If you were Kamala Harris, who would you choose to be your VP

[viper37]

Gretchen Whitmer; we haven't had a vice president that spoke without an accent since the end of the Nixon era so I think we're due. 



 

Edit:  Also the VP debate would be the legendary rivalry: Michigan vs. Ohio.

Biden has an accent? Weird.  I don't notice it.

The joke is that Whitmer (and Gerald Ford) are from Michigan and therefore, from my perspective, have no accent.  (Actually we all grew up in the same city, Grand Rapids, I'm just the under-achiever. )

Ahhh.  I get it!

[grumbler]

The joke is that Whitmer (and Gerald Ford) are from Michigan and therefore, from my perspective, have no accent.  (Actually we all grew up in the same city, Grand Rapids, I'm just the under-achiever. )

I always think of GR as de Vos country, from my stay over in the Amway Grand Plaza.

Western Michigan used to have some of the most liberal counties in the state.  They've now completely inverted that.

[Savonarola]

I always think of GR as de Vos country, from my stay over in the Amway Grand Plaza.

Which is worse, being the hometown of Gerald Ford, or being the hometown of Amway?   

(Amway, unquestionably, if you ask me.)

When I was young they once had a "Wizard of Oz" convention the Amway Grand Plaza Convention Center; apparently the organizers thought that Judy Garland was from Grand Rapids, Michigan rather than Grand Rapids, Minnesota. (For those outside the United States, that's not that uncommon of a mistake.  Michigan's abbreviation is MI while Minnesota is MN.)

[jimmy olsen]

Interesting
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/31/kamala-harris-vp-pick-wall-street-donors

"The Harris campaign is pressing Wall Street donors to cut their checks as soon as possible, citing a financial rule that bars contributions to tickets featuring a sitting governor," Axios reports.

"The urgency of the requests has led some donors to conclude that Harris plans to pick a governor — and not a senator, like Mark Kelly of Arizona — to be her running mate."

"If the campaign signals are being correctly interpreted, that would narrow the veepstakes down to Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz."

[Barrister]

I was pulling for Mark Kelly, on the grounds that he dressed up as a gorilla on the ISS.

But as I googled it to make sure, it turns out it was his twin brother Scott - although Mark sent him the gorilla suit.

[Razgovory]

Looks like it will be Shapiro.  Harris will make a public statement in Philadelphia next Tuesday.

[Josquius]

Is this no money for governers thing a concern? It sounds weird and potentially a bit of a hindrance?

Though shapiro makes sense. Pennsylvsnia is the key one to lock down right?

[Maladict]

Though shapiro makes sense. Pennsylvsnia is the key one to lock down right?

I don't think that's a given.

[Barrister]

Is this no money for governers thing a concern? It sounds weird and potentially a bit of a hindrance?

Though shapiro makes sense. Pennsylvsnia is the key one to lock down right?

It's a very large, very swing, state.  So no single state is essential, but PA is important.

The knock against Shapiro as I understand it though is that he is, well, Jewish.  And the activist left of the Democratic Party is very much on the pro-Palestinian side of things in the Middle East.

Now worth noting that Harris' husband is also Jewish, even though Harris herself is not.

[Razgovory]

Who's Afraid of Josh Shapiro?
The Pennsylvania governor called Benjamin Netanyahu "one of the worst leaders of all time." But anti-Israel activists don't want him on the Democratic ticket.

A politician designed in a lab to help Democrats win pivotal Rust Belt swing states would probably look a lot like Josh Shapiro. In 2016, when Donald Trump won Pennsylvania by less than 1 percent of the vote, Shapiro was elected attorney general by nearly 3 percent. In 2020, when Joe Biden won the state by one point, Shapiro won reelection by more than four points. And in 2022, the Democrat took the governorship by a whopping 15 percent.

Today, Shapiro's favorability in Pennsylvania stands at a commanding 61 percent, far outstripping Kamala Harris's 49 percent in the state. Leaks from the Republican camp suggest that party strategists see the governor as one of their most formidable potential adversaries in a presidential campaign. There's just one problem.

"He's Jewish," CNN's John King noted last week, so "there could be some risk in putting him on the ticket." In fact, Shapiro might be the most visibly Jewish elected official in America: He keeps kosher, has weekly Shabbat dinner with his family, and even quotes Jewish scripture in his political speeches. The sole race he ever lost was for student-body president at his Jewish day school.

Events have borne out King's concern. Today, Shapiro is the only veep contender subject to an organized campaign to capsize his prospective nomination. Put together by hard-left congressional staffers and members of Democratic Socialists of America, among others, the push is ostensibly about Shapiro's support for Israel. "Tell Kamala and the Democrats now," reads the site NoGenocideJosh.com, "say no to Genocide Josh Shapiro for Vice President."

Anti-Israel partisans have every right to advocate against candidates who oppose their cause, and there's nothing inherently anti-Semitic about doing so. But as its name implies, the "Genocide Josh" campaign is not about applying a single standard on Palestine to all VP contenders; it's about applying them to one person, who just so happens to be the only Jew on the shortlist. And to make matters more absurd, Shapiro's positions on Israel don't come close to fitting the epithet.

"I personally believe Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the worst leaders of all time," Shapiro told reporters in January, months before Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for the Israeli leader to resign. At the time, Shapiro also pressed for an "immediate two-state solution," something Netanyahu and his hard-right government stridently oppose. The anti-Shapiro campaign ignores these remarks but makes much of the governor's comparison of campus Gaza protesters to "people dressed up in KKK outfits." When he said that in an interview, however, Shapiro was distinguishing between bigoted extremists—such as the Columbia campus-protest leader who called for killing "Zionists"—and peaceful demonstrators, about whom the governor has said, "It's right for young people to righteously protest and question."

Now consider the other vice-presidential contenders. Arizona's Senator Mark Kelly leads the Democratic-nominee prediction markets along with Shapiro. Like the Pennsylvania governor, Kelly also supported using police to break up campus encampments. "Everybody has the right to protest peacefully," he said, "but when it turns into unlawful acts—we've seen this in a number of colleges and universities, including here in Arizona—it's appropriate for the police to step in." In the same interview, Kelly said that the Israelis "have to do a better job" reducing civilian casualties in Gaza, but drew on his military experience to explain the difficulty of that task, and emphasized that "Hamas, without question, is the biggest impediment to peace in the Middle East." Last week, Kelly attended Netanyahu's address to Congress and applauded.

Unlike Shapiro, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper didn't simply enforce preexisting state laws against boycotts of Israel while in office—he signed one himself in 2017. This month, Cooper codified into state law a definition of anti-Semitism that has been adopted by many countries around the world, but that left-wing critics argue penalizes speech critical of Israel. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, flew state flags at half-mast after October 7 and did not respond to activists who called on the state to divest from Israel. Some were arrested after protesting outside his residence.

That all of these politicians support Israel should not come as a surprise. After all, Harris is searching for a moderate to help her win swing voters in states that are currently polling in the Trump column. Although some Democrats have grown more critical of Israel, Americans back the country by a two-to-one margin and oppose the recent campus protests, which means that any VP nominee considered by Harris would likely share such views.

And yet, activists have not organized in force to discredit any of the non-Jewish contenders for vice president on these grounds. There are no viral memes against "Killer Kelly" or "War-Crimes Walz." Either the activists involved are extraordinarily lazy and never thought to investigate the other VP possibilities, or they think that Jews are uniquely untrustworthy. Seen in context, the "Genocide Josh" campaign and its tendentious reading of Shapiro's record look less like a legitimate political critique than a rigged litmus test imposed on the Jewish lawmaker alone.

Sadly, this selective stigmatization isn't new to progressive politics. In 2021, the Washington, D.C., branch of the climate-action group Sunrise Movement pulled out of a voting-rights rally because of the participation of three American Jewish groups. All three were known for their progressive domestic-policy advocacy and supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the D.C. chapter of Sunrise nonetheless argued for their exclusion because the groups were "Zionist."

The large majority of supporters of Israel and Zionism throughout history have been—like President Biden—not Jewish. Yet the Sunrise branch made no demands of the many non-Jewish groups at the rally; they effectively carded only Jews at the door. The organization later apologized and called the incident "an opportunity to grow." That growth seems to have been stunted. Today, the national Sunrise Movement is echoing the rhetoric of the "Genocide Josh" campaign, while it has remained mum on the Israel stances of all other VP contenders.

It has become hard to escape the conclusion that some of the activists imposing this inquisition have a problem not just with Israel or Zionism but with Jews, who they assume are serving a foreign power, no matter what they've actually said or done. Historically, this is nothing new. The white-nationalist right has long sought to stigmatize American Jews as subversive and exclude them from political life, arguing that Jews are loyal only to their own kind. In this case, however, some on the progressive left are the ones treating Jewish identity as inherently suspect and holding Jewish political actors to a different standard than their non-Jewish counterparts.

The irony of this whole affair is that Shapiro has actually been more outspoken against Israel's leadership than Biden or Harris. Few Rust Belt governors would publicly rebuke the prime minister of a foreign country, let alone that of an ally like Israel. But Shapiro knows a thing or two about the subject, which is why he feels comfortable assailing both Netanyahu for thwarting peace and extremist campus protesters for engaging in anti-Semitism. The two positions are not contradictory except to binary thinkers who treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a partisan sport, and whose understanding of the issue derives from social-media slogans. Marooned in their moralism, the "Genocide Josh" brigade misses what makes Shapiro so interesting.

The truth is that whatever Shapiro's views, a Jewish vice president would function in precisely the opposite manner from what these critics fear. Far from a sinister Semitic Svengali suborning the president to an Israeli agenda, a Jewish veep would be trotted out to defend Harris in her inevitable conflicts with Israel's right-wing government, and to insulate the boss from charges of anti-Semitism. As one Republican Senate staffer put it to Jewish Insider last week, if Shapiro is picked, "forget about claiming we're the only party standing against anti-Semitism."

The perverse politics of Jewish identity are one reason I've never been enthusiastic about the prospect of a Jewish president or vice president. Anti-Semitism conceives of Jews as clandestine puppeteers who control the world's governments and economies, fueling political and social problems. A Jewish vice president would provide the perfect canvas for these fevered fantasies—a largely ceremonial figure onto whom bigots could nonetheless project all of their conspiracies, casting him as the real power behind the Resolute Desk.

Harris would be foolish to discard any compelling VP option over their views on an intractable foreign-policy conflict thousands of miles away, while Americans stare down the prospect of another Trump presidency here at home. With the polls as tight as they are, and her campaign starting from behind, she is unlikely to choose her running mate based on unrepresentative online outrage rather than cold electoral calculus. If she picks a Jewish vice president, it will be for his impact on the Electoral College—not the Middle East.

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like it's down to Shapiro and Walz, who was not on my initial list, nor did anyone vote for other and list him.

[Valmy]

Looks like it's down to Shapiro and Walz, who was not on my initial list, nor did anyone vote for other and list him.

Walz wasn't on my radar at the time but now I think he is the best choice.

[Valmy]

It's a very large, very swing, state.  So no single state is essential, but PA is important.

The knock against Shapiro as I understand it though is that he is, well, Jewish.  And the activist left of the Democratic Party is very much on the pro-Palestinian side of things in the Middle East.

Now worth noting that Harris' husband is also Jewish, even though Harris herself is not.

Shapiro is good to. But I just feel like there is something special about Walz. I mean the "activist left" (I mean plenty of leftist activists care about lots more than just this one foreign policy issue) needs to be appeased to some extent so they show up and vote, at least in the states that matter, but I don't think Shapiro is going to turn many of them off that much,.

I think Harris is guaranteed to make a good choice here with those two finalists. That is an encouraging sign.

[Tonitrus]

Didn't know anything about Walz...but his military background is as fellow enlisted scum (even if National Guard), so a plus there.

[crazy canuck]

I heard Walz interviewed on the Ezra Klein podcast.  He is plain spoken and is anything but an "elite".  Seems a perfect antidote to Trumpism and a dramatic contrast to Vance.