By: Noah Rothman – nationalreview.com – July 24, 2024

A grand gesture that would suggest a level of courage absent during most of her political career.

Kamala Harris is going to have a bear of a time combating voters’ impression that she is “too liberal,” as she should.

The former California senator spent the better part of her career in national politics courting the far-Left in an ungainly manner that succeeded less in convincing liberals of her sincerity than it did in repulsing conservatives and moderates who had no reason to question her self-stated values.

Harris cannot run away from her support for firearms buybacks and the abolition of the private health-insurance industry or her hostility toward the domestic energy industry without repudiating her whole career. Even if she hoped to thread a needle here or there, the truncated election season into which she’s been parachuted forecloses on the prospect of nuance. What she can do, however, is a grand gesture — one that conveys her intention to park herself squarely in the middle of the American electorate even at the risk of courting the ire of some of the most detestable people in American politics who nonetheless call themselves progressives. In short, Harris would be well advised to do the full Fetterman.

The opportunity for just such a gesture presents itself in the form of her vice-presidential pick. Among the Democrats with an inside track, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro presents Harris with the chance to answer those who see her as a stalking horse for the radical Left.

The balance of forces within the Democratic Party for and against Shapiro already reflects the wisdom of such a choice. On the pro-Shapiro side, you have the Democratic Party’s kingmakers. In a New York Times survey of more than 250 delegates to the Democratic convention in August, the Pennsylvania governor earned the most support of any named candidate. On the other side of that equation are some of the least sympathetic figures in Democratic politics.

“Shapiro’s stance on boycotting Israel [and] on college protests will annoy the antiwar left,” wrote Mehdi Hasan, a broadcaster whose anti-Israel agitation became too much even for MSNBC to stomach. “Choosing Governor Josh Shapiro for Vice President would be a mistake,” wrote Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and perennial progressive candidate with an impressive string of electoral losses under her belt. “Governor Shapiro compared pro-peace protesters to the KKK. That’s simply unacceptable [and] would stifle the momentum VP Harris has.” Over at the once-great journal the New Republic, writer David Klion pleads with Harris to not throw the anti-Israel left under the bus. After all, “Shapiro is an observant Jew with personal ties to Israel,” he writes. If it must be a Jew, Klion sighs, let it be Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker.

The anti-Israel Left couples this advocacy with an implied threat. To pick a running mate dispossessed of an irrational hatred toward the Jewish state risks the youthful energy any Democratic ticket must court, they intimate. As CNN’s John King warned, putting a Sabbath-observing Jew who took his oath of office with his hand on a stack of Hebrew Bibles is a “risk.” But even assuming that the anti-Israel/pro-Hamas Left is favored by young voters, it is still deeply unpopular with everyone else. What’s more, as the tone of Harris’s detractors suggests, she doesn’t have much of a reputation to repair among this cohort.

In her time in the national spotlight, Harris rejected pressure from the activist class to steer clear of private meetings with representatives from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. She irritated the monomaniacs in her party when she rejected the premise that Israel is guilty of “ethnic genocide.” As a senator, she co-sponsored legislation combating antisemitism at the United Nations, criticized the boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) movement, and chided Barack Obama for withdrawing America’s support for Israel in that body when it abstained during a vote condemning Israel in 2016. Harris’s pro-Israel bona fides were so conspicuous that, in 2019, the progressive Institute for Policy Studies accused her of secretly harboring a “neoconservative worldview.”

The path of least resistance before Harris now is to lean into the impression her party’s radicals already have of her. Choosing Shapiro as her running mate would advance that objective. What’s more, it would pay political dividends. Shapiro is the most popular governor the must-win State of Pennsylvania has had in some time. Not only is he well liked among Democrats and independents, even one-third of Pennsylvania’s Trump voters approve of the job he has done in office.

Shapiro is the most popular official in the Keystone State with Fetterman close behind. Fetterman’s career arc is illustrative. The junior senator from Pennsylvania took office as one of the least popular U.S. senators in America. Today, he has the support of a near-majority of the state’s voters. What did Fetterman do to change his fortunes (beyond making a few hawkish noises relating to border security) except adopt a posture of indefatigable support for Israel in its defensive war against a terrorist organization?

The progressive Left might feel betrayed by Fetterman, but the rest of his state doesn’t seem to mind the senator’s political evolution. It’s not as though Fetterman has rethought his support for the suite of left-wing policy preferences. By all accounts, he’s still the progressive Democrat that he was when he won his Senate seat in 2022. Merely by virtue of his willingness to stand up to a freakish mob of menacing bigots, however, Fetterman has sloughed off the impression that he, too, is a radical.

As “a Democrat who joined a rush to the left during a presidential primary that looks incredibly ill-advised in retrospect to many in the party,” Politico reported on Wednesday, both Harris and her aides want to find some way to disavow the person who “was struggling to find footing in a party that, at the time, appeared to be moving sharply left.” Here it is! Presuming he’s even interested in the role, the elevation of an observant, pro-Israel Jew to the No. 2 slot clears away the miasma of antisemitism suffocating her party and provides persuadable voters with some assurance that the persona Harris adopted in 2019 was an ill-fitting fabrication. At the very least, it would alienate all the people Democrats need to cast off into the sun if they hope to convince voters that the chaos and violence that consumed Biden’s presidency in its final year was a Biden problem, not a Democratic problem.

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Source: Kamala Harris Should Go Full Fetterman | National Review