It’s a fiasco.
Yes, Kamala Harris’s defeat could have been worse. George McClellan, who challenged Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, won hardly 5% of the Electoral College. Barry Goldwater, who ran against Lyndon Johnson after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, carried only six states, and Alf Landon, who faced Franklin D. Roosevelt while he fought the Depression, won just two.
Even so, this week’s defeat is worse, because those runs were unwinnable, regardless of the losers’ identity and platform. The duel with Donald Trump was winnable. The winner – a serial liar, notorious bigot, proud ignoramus, political charlatan, abuser of women, and convicted felon – was vulnerable from head to toe.
Who, then, was this election’s loser, what caused the defeat, and what will prevent its repeat?
The defeat, many say, was Kamala Harris’s. She was the candidate, she shaped the campaign, and she failed to impress the swing vote, both as a candidate and as vice president.
Well, that’s true, but even so she was not the cause of the defeat. The cause was the Democratic Party, which failed this test’s every task: The diagnosis, the tactics, the strategy, and, above all, the mentality with which it approached the challenge of Donald Trump.
THE DEMOCRATS’ first mistake was their failure to address President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. He was their leader. It was their duty to draw conclusions before the rest of us did. If the party could not notice, or admit, its own leader’s situation, how could it credibly decry its opponent’s flaws?
Then came the tactical mistake of crowning Harris without a contest. When the same party had to field a candidate instead of the slain Kennedy, it held a primary election in which Alabama governor George Wallace challenged Johnson.
Yes, there was more time back then, a whole year, but the time deficit was the party’s fault. It should have persuaded Biden to declare his incapacitation early, and then held normal primaries.
Alas, just like there was no party to remind Biden of his promise to be a one-term president, there was no party to prevent his handpicking its next leader. Had the Democrats held a primary election, voters might have learned in time what they learned too late: that Harris couldn’t beat Trump.
Hovering above this tactical misjudgment was the strategic misunderstanding of the arena into which Harris was pushed. The party never contemplated its campaign’s message. There was a long list of promises – no new taxes for the middle class, more taxes on the rich, expansion of the Affordable Healthcare Act, for instance – but there was no flagship plan.
Trump, by contrast, repeatedly blared a major vow – to expel illegal immigrants in droves – and made it the center of his campaign. Faced with this negativity, the Democrats were supposed to produce an equally clear, but positive overarching vow: say, a plan to renew all urban ghettos, or to offer free college tuition in return for social service, or to build fast trains between America’s major cities.
Democrats focused on Trump's flaws
There was no such thinking. Instead, the Democrats focused on Trump and his flaws. The result was a responsive campaign which failed to become identified with an idea, and at the same time was as negative as the rival campaign.
Harsh as these failures were, they were mechanical rather than structural. The structural predicament was not about Biden’s condition or Trump’s challenge, but about the Democratic Party’s infiltration by extremists who do not belong in its ranks.
THE DEMOCRATIC Party faced a tightening siege by radicals – some with a mostly economic agenda, like Bernie Sanders, and others, like Rashida Tlaib, with a Middle Eastern agenda.
Historically, the party’s economics were the American version of European social democracy; the quests of Roosevelt and Johnson to graft capitalism and compassion. Sanders proceeded from there to drastic and unrealistic proposals like a single-payer healthcare system, peppered with anti-Wall Street rhetoric that would have been music to Karl Marx’s ears.
Democatic Party members tout anti-Israel policies
Tlaib and the rest of the so-called “Squad” bandy slogans about the Middle East that are all inspired, not to say dictated, by Israel’s worst enemies. This means actively fighting America’s support of Israel, while embracing the narrative that Israel was established as a colonial conspiracy, which implies that the Jews have no right to their own state in their ancestral land.
This is not what the Democratic Party stood for historically. On the contrary, the Democrats, under Harry Truman’s leadership, spearheaded Israel’s establishment, first by making the US the first country to recognize Israel, then by helping the young state’s development.
Had the Democratic Party been true to itself, it would have told its anti-Zionist fellow travelers that they have no place in the party. That never happened. Instead, when thousands of riflemen stormed southern Israel on October 7, shooting, torching, mutilating, and raping hundreds of Israelis, nine Democratic lawmakers voted against a congressional resolution that condemned Hamas.
Then came the upheaval at American campuses. Many Americans didn’t know in detail what was happening in Middle East battlefields, or in their own universities, but millions understood that the chaos on their campuses was helped by anti-American money deployed to drive a wedge between the American people and the Jewish state.
Harris’s attempts to please both Palestinians and Israelis with contradictory statements pleased neither, and only convinced swing voters that she lacks conviction, passion, and character, and would be easy prey for guys like the leaders of Russia, China, and Iran.
The Democratic Party’s defeat has many causes, but its anti-Zionist wing has clearly contributed to its electoral collapse. Faced with apologists for an Islamist attack on the Jewish state, swing voters asked which candidate was more distant from that anti-American scourge. Their answer was Trump.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.