Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
In light of Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, we’re going to talk to two Democratic strategists about what happens now, and what impact it could have on US policy towards the Gaza War. Rania Batrice is a Palestinian-American political consultant. She served as deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and this year has been the media consultant for the Uncommitted campaign. Matt Duss is executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy and served as foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders from 2017-2022. I’m excited to talk to them both.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Jonathan Shamir interviews Hana Morgenstern, Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, and Moshe Behar about Arab-Jewish identity.
Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.
Last week, the Knesset voted to reject the two state solution. Not a single Knesset member from a Jewish party opposed the resolution.
See you on Friday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. So, I’m recording this on Sunday. Just heard the news that President Biden is gonna drop out of the presidential race. And obviously there’ll be just a tremendous amount of commentary and all this. I would just say, for me, this is the first thing that’s happened in a while that kind of reminds me why—with all its flaws—the Democratic Party is still the party that I associate with. And it’s because both of these parties faced a situation in which they were under pressure to deny basic reality. In the case of the Republican Party, the denial of reality is the idea that Donald Trump is not what he palpably is, which is: an authoritarian racist, misogynist, pathological liar. And the Republican Party has really coalesced around denial of those really obvious truths.
And the Democratic Party was headed down a path of doing something which was in some ways similar, which was that the leadership of the party was going to coalesce around the denial of the reality that Joe Biden is no longer fit to be a presidential candidate, in the sense that he cannot vigorously make a case for himself to the American people, and I think cannot be, certainly for years going forward, an effective president. Because part of the job of being present is making a case to the public to rally them in support of what you want to do—sometimes rallying the entire world behind a certain policy—and being forceful in private, whether it’s foreign leaders, or members of Congress.
And we were entering this situation, and what was so profoundly depressing was to see the Democratic Party, which I thought is the more benign of the two parties and the more in touch with reality of the two parties, essentially going down that same road of denial of reality that the Republican Party was. And what we saw was because of the different constituency groups in the Democratic Party, because of its different relationship with the media, because of its different relationships with members of Congress, for variety of reasons, that Democrats were able to force Joe Biden to face this reality in a way that Republicans have never been able to do vis-à-vis Donald Trump. And so, that to me is just a sense of tremendous relief. Of course, there are very, very, very major concerns about Kamala Harris—assuming she is the nominee—above all, for those of us who care about Israel-Palestine, the fact that she was still implicated in this administration’s just horrific policy towards the Gaza War.
But I at least think that there is the hope that this recognition of reality in the party could perhaps be the beginnings of a reckoning with other kinds of reality. The reality that just as the party cannot continue to deny the reality of the fact that Joe Biden is no longer fit to be a presidential candidate, he’s not fit to serve as president for the next four years, that it will move towards—under pressure again from the from the party, from members of the party coalition—that it could move towards the recognition that this claim that this war is just and necessary is a denial of reality as well. And so, it shows that there is just some possibility that the Democratic Party can be moved to the place where it faces things as they actually are, as opposed to the Republican Party, which is living in a very, very dangerous fantasy about who Donald Trump is, and indeed what America is.
And so, it’s for that reason that I would say this is the first time that I felt hopeful about this presidential campaign in at least a month, probably more than a month. And it’s the first time that I haven’t felt just utterly demoralized thinking about this presidential campaign. It’s not that Kamala Harris would have been my chosen, you know, Democratic nominee, if I was given a list of, you know, a dozen or a hundred people, but there is at least the chance for movement, for change, for energy, for making a case, and perhaps ultimately for coming to reckon with some of the really, really important moral truths that Joe Biden was not able to reckon with.
