Some of Kamala’s Best Friends are Jews

As his columns appear in the reader-deprived Nine rags, few encounter Bruce Wolpe’s thoughts on the state of America, its politics and this year’s presidential race. That is a pity, not because Julia Gillard’s former chief of staff has anything new or insightful to say when reciting the latest Democratic Party’s talking points but for the grace with which he dances lightly over developments the Left’s publicists are keen not to mention, let alone encourage a reading  audience to further explore. The title of his latest column, “Why Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro“, is the perfect example — a headline that promises an analysis which, perhaps for reasons of embarrassment and expedience, never gets fully delivered. Here is his second paragraph with emphasis added:

The most divisive issue in the Democratic Party – just as it is for Labor in Australia – is Israel and the war in Gaza. Shapiro is a staunch supporter of Israel. With US backing, Israel may be in a regional war with Lebanon and Iran in coming days. This is a crisis that would take a political toll.

A “political toll” eh? What would be the problem with supporting an ally of long standing? Well here is the background.

The Josh Shapiro he mentions is the extremely popular Governor of Pennsylvania, one of America’s finest campaigners and a stump orator without equal. His fatal flaw is being not merely “a staunch supporter of Israel” but an observant Jew who keeps kosher, which would appear the sole reason he was blackballed for the Veep slot. It also made of him a cynically useful tool to be deployed, demeaned and abandoned, which is precisely what has happened.

When Kamala Harris revealed Walz as her sidekick, the much-awaited announcement came as promised in Philadelphia, Shapiro’s home turf and a location which led America’s credulous hacks to rate him the odds-on favourite for the second spot on the ticket. The Keystone State is vital to the hopes of both Trump and Harris, set to deliver 19 Electoral College votes to the winner on November 5. It defied the polls and swung narrowly to Trump in 2016, then back to the Democrats and Joe Biden in 2020 amid subsequent claims of vote fraud, which can be viewed as a revered state tradition if page after page of those convicted for tickling the ballot box is any indication.

With the state polls favouring Trump by a whisker, which way it might lean in 2024 is anyone’s guess. We can be certain, though, that placing on the ticket a much-liked governor, one whose approval rating has never dipped below 60 per cent, would have done Harris’ ground game a power of good. Instead, Shapiro’s only service to the Harris campaign was an invitation, one that must have been accepted through gritted teeth, to warm up the crowd for the man who scored the job for which he had been rejected by the women who, by hint, wink and inference, quite deliberately misled him, the press (never difficult) and the voting public.

Let us be clear: there was never a chance, not a hope in hell, Shapiro would be a vice-presidential nominee. But as a patsy, as a bait-and-switch prospect, an expendable bit player to be shamelessly used and then cast rudely aside, Shapiro had no equal. He was keen to get the job, no doubt about it, even to the extent of humiliating himself by scratching from his Wikipedia entry any mention of being “a past volunteer in the Israeli army”. That didn’t placate the Jew haters, nor the claim that his ties to the IDF did not involve carrying a gun and amounted to nothing more than lending a hand at an army base construction site.

While noting internal party opposition to Shapiro — sites like No Genocide Josh and pro-Hamas diatribes were popping up all over —  legacy media bought and broadcast the line, as intended, that some of Kamala’s best friends are Jews. Elements among the party faithful are calling openly and often for Israel’s destruction while detesting “Zionists”, read that as generic anti-Semitic shorthand, but she had the courage to defy them. Until, inevitably, she didn’t.

There was more to building expectations of Shapiro getting the nod, however, than re-assuring Jewish voters and donors, especially donors, that Democrats still love them, most Democrats anyway, and please do ignore those chants of ‘river to the sea’. Too clever by half, having shmoozed Jews with all the Shapiro talk, those Democrat backroom boys and girls also saw an opportunity to woo and win the Muslim vote. Walz was waiting in the wings to play his part in the charade.

The first choice for running-mate in that cause might well have been Michigan Governor Christie Whitman, whose Muslim population could deny Donald Trump the state’s 15 Electoral College votes. Having raised a wet finger and determined the wind wasn’t right for a jump from state politics to Washington, Whitman said she wasn’t interested. At that point Walz, formerly a rank outsider, began to creep up the bookies’ boards.

Like Michigan, Minnesota boasts a significant population of Muslim voters, mostly Somali refugees who have been sending Squad firebrand Ilhan Omar to Washington from the state’s Fifth District since 2019. Omar fancies herself the scourge of Zionists, spitting so many anti-Semitic myths and slanders she became the subject of a rare formal censure by her fellow House members. But she has never been criticised by Walz, who enthusiastically endorsed her re-election. As the Salt Like City Tribune summed it up:

Walz, for his part, has regularly attended iftar dinners and Eid al-Fitr celebrations, welcomed a Muslim delegation with a speech during a Muslim Day at the Capitol in 2019, visited Muslim communities that have been victimized by vandalism, and spoken at events hosted by chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and others geared toward pushing back against Islamophobia.

Before the palace coup that ousted Biden the polls were showing Trump had a chance, albeit a slim one, of taking Minnesota, which hasn’t voted for a Republican president since Richard Nixon in 1972. The Harris-Walz combination has restored a margin of safety, so that is one small gain, but it’s hard to discern any other significant advantage in rejecting Shapiro. It certainly won’t quieten the anti-Israel/pro-Hamas mobs set to descend on the Democrats’ convention in Chicago on August 19. And the hope that Minnesotan Walz might also swing the vote in neighbouring Wisconsin and, two states further to the east, in Michigan seems much less likely to succeed than traditional ballot-stuffing and cheating. (Those who watch election night TV coverage should keep an eye on Detroit’s returns, which are never declared until the rest of the Michigan has been tallied. That pause gives the city’s all-powerful Democratic machine a clear idea how many additional  ‘votes’ need to manufactured).

As a Democrat, an American and hefty donor to Democrats, Bruce Wolpe is clearly a partisan, laughably so when he cites 99-year-old Jimmy Carter as an example of the excitement Harris and Walz are generating. The man often rated America’s second-worst president, in hospice care for the past year, is striving to stay alive, Wolpe reports, so he can vote for Harris. That his Nine column mentions not a word about Walz’s dubious history in the military, his favourable view of open borders or being so woke his government put tampon dispensers in boys’ school toilet blocks, also isn’t surprising.

Even though his audience is Australian and unable to vote in November, why not gloss over Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats’ Jewish problem? After all, why would a typical Age of SMH reader need to know what is really meant by the “political toll” of being seen as too friendly with the Jews.