By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, June
26, 2024
“With the exception of Lauren Boebert’s carpet-bagging,
last night’s primaries were full of victories for Team Normal,” former Trump
staffer turned Never Trumper Alyssa Farah
Griffin tweeted on Wednesday.
It’s true! Even the carpetbagger’s 29-point win held a
silver lining for normalcy nostalgists.
Candidates endorsed by Donald Trump were rejected
in Republican primaries across the map, some by ignominious margins.
The man whom he hoped would replace his nemesis, Mitt Romney, in the Senate is
headed for a 20-point
defeat in Utah. His hand-picked choice for the House district that
encompasses Colorado Springs fell short by more
than 30.
He almost got a win in South Carolina’s 3rd District,
where Trump-backed pastor Mark Burns lost a 51-49
squeaker. But Burns “had called for teachers who push an LGBTQ+ agenda in
schools to ‘be immediately terminated,’ lied about obtaining a bachelor’s
degree, misrepresented his military service and urged protesters in Washington
ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol,” per Politico.
No wonder he was so competitive in a Republican primary.
As for Boebert, she may have cruised to victory in her
new district but she did so with 43.4
percent of the vote. The rest of the electorate split evenly among five
challengers, four of whom ended up in double digits. Even in a race in which
lowbrow populism prevailed, in other words, nearly 60 percent of Republicans
preferred another option.
The best news on a night of good news came from New York,
however. And it came from the other party.
It’s tragically rare for a fringy populist who’s made it
to Congress to be ousted in a primary. Gerrymandering has made it hard and the
gradual civic degradation of the American people has made it harder. It does
happen occasionally—ask Steve King or Madison Cawthorn—but it takes a lot to
get primary voters motivated to dump A Man of the People after he’s gained the
advantage of incumbency.
King spent nearly 20 years in the House before his
confusion about why white supremacy should be thought of as
a bad thing finally did him in. Cawthorn was a conspicuously young
one-termer buried
in scandal who made enemies of the Republican leadership when he
chattered in an interview about the cocaine and orgies some of his House
colleagues allegedly enjoyed.
We live in an era without shame. And so you need to
be very, very embarrassing—more embarrassing than
this, even—to be too embarrassing for shameless American voters to return
you to Congress.
Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman is very, very
embarrassing.
***
Bowman is affiliated with the Squad, the nickname given
to the vanguard of young, nonwhite progressive populists in the House. The
Squad fills a similar niche politically on the left that Tea Party Republicans
filled on the right circa 2011. They’re hard ideologues, they purport to
represent the voiceless grassroots of their party, and they’re keen to
repopulate the ranks of their House caucus with insurgents who share their
beliefs.
They’re darlings of the activist class and so they
frequently embarrass themselves, as activists are wont to do. Usually that
embarrassment takes anodyne policy forms, such as enthusiasm for unworkable
economic nonsense like the Green New Deal. But from time to time it reveals
itself in other,
darker ways.
Jamaal Bowman is embarrassing even by Squad standards.
Four years ago he scored one of the biggest progressive
primary victories of the populist era when he ousted establishment mainstay
Eliot Engel. Four years later, on Tuesday night, he became the first member of
the Squad to lose a primary—and not by the skin of his teeth. He’ll end up
falling short of centrist challenger George Latimer by
16.8 points or so when all the votes are counted in New York’s 16th
District.
Do you have any idea how embarrassing you need to be to
get blown out in a primary by a normie in 2024 despite having impeccable
populist credentials?
Bowman is the guy who pulled
a fire alarm in the Capitol last October, seemingly out of desperation
to thwart a House vote on a spending bill. That earned him a censure
from his colleagues and a misdemeanor
charge. In January it came out that he had published 9/11 conspiracy theories
on his blog years ago … in the form
of free-verse poetry: “2001/Planes used as missiles/Target: The Twin
Towers…. Later in the day/Building 7/Also Collaspsed [sic]/Hmm…/Multiple
explosions/Heard before/And during the collapse/Hmm…”
He was a middle school principal at the time. Imagine
trusting your child’s education to someone who sounds like Tucker
Carlson on a good day.
Bowman’s most embarrassing behavior, and by far the most
salient to his primary race, involved his commentary on Israel since October 7.
National
Review summarized the lowlights:
He has revealed himself to be a
staunch friend of Hamas and an opponent of the Israeli state’s right to exist.
Little more than a month after October 7, Bowman appeared with Ilhan Omar and
Rashida Tlaib to call for a “cease-fire now,” informing his Jewish constituents
who might object that “by me calling for a cease-fire with my colleagues and
centering humanity, I am uplifting deeply what it actually means to be Jewish.”
During one pro-Hamas rally, Bowman denied that the terrorist group raped
Israeli women, claiming the well-documented atrocities were a “lie” and
“propaganda”—a statement which he ham-handedly apologized for only recently. In
an interview with Politico, he lamented that in his district,
“There’s certain places where the Jews live and concentrate”—ignoring their
need to be near synagogues, Kosher supermarkets, and other institutions
essential to practicing Judaism.
He had to issue a second apology
after sitting for an interview with Norman
Finkelstein, who compared the slaughter by Hamas on October 7 to the Jewish
uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. Later Bowman took to
describing Israel as a “settler colonial
project,” progressive jargon designed to delegitimize the nation as a
usurpation of Palestinian rights to the land. His hostility to the Jewish state
grew so queasy that the advocacy group J Street, which promotes left-of-center
solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, withheld
its endorsement from him this year.
By the end of the campaign with Latimer, Bowman and his
supporters had identified one villain above all others who was determined to
see him driven from power:
That’s not the first time a
Squad member has accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), the nation’s best-known Jewish-aligned lobbyist group, of “buying”
political support. On Saturday, at a rally attended
by progressive royalty like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bowman
went a step further and vowed to “show f—ing AIPAC
the motherf—ing power of the South Bronx” in the primary.
That was an embarrassing line when it was uttered and
even more embarrassing in hindsight given Tuesday’s results. But in fairness to
him, AIPAC did not succeed in ending Jamaal Bowman’s political career.
It only seems that way because both sides of the left’s
Israel divide have reason to pretend that it did.
***
The grain of truth in the “AIPAC sank Bowman” narrative
is that the group did spend a mind-boggling amount of money on his race.
As of June 20, over little more than a month, AIPAC
dropped $14.5 million to promote Latimer. That accounted for more than
half of the $24 million total spent on the race to that point, making it the most
expensive primary in U.S. history. Post hoc ergo propter hoc: If the
spending was extraordinary and a populist incumbent losing is extraordinary, it
must be that AIPAC’s spending caused Bowman’s defeat.
It makes sense. But it’s almost certainly not true.
For starters, Latimer’s gaudy margin didn’t develop
recently, as one might expect if AIPAC’s lavish expenditures in May and June
had propelled him to victory. One poll taken
all the way back in late March, before AIPAC’s cash began flowing, gave him a
52-35 lead over Bowman. Another survey conducted in early June found him ahead
by the same margin, 48-31. In the end, on Tuesday night, Latimer prevailed by
an almost identical margin of 16.8 points.
In three months, the race never moved. There’s a stronger
case that AIPAC wasted its money on a contest the challenger had in the bag all
along than that Bowman would have been reelected without its involvement.
The hype about AIPAC might also lead you to believe that
the group successfully turned the election into a referendum on Israel. The
people’s champion, Bowman, strained mightily to make the race about the sort of
kitchen-table issues the working class cares about, progressives might tell
you. But the dastardly Jewish lobby plowed millions into an effort to distract
Democratic voters with a shiny foreign-policy object.
The truth is basically the opposite.
“Few of the ads that the group paid for in New York
mentioned Israel,” the New
York Times said of AIPAC in its postmortem of the campaign. Instead
those ads emphasized
Latimer’s support for infrastructure spending, a sore spot in the district
given that Bowman voted
no on the infrastructure bill that passed Congress in 2021. “His district
is not woke. It is Democratic,” one former Bowman adviser told The
Atlantic. AIPAC appeared to understand that and focused its political
energies accordingly. The congressman, who spent the end of the campaign
shrieking about the influence of “the Zionist
regime we call AIPAC,” weirdly did not.
He’s simply not a good retail politician. He disdains the
entire concept of retail politics, in fact, sneering in an interview with HuffPost
in May that Latimer “doesn’t do anything. He’s a retail politician. He has
coffee with Dem leaders to make them feel good about themselves.” One local
official complained to the
Times that “I could see Latimer maybe five times a week…. I’ve
only seen Bowman maybe three or four times since he’s been a congressmember.”
All you need to know about Bowman’s retail skills is that
the South Bronx, where he held his rally last weekend and whose “motherf—ing
power” he vowed to show AIPAC on election night, isn’t
even in his district.
On top of all that, he was cursed with an unusually
strong primary challenger in Latimer. Normally incumbents can count on a
fearsome advantage in name recognition, but Latimer has been the top executive
in Westchester County since 2018. Before that he spent 25 years representing
the area in state and local government. “A local leader who first took office
in the Reagan era, he had racked up friendships, favors and familiarity through
decades of retail politics at the local, state and county levels, overseeing a
huge county budget and showing up at senior bingo hours,” the Times
wrote of him.
Latimer was a very comfortable alternative to a
congressman who’d made his constituents uncomfortable repeatedly since taking
office in 2021. So why did AIPAC feel obliged to spend a cargo-hold of money on
him that he didn’t need? And why are progressives intent on convincing
observers that that was the difference in the race?
***
The answer is that the two wings of the left’s split over
Israel benefit from the false narrative that the group is responsible for
Bowman’s defeat.
For AIPAC and its supporters, the logic is simple: Pour
encourager les autres.
Many progressives in Congress share Bowman’s opinions on
Israel, of course. AIPAC is eager to raise the political cost to them of doing
so. Blowing $14.5 million on a race their preferred candidate was all but
certain to win anyway is their way of warning Democratic Hamas apologists to now witness the firepower of
this fully armed and operational political battle station. The bigger the
number, the more firepower anti-Israel Dems have to fear.
The acronym “FAFO,” which I’ll leave you to Google for
yourself, leaps to mind.
That message was sent so clearly and emphatically that
even some pro-Israel House Democrats were left grumbling to Axios on
Wednesday about how heavy-handed it was. “The number is gross…. I don’t like
it,” one Democrat said of AIPAC’s spending against Bowman. “If anything, that
much money could backfire, because then you get people that are like, ‘This is
just wrong.’”
The irony is that AIPAC almost certainly chose to get
involved in the race only because Bowman was already en route to a humiliating
defeat. When the group had a chance to spend against progressive Rep. Summer
Lee in her own primary in Pennsylvania earlier this year, it declined in the
belief that she’d
win anyway and AIPAC would be left looking impotent. Jumping into Bowman’s
contest to bounce the rubble is tantamount to racing out in front of a
pro-Latimer parade that’s already in progress and purporting to lead it.
Still, $14.5 million really is a big number. And
the group isn’t done this summer with targeting progressives: It’s already begun
spending to defeat Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, another Squad-ster who
spent the first weeks of the war accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”
A poll
released on Tuesday found her primary challenger, Wesley Bell, surging 14
points since January to take a 1-point lead. AIPAC knocking off Bush on top of
Bowman’s defeat really might spook some House Democrats into biting their
tongues the next time they’re moved to defend Hamas.
Progressives have their own reasons to push the “AIPAC
sank Bowman” lie, meanwhile.
For starters, it fits easily into the standard populist
political template of brave truth-tellers facing down a corrupt yet
all-but-invincible establishment. (Populists love a martyr, as this newsletter
frequently has occasion to note.) Whom would you choose if you had to cast the
role of “villainous establishmentarian” in a left-wing fable about the New York
primary? The average joes who voted in Westchester County? Unassuming Democrat
George Latimer? Or AIPAC, the beating heart of Zionist influence in American
politics bent on providing political cover for Israel’s “genocide”?
Treating AIPAC money as the root of Bowman’s defeat also
conveniently lets progressives go on pretending
that their vitriolic contempt for Israel and uncritical solidarity with the
Palestinians is popular, mainstream, and certainly not an
electoral liability. In a fair political fight Americans would side with them
and Hamas, you see; only because the Israel lobby continues to pour oceans of
cash into shaping public opinion does the U.S. continue to support the Jewish
state.
Bowman himself promoted that storyline in stark terms after Tuesday’s defeat.
The goal here, very obviously, is to delegitimize the
idea that Democratic voters might prefer a pro-Israel candidate for rational
reasons by implying that something untoward and illicit happened in Bowman’s
race. Latimer supporters weren’t persuaded, they were “brainwashed.” Voters in
the district didn’t reject the incumbent because they found his antics
repulsive, they did it because a rich special interest corrupted democracy with
unprecedented spending.
Progressives want hostility to Israel to become
left-wing, and ultimately Democratic, orthodoxy. (They’re well on their way.)
Convincing liberals that Zionists played dirty pool somehow in Jamaal Bowman’s
race suits those purposes. Cori Bush is already in on it,
in fact, no doubt hoping that left-wing outrage at his defeat will spur turnout
in her own upcoming primary.
And so, in the end, everyone has a cynical and
self-interested reason to pretend that AIPAC was the difference on Tuesday …
except, strangely, Jamaal Bowman himself.
He does have a reason, to be
sure—blaming the group conveniently absolves him of being a terrible
politician—but I agree with Jonathan
Chait’s theory of why the congressman became so obsessed with AIPAC as
his primary wore on. It’s not that he was resigned to defeat and looking to
maximize his appeal to hard-left activist groups after he leaves Congress, as some
have suggested. It’s that he got sucked so deeply into left-wing argle-bargle
about Zionism and “settler-colonialism” that he either forgot he had an
election to win or convinced himself that that argle-bargle would actually win
him the election.
“Bowman has simply gotten so carried away with the logic
of progressive-movement politics that he’s lost all sight of the practical
opportunities to build an electoral coalition rooted in the liberal side of the
intra-Jewish debate,” Chait surmised. He could have aligned
himself with J Street as a harsh critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government
while still endorsing a two-state solution and Israel’s right of self-defense,
but he kissed off mainstream liberals who hold those positions when he sank
into denialism
about October 7 and demagoguery about Zionist influence. As Chait put it,
“Liberal Jews who disagree with AIPAC are going to suspect that somebody who
treats AIPAC as the greatest force for evil in the world is harboring deeper
levels of hostility toward their community.” Thus was Latimer’s win assured.
Bowman blamed the Jews—sincerely—and lost his election because of it. Who says good things don’t happen anymore in American politics?
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