a nominee — we don’t actually know what Kamala Harris believes, let alone what her vision for the future is. (How times change; when Bill Clinton ran for president, he published a book entitled Putting People First — a manifesto, line by line and program by program, detailing what he’d try and get done.) At last night’s rally, while the crowd chanted “We’re Not Going Back,” Harris repeatedly said her campaign would be about the future. With less than 100 days to go, it would behoove her to get specific and tell us what that future will look like and how she’d lead us to it.
Correction: A previous version of this post mischaracterized Josh Shapiro’s stance on the war in Gaza. He has called Bibi Netanyahu “one of the worse leaders of all time” but has not called for a ceasefire.
