Larry Gordon is Editor in Chief of the Five Towns Jewish Times
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris needs the 19 electoral votes of Pennsylvania much more than she needs the state’s governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate.
Because of his Jewishness and his support for Israel, Shapiro did not make the final cut. On Tuesday, Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her number two. Over the last few days, it looked like her needing Shapiro would win out, but in the end, the radical left wing of the Democratic Party won out.
Josh Shapiro is a career politician and a committed Jew. He met his wife, Lori, at Hebrew school and proposed to her while they were doing volunteer work in Jerusalem.
Fox News reported this week that Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania expressed his views to Harris and her aides that he opposed her selection of Shapiro as her running mate. Fetterman said he thought Shapiro was too ambitious. But the real problem for many on the Left is the governor’s attachment to and support for Israel.
And that matter stands out, especially since Biden and Harris, taking cues from Barack Obama, prefer more of a separation between the U.S. and Israel rather than maintaining the strong ties that have been the norm between the two nations for decades. Instead, the traditional alliance that has been mutually beneficial for both countries is starting to feel more like a yo-yo, rising and falling depending on political expediency.
Had Shapiro become Kamala Harris’s running mate, it would have hearkened back to the time when Senator Joe Lieberman ran as Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate when he ran against George W. Bush in 2000.
As you might recall, it was an extremely close race. In fact, the Gore-Lieberman ticket drew at least two million more popular votes than Bush, who was running with Dick Cheney on the Republican line.
That race came down to a technicality of how the ballot cards were punched at voting stations in Palm Beach County. If you were paying attention back then, you might remember the term, “hanging chad,” which refers to the fragments of punched-out ballots that dangled off the paper, resulting in an incomplete and therefore invalid ballot, hence the term “hanging chad.”
This ordeal 24 years ago went before the Supreme Court, which ultimately decided that Bush won Florida and thereby the Electoral College vote, which made him the new president of the United States.
In a sense, even though the 2024 election has not taken place, things are definitely evolving in the same, convoluted direction. History records that back in 2000, Gore probably had the opportunity to claim that he was the victor in the race against Bush. The election was as close as it was confusing, but the High Court made a decision, and in those days, people abided by the court’s ruling. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Bush won Florida and thereby won the electoral vote.
Today, however, if you find you don’t agree with a Supreme Court ruling, you can challenge them, accuse them of being corrupt, and like Joe Biden did last week, make a proposal to reconstitute and redefine the court in American society.
Today, with all the troubled spots in the world: the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the Middle East on the verge of exploding, it turns out that the future of the U.S. and the entire balance of the world might have come down to a man named Shapiro. But in the end, they just couldn’t do it and they pulled the “Shapiro pro-Israel card.”
Josh Shapiro is a strong supporter of Israel. Today’s Democrats favor him because he has made it known that he’s not a big fan of Prime Minister Netanyahu. But that’s no big deal because half the State of Israel feels that way too, and more than half of American Jews share that opinion.
In addition, Shapiro has made it known that he favors the nonsensical “two-state solution” to the Palestinian Arab problem, which has been the centerpiece of Middle East diplomacy over the last half century.
A smart political operative like Shapiro knows full well that it’s safe to say you favor two states (one being Israel, the other being Palestine) for the reason that the Palestinian Arab leadership, whether alive like Mahmoud Abbas or dead like Ismail Haniyeh, were against two states in principle. And that’s why it’s safe for a guy named Shapiro to say he favors two states.
His issue at the moment is that thirty years ago, while as a college student, he wrote a paper saying that Palestinian Arabs are not capable of establishing their own independent state.
On this matter, it is important to note that these decisions are not being made by Harris alone. She is being directed and coaxed into selecting a running mate by whoever is calling the shots (Obama).
The fact is the Democrats need a Jew named Shapiro as a vice-presidential candidate like they need an unnecessary triple root canal. What they desperately need are the 19 electoral votes that Pennsylvania can deliver them. Instead, they chose the extreme leftist from Minnesota, where there was more rioting and destruction from BLM than in any other state in 2020. Walz in Minnesota is more than anything else the kind of unknown candidate who will hopefully lead to a huge Democratic loss in November.
The Democratic National Convention will take place from August 19–22 in Chicago. The expectation at this point is that there will be upwards of 100,000 anti-Israel protestors on the streets of the Windy City. The ideas fueling the outpouring of street protests like these primarily revolve around Israel, October 7, support for Hamas and Iran, and now protests against the very judicially-proper elimination of Hezbollah and Hamas terror leaders.
The protests will no doubt lead to violence and millions of dollars of damage perpetrated indiscriminately against local businesses and institutions.
Whether Josh Shapiro was the Democratic Party’s choice for vice president, according to a piece in The New York Times on Monday, was about the close relationship between Governor Shapiro and former President Barack Obama. Obama didn’t get his way and it seems the pro-Hamas wing of the party won out.
According to the Times article, the two are so close that people have taken to referring to the governor as “Baruch” Obama. The relationship began in 2006 when Shapiro, then a state-elected official, supported Mr. Obama in the Pennsylvania primary against Hillary Clinton.
The basis of how that relationship has evolved and the role that Mr. Obama played in both the Biden administration as well as advancing the coup against Biden and the elevation of Ms. Harris as the nominee without so much as a single vote in a state primary shows the influence of the former president, who has vowed to help her defeat former President Donald Trump in November.
The fact is, there would be widespread protests against the appointment of Josh Shapiro based solely on the fact that he is Jewish. The Tim Walz selection may avoid that outcome. The sad and pathetic fact is that this is the reality of our broken nation’s political discourse today.
Animosity and hostility toward Jews are woven into today’s dysfunctional society.
If Harris and Barack Obama felt that they could tap Shapiro as VP, it was perhaps a Divinely-inspired political miscalculation. The question that remains is whether the country is ready for a female president of color (sometimes Indian, sometimes African-American) and a Jewish vice president who as a young man volunteered in the IDF. Know that we have at least half the answer: No Jew allowed.
That alone will be great material for the 100,000 anti-Israel crazies who are planning to be on the streets of Chicago for the Democratic convention.
Earlier this week, a story was floating that Shapiro was offered the VP position, but turned it down because his advisers told him that attaching himself to a political personality like Kamala Harris was a losing proposition. Shapiro is just 51 years old and his popularity can lead to his own presidential run in 2028.
War is not fun and neither are these awful and dangerous crises that Israel is facing. A Shapiro appointment would have just exacerbated an already complicated and difficult political situation.
Those who were uncomfortable with the Joe Lieberman choice in 2000 are breathing a sigh of relief today. Who needs those headaches? We know how Trump Derangement Syndrome works. It’s an old Democratic malady. But Shapiro Derangement? Nothing new under the sun!