Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, Aug. 6, 2024
“Shapiro being an affiliated synagogue member who attended Jewish day school and sends his own children to them, as well as has a record of support for Israel dating back to his youth, made him unacceptable to that crucial wing of the party.”
There was probably more than one reason why Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz rather than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to be her running mate. It may well be that Shapiro rubbed Harris the wrong way in their interviews when she was auditioning potential candidates. The same factors that led Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) to advise her against picking Shapiro might have influenced her. Shapiro does not have a reputation as a team player. His steady rise through Pennsylvania politics has been fueled by genuine talent as well as the sort of naked self-interested ambition that would have to be put on hold if he were to be the No. 2 in a campaign and an administration.
But there’s little doubt that the decision to bypass a popular governor who could have played a decisive role in winning a key battleground state that Harris must have if she is to beat former President Donald Trump in November wasn’t made solely because of Shapiro’s healthy ego. As we all know, that is a quality that hardly marks him as an outlier among politicians. Instead, it was his identity as a Jew and an unabashed supporter of Israel that sparked an ultimately successful campaign among Democrats to spike the Shapiro boomlet.
His positions on Israel and the war on Hamas are not, in fact, very different from those of the other men Harris was considering, including Walz and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. They, too, support Israel’s right to exist and condemned the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, as well as expressed concern about the pro-Hamas demonstrations that have become the hallmark of a surge in American antisemitism during the last 10 months. And like them, Shapiro supports proposals for a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict that is hopelessly out of touch with what Palestinians want; all are critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. … [To read the full article, click here.]