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Let’s face it, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) was never going to be 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s running mate. He had shown too much Jewishness for the job.
In his new memoir, Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro contends that during a vetting interview and after a string of “unnecessarily contentious” questions, Dana Remus, former Obama administration counsel, asked the governor if he was a “double agent for Israel” or whether he “communicated with an undercover agent of Israel.”
When Shapiro responded that the question was offensive, he was reportedly told, “Well, we have to ask.”
Did they, really?
Had the Harris campaign uncovered suspicious interactions between the governor of Pennsylvania and Israeli agents? Was there evidence that Shapiro had spoken to known spies? Because Remus didn’t ask the governor if he’d ever lobbied for Israel or whether he had financial or other conflicts of interest with the Jewish state. Those are legitimate questions. According to Shapiro, she asked him if he was a traitor.
Let’s remember that the Obama administration regularly accused its domestic foreign policy opponents of dual loyalty, so hearing that Remus engaged in it wasn’t exactly surprising. The allegation has been weaponized to chill pro-Israel speech. And maybe that was the idea.
Nevertheless, the dual loyalty accusation is one of the most enduring tropes of antisemitism, a smear that’s been around far longer than the modern state of Israel. The accusation was the pretext for antisemites from the Dreyfus Affair in France to “Doctor’s Plot” in Stalin’s Soviet Union to pogroms going back centuries.
In its modern form, the slur insinuates that American Jews are inherently disloyal because they also feel a connection to their ancient culture, faith, and Israel.
And while the Democratic Party isn’t exactly a hospitable place for unrepentant Jews these days, it was even worse in the summer of 2024. The Left’s activist faction was out in full force, targeting Jewish students and businesses, while the political and media faction was spreading Hamas propaganda and blood libels.
Only a couple of weeks before Harris introduced Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate at a rally in Philadelphia, bigoted protesters at nearby Temple University had marched to Hillel Center for Jewish Life to target Jewish students with chants of “globalize the intifada.” It was one of scores of incidents around the country — some violent, some not — that most Democrats wouldn’t condemn.
Even as her team was vetting Shapiro, Harris said pro-Hamas campus protesters were showing “exactly what the human emotion should be,” whatever that meant. A hapless President Joe Biden, afraid to lose the Muslim vote in Michigan, had been similarly trying to placate the hard left after Oct. 7, 2023.
Progressive groups made sure to ramp up attacks on “Genocide Josh” as soon as Harris was handed the nomination. They quickly “uncovered” a 30-year-old opinion piece written when Shapiro was a 20-year-old student titled “Peace not possible.” Penned during the First Intifada, the column argued that no deal could be struck with the Arabs in Judea and Samaria because they didn’t possess the “capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States” and were “too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”
Subsequent events proved the young Shapiro prophetic, even as the elder Shapiro walked back the column and made sure to harshly criticize the Israeli government to placate his fellow Democrats.
Not enough, apparently.
When in high school, Shapiro, like many Jewish children, had also spent a few months studying and volunteering in Israel. At the kibbutz where Shapiro stayed, however, some of the activities included the Israeli military, which has morphed on social media into a claim that the 16-year-old Shapiro was a full-fledged member of it.
If vice presidential candidates are going to answer for attending a program in an allied nation at the age of 16, surely Walz should have been vetted for his ties to an enemy of the U.S. as an adult. Walz became a teacher in China when communist tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square and violently crushed pro-democracy protests. The former visiting fellow at the Chinese communist Macao Polytechnic University subsequently travelled to the country 30 times. After Harris tapped Walz as her running mate, the New York Times had to clean up Walz’s “complicated” relationship with China.
There is no way that Harris’s people asked Walz if he was a Chinese communist spy and traitor.
By the time Harris was choosing her vice president, there was also no way a centrist Democrat, much less an open Zionist, would be on the ticket, despite his popularity.
And by any political measurement, Shapiro rated a better national candidate than Walz. Harris contended that she chose the Walz due to his uncanny ability to connect with average caucasian cisgender dudes who’d defected to Republicans. The vice presidential candidate called himself the “permission structure” for white guys to vote for Democrats because he could “code talk” about football and fixing trucks.
But in the swing state of Pennsylvania, a place teeming with voters who enjoy sports and trucks, and never say cringy things such as “permission structure,” Shapiro’s approval rating ranged between 57% and 59% during the summer of 2024.
Moreover, in 2022, Shapiro had won over 56% of the vote in a state that Democrats desperately needed to keep the White House. The last time Pennsylvania’s voters hadn’t aligned with the national winner was 2004. In nine out of the past 11 presidential elections, Pennsylvania was on the winning side. Walz, on the other hand, had won 52% of the vote in a state that hadn’t gone to a Republican president since Richard Nixon in 1972.
None of this is to argue that Shapiro is any kind of hero. Now that it’s politically and financially expedient, the governor tells us extremists on the hard Left sandbagged him. It’s worth remembering that at the time, Shapiro grovelled, apologizing for his pro-Israel views. This indicates that he was interested in the vice presidential nod. Even after Walz was picked, Shapiro exuberantly campaigned for the people who demanded to know if he was a fifth columnist.
I understand that politics tends to scramble a person’s moral compass, but there really is no excuse for this kind of cowardice.
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It is also true that there are other problematic aspects to a Shapiro candidacy, namely that he functioned as a traditional Democrat rather than a socialist cultural warrior. The media will now tell you that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the future, but thus far, Shapiro has shown that a centrist political agenda has a far wider appeal.
In the summer of 2024, though, Shapiro’s biggest problem was his ethnicity.
