By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, February 05, 2025
Of all the shadows on the cave wall that haunted Kamala
Harris’s constitutionally risk-averse campaign, the great unwashed of the
pro-Hamas crowd scared them most.
Save a handful of contrived efforts to put the
professional demonstrators in their place — the “I’m speaking” shtick, which never seemed to intimidate
anyone — the former vice president’s candidacy was hamstrung by the fear that
anti-Israel activists would cost Harris the State of Michigan and, therefore,
the presidency.
Throughout her candidacy, she made supplicating appeals
to what the polling suggested was one of the least sympathetic groups in the
country. Even less than one week before the vote, the Associated Press reported that the campaign was still
trying to figure out how to “validate protester concerns” and harness their
energy for Harris’s benefit. That is quite a dispensation for a mob of
misanthropes who “interrupt, heckle and, oftentimes, knock a candidate off track.”
Of course, Harris did lose Michigan, along with the other
six swing states on the electoral map. And the anti-Israel activist class has tried to take credit for her defeat.
But a reasonable postelection analysis via the Huffington Post’s
Jonathan Cohn casts doubt on these self-serving claims.
“The electoral impact of Gaza was more complex than
outside analysts frequently realized,” he wrote. “For every voter angry over
the Israeli strikes on Gaza, there may have been another ready to back Trump if
Harris seemed too critical of Israel or too forgiving of Hamas. In addition,
Democrats were already losing votes among socially conservative Arab Americans
because of LGBTQ+ issues.”
Ultimately, the race just wasn’t close enough for the
small and geographically disperse population of American Arabs and Muslims to
have a decisive role in Harris’s defeat. And yet, the so-called Uncommitted
Movement, an organization that had rallied Democrats to cast a ballot for
“uncommitted” against Joe Biden in Michigan’s uncontested primary last year, is
still pushing the notion that Trump’s election is a result of the fact that the
Biden-Harris team were just too pro-Israel for America’s taste.
“Harris left a vacuum by not visiting Michigan families
impacted by US-supplied bombs to help create a permission structure for their
trust while Trump visited Dearborn and filled a community in despair with
lies,” a burdensome sentence composed by Uncommitted’s Layla Elabed read. “Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are
horrific,” the statement continued, “but, as on so many other issues, Democrats
had a chance to persuade voters they were the better alternative, and they blew
it.”
One former Harris staffer responded to the accusation in a quote provided to NBC News reporter
Sahil Kapur: “Deeply unserious people who want to shirk their responsibility.
Clowns.”
Clowns they may be, but they’re not cowards. You can’t
say the same for Harris or her team. After all, the clownishness of Elabed’s
statement notwithstanding, she did attach her name to it. Harris’s staffers
chose to remain anonymous. Although Democrats seemed to regard that sort of
pusillanimity as best practice during the campaign, the party’s elected leaders
adopted a far more confrontational posture toward that
cohort after the race was lost. For reasons that remain elusive, the remnants
of the Harris campaign are still quaking over the prospect of confrontation
with this paper tiger.
It’s clear from the anonymous statement given to Kapur
that they resent their torment, but it is a prison in their own minds and of
their own making.
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