Norman Solomon

Josh Shapiro Would Be a Dangerous Choice for Harris Running Mate

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Kamala Harris has gained strong support as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. Putting Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ticket would likely fracture that support.

The most divisive issue among Democrats is the U.S.-enabled Israeli war against the civilian population of Gaza. To unify the party and defeat Trump’s MAGA forces, Harris needs to distance herself in a meaningful way from Joe Biden’s Gaza policy. If she does so, she can win back the votes and energy of young activists, progressives, racial justice organizers, Arab Americans and Muslims – many of whom devoted weeks or months of their lives in 2020 to defeating Trump on behalf of the Biden-Harris ticket.

But a Harris-Shapiro ticket would jeopardize all that.

Today, parallels are apparent with pivotal events of 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson – increasingly unpopular among Democrats and others because of his Vietnam War – stunned the political world by announcing he would not seek reelection. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the party nominated LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as its standard-bearer. Humphrey’s halting efforts to distance himself from Johnson’s war policy were too little, too late, and he was unable to connect with many of the dedicated Democratic activists and voters who were antiwar. Failing to detach himself sufficiently from the president’s war policy, Humphrey lost a winnable election to Republican Richard Nixon.

If Harris now chooses a running mate who intensely connects her to Biden’s policies on the Gaza war that are so unpopular with much of the Democratic base, party unity – and the chances of defeating Trump – would be undermined.

Overall, Josh Shapiro is liberal and sometimes progressive on domestic issues (though notably not on fracking or tax subsidies for private schools). But on the contentious issue of Israel’s relentless war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Shapiro sounds much less bothered by the lethal violence than by U.S. ceasefire activists, many of whom he has demonized. Here’s a bit of the history:

In 2021, after Ben & Jerry’s (a company founded and led by Jewish Americans) refused to sell its products in Israel’s illegal settlements, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro threatened the company by urging Pennsylvania state agencies to enforce a constitutionally suspect law targeting advocates of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel over its discriminatory policies. Shapiro smeared such advocates by claiming that “BDS is rooted in antisemitism” – although the effort has wide support globally, including from many Jews, as a thoroughly nonviolent tactic in advancing Palestinian rights.

After the horrific Hamas attack of October 7, several dozen Pennsylvania-based Muslim groups wrote a letter protesting Governor Shapiro’s one-sided comments: “Not only did you fail to recognize the structural root causes of the conflict, you chose to intentionally ignore the civilian loss of life in Gaza.” Responding to the letter after Israeli bombs and missiles had killed more civilians in Gaza than had been killed by Hamas in Israel on October 7, the governor’s spokesman said: “We all must speak with moral clarity and support Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Last December, after he amplified the Capitol Hill demagoguery of MAGA Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Gov. Shapiro contributed to the firing of the University of Pennsylvania president. Referring to UPenn’s president, Shapiro said: “I thought her comments were absolutely shameful. It should not be hard to condemn genocide.” By then, after two months of Israeli bombing, more than 17,000 Gazans had been killed, mostly women and children – and later that month, Israel was charged with violations of the Genocide Convention in South Africa’s filing at the International Court of Justice.

In early April, after Democratic governors in other states had called for a ceasefire in Gaza, Muslim leaders in Philadelphia criticized Shapiro for his refusal to do so.

Beginning in late April, Gov. Shapiro and his office repeatedly prodded campuses to “restore order” and take action against student encampments, including the University of Pennsylvania Gaza Solidarity Encampment which called on the college administration to provide greater transparency on university investments, divest from Israel, and reinstate the banned student group Penn Students Against the Occupation.

On May 9, Shapiro invoked student “safety” in demanding the encampment be shut down. Police shut it down the next day, arresting 33. In two different interviews, Shapiro seemed to compare campus ceasefire activists, many of whom are Jewish or students of color, to “white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs” and “people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia making comments about people who’re African American.”

In May, as activism continued to grow over Israel’s lethal violence against civilians in Gaza, Gov. Shapiro issued an order aimed at Israel’s critics that revised his administration’s code of conduct to bar state employees from “scandalous or disgraceful” conduct – a vague and subjective directive criticized by the legal director of Pennsylvania’s ACLU as a possible violation of free speech protections.

In a July 23 tweet on X, progressive leader and former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner wrote: “Choosing Governor Josh Shapiro for Vice President would be a mistake. Governor Shapiro compared pro-peace protesters to the KKK. That’s simply unacceptable & would stifle the momentum VP Harris has. Hopefully she is looking to build a broad coalition to beat Trump.”

A broad coalition to defeat Donald Trump and the fascistic MAGA movement is exactly what we need. Making Josh Shapiro the nominee for vice president is exactly what we don’t need.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.

The Democratic Party’s Culture of Loyalty: How an Ethos of Compliance Made the Biden Debacle Possible

By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

The Biden campaign drove the Democratic Party into a ditch and speculation is rampant about grim prospects for the election. But little scrutiny has gone into examining how such a dire situation developed in the first place.

Joe Biden was on a collision course with reality long before his abysmal debate performance led to his withdrawal from the race. “Several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” the New York Times reported five days after the debate. Some had noticed the glaring problem months earlier but kept quiet.

A culture of dubious loyalty festered far beyond the Biden White House. It encompassed Democratic leaders at the Capitol and across the country, as well as countless allied organizations and individuals. The routine was to pretend that Biden’s obvious cognitive deficits didn’t exist or didn’t really matter.

Because his mental impairment was so apparent to debate viewers, some notable Democratic dissenters in Congress stepped up to oppose his renomination. But for weeks, relatively few colleagues followed the lead of Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett, who broke the congressional ice by calling for Biden to “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”

Heads in the Sand

Acuity came from Julián Castro, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, who kept up a barrage of cogent tweets. One message referred to Biden’s “unique political liability” and warned: “It’s not going to get any better — and has a high risk of scrambling the race again, sealing Dems fate. Burying our heads in the sand won’t assuage voters concerns, which have been painfully obvious for years.”

A literal heads-in-the-sand photo was at the top of a full-page print ad that the Don’t Run Joe team at RootsAction.org (where I’m national director) placed in The Hill a year and a half ago. Headlined “An Open Letter to Democrats in the House and Senate,” it said: “Many of your colleagues, and maybe you, are expressing public enthusiasm for another Biden presidential campaign in on-the-record quotes to journalists — while privately voicing trepidation. This widespread gap ill serves the party or the nation… There are ample indications that having Joe Biden at the top of ballots across the country in autumn 2024 would bring enormous political vulnerabilities for the ticket and for down-ballot races. No amount of spin can change key realities.”

But the spin never stopped and, in fact, went into high gear this summer with Biden trying to make his candidacy a fait accompli. Meanwhile, the culture of loyalty kept a grip on the delegates who’ll be heading to Chicago in mid-August for the Democratic National Convention. As the second week of July began, CNN reported that “a host of party leaders and rank-and-file members selected to formally nominate Biden said they were loath to consider any other option.” A delegate from Florida put it this way: “There is no plan B. The president is the nominee. And that’s where I and everyone that I’ve been talking to stands — until and unless he says otherwise.”

The lure of going along to get along with high-ranking officials is part of the Democratic Party’s dominant political culture. I saw such dynamics up close, countless times, during my 10 years as a member of the California Democratic Party’s state central committee, and as a delegate to three Democratic National Conventions. I viewed such conformist attitudes with alarm at meetings of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Norman Solomon on Democracy Now! -- June 28, 2024

 

 

The Imperative to Reduce the Chances of a Trump Victory

By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen

Let’s face it: Donald Trump is in a stronger position than ever to win a second term in November, with his active supporters even more motivated in the wake of the shooting Saturday. Preventing a Trump victory is now unlikely. But we must try.

Top Trump strategists are very eager for their candidate to run against Joe Biden. They’re now worried that the Democratic Party might end up with a different standard bearer.

Days ago, The Atlantic published journalist Tim Alberta’s in-depth examination of the Trump campaign’s strategic approach. “Everything they have been doing, the targeting that they have been doing of voters, the advertisements that they’re cutting, the fund-raising ploys that they’re making, the viral Internet videos that they have been churning out, they’re all designed around Joe Biden,” Alberta told the PBS NewsHour.

“So if suddenly he were replaced at the top of the ticket,” he added, “I think in many ways it’s back to square one for the Trump campaign. They recognize this. And I think they’re deeply unnerved by the possibility of a switcheroo at the top of the Democratic ticket.”

Last weekend, the Washington Post put it this way: “As Democrats debate the future of Biden’s reelection bid, Republicans would prefer he stay in a race they believe they are already winning.”

On Sunday, Face the Nation reported “top Democratic sources believe that Democrats who had thoughts about challenging President Biden are now standing down ‘because of this fragile political moment.’” Yet a guest on the same CBS program, Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, warned of a “high risk” that his party will lose the election “unless there is a major change.” He said that messaging from Biden’s campaign “is not effectively breaking through.”

While Biden boosters like to talk about national polling that sometimes puts Biden within a couple of points of Trump, such surveys mean little. Due to the Electoral College, the swing states will determine the winner. Biden is behind -- and falling further behind in most of them. Arizona, Georgia and Nevada have moved from “toss up” states to “lean Republican” according to the Cook Political Report.

And with an approval rating that now hovers around an abysmal 37 percent, Biden is increasingly playing defense in states he won easily four years ago.

“Democrats’ concerns about Biden’s ability to win are expanding beyond this cycle’s predetermined battlegrounds into states that long ago turned blue in presidential elections,” Politico reported last week, in an article raising doubts about Biden’s prospects in New Hampshire, Maine, New Mexico and Minnesota. The headline: “Dems Are Freaking Out About Biden Even in Once Safely Blue States.”

Around the country, Democratic candidates are running well ahead of Biden. Last week, the Economist/YouGov poll found that “96 percent of registered Democrats say they will vote for a Democratic House candidate in the fall, compared with 85 percent who plan to vote for Biden.”

Biden’s presence at the top of the ticket promises to not only deliver the White House to Trump but also the House and Senate to Republicans.

In the light of such realities less than four months before Election Day, it’s alarming to hear many elected Democrats -- including some progressives in Congress -- publicly claim that Biden is just fine as the party’s nominee.

The happy-talk denialism from those congressional progressives shows a disconnect from the progressive grassroots. Many activists who devoted months of their lives on behalf of Biden in 2020 to vote Trump out are disaffected from Biden in 2024. Many are furious over Biden’s nonstop support of Israel during its continuous slaughter of civilians in Gaza. That includes Arab-American and Muslim activists and groups who mobilized for Biden four years ago against his Islamophobic opponent. Many climate activists who fought for Biden in 2020 against the “drill, baby, drill” Trump are disgusted with his reversals on climate policy.

So, the depressing poll numbers may understate the problem for Biden as the Democratic nominee, because they don’t count the gap in campaign volunteer energy -- especially in contrast with the highly energized MAGA base. Early this year, an anonymous letter from 17 Biden 2024 campaign staffers urged Biden to reverse himself on Gaza and seek an immediate ceasefire: “Biden for President staff have seen volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever.”

In 2017, the Trump presidency was properly mocked for its brazen assertions of “alternative facts.” It’s now disconcerting that Biden and his advocates so often lapse into puffery as to his true political situation.

That situation was laid out with chilling candor in a detailed New York Times piece by longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and has advised dozens of governors and senators. The article makes for grim reading: “President Biden has spent much of 2024 with a more challenging path to winning a second presidential term in November than Donald Trump. But for reasons that have become glaringly obvious, that path has all but vanished.”

Biden “not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020,” Sosnik wrote, “he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008.”

But so many Democrats in Congress are refusing to call for Biden to step aside. And a lot of them are even cheering him on, encouraging his intransigence, as though nothing is amiss.

Until the Democratic Party officially nominates its presidential candidate, the push for Biden to withdraw from the ticket should continue.

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

Deference to Joe Biden from Bernie Sanders Has Become Nonsensical

By Norman Solomon

I love Bernie Sanders. By most measures, he’s the greatest senator in the last 50 years. I was very glad to be a Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. But when Bernie screws up, his progressive base should say so.

That happened during the first months of Israel’s war on Gaza that began last October. Initially, Bernie sounded equivocal as Israeli forces engaged in mass murder. After several weeks of carnage, antiwar activists occupied his D.C. office to demand support for a ceasefire. Some were arrested for their civil disobedience.

Bernie gradually changed his position and became a fierce critic of Israel, denouncing it for horrific large-scale crimes against Palestinian civilians and challenging the shipment of weapons to the Israeli military. There’s no telling if the public pressure from progressives hastened his shift to strongly oppose Israel’s genocidal war. But that pressure was necessary.

Unfortunately, after President Biden’s debate debacle on June 27, Bernie did not weigh in against the gaslighting maneuvers by the White House and the Biden campaign. In fact, Bernie aided them by downplaying the importance of what had happened on the debate stage.

Since then, Bernie has encouraged the illusion that Biden now has the capacity to be an effective candidate against Donald Trump. Equally problematic has been the implicit pretense that Biden could be up to the job as president until January 2029.

Such evasion not only dodges the reality that Biden was inept and sometimes incoherent during the debate. Since then, much stunning information has come to light, illuminating how badly Biden’s mental capacities have diminished.

“In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” the New York Times reported on July 2.

But on July 3 and again on July 5, email from Bernie to supporters told them: “President Biden said today that he is staying in the race, and I take him at his word.”

However, taking Biden “at his word” is beside the point. As the party’s nominee, Biden would drag down many Democratic candidates with him while making it easy for Donald Trump to win the presidency again.

The problem isn’t only what Bernie has been telling people on his email list. He has also been putting out important messages to the broader public via mass media -- in the process sending positive signals to Biden and his top aides while they gauge whether to continue the Biden 2024 campaign.

And Bernie is talking directly with the president. Biden “has spoken to me in recent days,” Bernie said on Sunday during an interview on the CBS program Face the Nation. It’s very likely that what Bernie told Biden was consistent with what he told the Associated Press, which reported on July 2 that Sanders “does not want Biden to step aside.”

The AP quoted Bernie as saying: “A presidential election is not a Grammy Award contest for the best singer or entertainer. It’s about who has the best policies that impact our lives.”

But Biden’s inability to clearly advocate for popular policies -- or to effectively refute lies and demagogic statements from Donald Trump -- is not like a failure to be “the best singer or entertainer.” The president’s glaring inabilities amount to huge failures as a candidate and as a leader.

It’s well known that Bernie Sanders has personal warmth toward Joe Biden. But, given the enormity of what is at stake, personal ties should not get in the way of realizing what ought to be crystal clear: Every day that goes by with Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee will work to the further advantage of Trump and his extremist right-wing forces.

“I’m going to do everything I can to see that Biden gets reelected,” Bernie told the Associated Press. But at this juncture, that’s the wrong vow. What we really need to hear from Bernie Sanders is a pledge to do everything he can to see that Trump is defeated -- and that means replacing Biden with someone who has a better chance of getting the job done.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.

More Than Ever, Trump’s Most Effective Campaign Ally Is Joe Biden

By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen

When Joe Biden’s ABC News interview aired on Friday night, it made clear that he should not be running for re-election. Rather than reduce the concerns sparked by his abysmal debate performance eight days earlier, the interview underscored that the president is in denial about his current political standing and unable to offer reassurance that his mental capacities are unimpaired.

Notably, Biden kept dodging and refusing to reply in the affirmative when journalist George Stephanopoulos asked whether he has had “a full neurological and cognitive evaluation” and if he would “be willing to have the independent medical evaluation.”

While insisting that his behavior during the debate was “no indication of any serious condition,” Biden evaded key questions while resorting to snippets of stump speeches emphasizing purported foreign-policy “successes.” The interview transcript makes for ominous reading. If Joe Biden is the candidate standing between America and a second Trump presidency, the nation is in extremely dire straits.

Four years after the Democratic Party and grassroots activists propelled Biden into the presidency, he is now adamant that he’ll stay the course as the 2024 nominee -- in effect, greatly boosting the Republican Party’s prospects for winning control of the White House and Congress.

It was widely reported that Joe Biden told more than 20 Democratic governors on Wednesday that he needs more sleep and that events should not be scheduled for him after 8 pm. Democrats have reason to question whether Biden is capable of mounting a vigorous presidential campaign; swing voters may wonder if he can run the White House.

It's all too tempting to lapse into spectator mode as developments in the current Biden psychodrama unfold. But progressives and others who understand the imperative of preventing a second Trump term should be determined to help shape history rather than just watching it in real time.

In recent days, it has become clear that only direct intervention by Democrats in Congress, propelled by grassroots pressure, can avert a Biden 2024 train wreck. It’s time to pull the emergency cord. And that means constituents should deluge every congressional Democrat with demands that they insist on Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race.

This telling exchange occurred near the end of the interview:

STEPHANOPOULOS: “If you are told reliably from your allies, from your friends and supporters in the Democratic Party in the House and the Senate that they're concerned you're gonna lose the House and the Senate if you stay in, what will you do?”

BIDEN: “I'm not gonna answer that question. It's not gonna happen.”

Proving Biden wrong on that point will be essential.

Nothing in Biden’s interview will in the slightest mitigate the urgency of the Step Aside Joe campaign (which we help lead). On the contrary, Biden’s frequent dalliance with magical thinking rather than realism makes him the most powerful de facto ally that Donald Trump has in his quest to regain the White House.

For progressives, the task should be clear: Join with other political forces to insist that Biden voluntarily become a one-term president.

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

Who You Gonna Believe, Biden Loyalists or Your Own Eyes and Ears?

By Norman Solomon

Almost as appalling as President Biden’s debate performance are the efforts of his loyalists to pretend that what 50 million viewers saw and heard didn’t happen or didn’t really matter. What has unfolded in the last few days amounts to a political gaslighting operation by the Biden campaign and supportive pretenders who’ve been trying to erase history as soon as it happened.

Apparently, Biden’s ego has proven to be much more resilient than his cognition, while loved ones and sycophants in concentric inner and outer circles cling desperately to talking points that are patently dishonest, often preposterous, and virulently dangerous for prospects of preventing a second Trump presidency.

By whistling past the graveyard of Biden’s credibility as a viable candidate in 2024, the pretenders are doing a huge disservice to all who want to avert a full takeover of the U.S. government by the fascistic Republican Party.

Let’s start with the innermost circle -- the First Couple. The day after the debate, both sidestepped what it had shown, instead striving to make it about one man’s quest to show individual resilience.

“I know like millions of Americans know -- when you get knocked down, you get back up,” the president told rallygoers in North Carolina. Meeting in New York with donors, Jill Biden said: “When Joe gets knocked down, Joe gets back up, and that’s what we’re doing today.”

Jill Biden’s role goes far beyond the personal with her husband. After Biden became president, Vogue described his wife as “a key player in her husband’s administration, a West Wing surrogate and policy advocate.”

But it’s worth asking what kind of “key player” could tell President Biden immediately after his disastrous debate performance, as Jill Biden did late Thursday night: “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!”

Party leadership was worse than dubious when, following the debate, House Democratic power broker Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina intoned: “Let’s just stay the course.” And when a former Democratic president, Barack Obama, dismissively declared on X: “Bad debate nights happen.”

A master class in evasion and obfuscation came moments after the debate ended when California Gov. Gavin Newsom went on MSNBC to exhibit his damage-control skills. The damage was beyond repair, but he did his best.

“On the signature issue the Democrats have, which is abortion, the president’s response was garbled and undirected at best,” a reporter pointed out. “Do you feel like he did what he needed to do on an issue that could motivate voters?”

“I think it’s significantly insignificant, because it’s de minimis, because the American people have made up their minds,” Newsom replied. “They don’t support the policies of Donald Trump” on abortion.

Newsom went on: “We have the opportunity to universally have the back of this president, who’s had our back. You don’t turn your back, you go home with the one that brought you to the dance. A hundred percent. All in. And I was very very proud that he was able to articulate the work that he has done, and lay a foundation of understanding of the lies and the deceit that continue to come out of Donald Trump’s mouth.”

The day after the debate, interviewed by Al Sharpton on MSNBC, the Democratic National Committee’s chair Jamie Harrison -- who serves at Biden’s pleasure -- echoed Newsom’s carefully obtuse rhetoric, proclaiming that “Joe Biden has always had our back, and we’re gonna have his.”

Meanwhile, liberal mega-substacker Heather Cox Richardson absurdly extended her longstanding record as a scholarly shill for President Biden by writing: “Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.”

But such intellectually disingenuous claims have suddenly worn thin in a wide range of media. Habitual supporters of Biden, such as Joe Scarborough at MSNBC and Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, responded to his abysmal effort in the debate by calling for him to drop out of the race. The Times editorial board did the same. During the last few days, a vast array of mainstream outlets featured urgent calls for Biden to withdraw as a candidate.

But the prominent Democrats now refusing to acknowledge that Biden was awful in the debate also refuse to acknowledge that he has been directly aiding mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. That’s what happens when deference to a leader substitutes fealty for humanity.