The GOP’s Dumbest Attack on Walz Pick: Democrats Are Antisemites
Republicans are already rolling out a broad array of attacks against Kamala Harris’s freshly minted running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. Some involve empty assertions that he’s some sort of radical, compounded by outright smears, as illustrated by Trump-Vance campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. The New York Times reports:
“Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide,” said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman. “If Walz won’t tell voters the truth, we will: Just like Kamala Harris, Tim Walz is a dangerously liberal extremist, and the Harris-Walz California dream is every American’s nightmare.”
Later on Fox News, Ms. Leavitt opened a more aggressive line of attack by falsely saying Mr. Walz wanted to “defund the police” and describing the streets of Minneapolis as “literally burned to the ground” during riots after a Minneapolis police officer was filmed murdering George Floyd in May 2020.
This is all par for the course in MAGA-land discourse, where the only tactic ever devised for dealing with Trump-Vance extremism is to suggest that the other team is really nutty. But there’s one argument circulating in the wake of the announcement about Walz that is not only a lie and a smear but is also really stupid: the claim that in preferring Walz to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Harris or her party is revealing their innermost character as antisemitic.
No less an authority than Republican senator Tom Cotton says so:
Let's be clear: Kamala didn't *cave* to the antisemitic, pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party.
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) August 6, 2024
She *belongs* to the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic party.
Yes, that’s right: We are supposed to believe that the woman married to Jewish Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is a Hamas-loving friend of antisemites, if not an antisemite herself. But Cotton’s hardly an outlier here. His party’s vice-presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, said in advance of the Democratic-veep announcement that if Harris did not choose Shapiro, it would be “out of antisemitism in their own caucus and in their own party.” Fox News–New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz was even more audaciously blunt:
Josh Shapiro had too much baggage to be the Dem VP nominee and that baggage was being Jewish.
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) August 6, 2024
Veteran conservative activist and gabber Erick Erickson took the next logical step into anti-antisemitic fantasyland:
No Jews allowed at the top of the Democratic Party.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) August 6, 2024
To which the Democratic majority leader of the Senate instantly replied:
News to me https://t.co/VYCrhpfcdM
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) August 6, 2024
Republicans really should not go there. Of the 36 Jews currently in Congress, 34 are Democrats and just two (both in the House) are Republicans. And you cannot simply attribute that to tradition. As recently as the 1980s, there were five Jewish Republicans serving simultaneously in the U.S. Senate. Now there are zero. Should that be cited as evidence that Republicans are the actual antisemites? No, that would not be fair. But it would be no less unfair than the claim that not choosing one of the four Jewish Democratic governors (Jewish Republican governors: zero) makes Democrats the party of antisemitism.
Of all the dumb comments along these lines, however, one from former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer really takes the cake:
The Left did it to Joe Lieberman. Now, they did it to Josh Shapiro.
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) August 6, 2024
The D party is not home for strong supporters of Israel. It’s time for the Jewish community to recognize the power in the D party rests with its anti-Israel progressive base.
Aside from the fact that Joe Lieberman as a Democrat was the first and only Jewish vice-presidential nominee, it’s absolutely false that Lieberman lost a Democratic primary in 2006 (assuming that’s what Fleischer is talking about “the Left” doing to Lieberman) because he was a “strong supporter of Israel.” No, he lost because he was a “strong supporter” of the Iraq War pursued by Fleischer’s boss, George W. Bush, which pretty much everyone in both parties –most definitely including the Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees– now considers a boneheaded blunder.
If Republicans are going to bash Democrats for choosing Walz, they should stick with their standard smearing of Harris and Walz himself and drop this stupid argument that the party for which Jews regularly and overwhelmingly vote actually hates them.