How Not to Pick a Jew for Vice President

This week, Kamala Harris chose her vice presidential running mate.

She could have picked the wildly popular, semi-moderate swing state governor from Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. Shapiro has a 62% approval rating in the state, which is ranked by Nate Silver as the most important election bellwether. Shapiro is charismatic, smart and bridges the gap between radical Democratic social policy and heterodox moderate views on education and Israel.

Instead, she chose the radical leftist candidate from the non-swing state of Minnesota who presided over the burning down of Minneapolis during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

Interesting choice.

Shapiro seemed to be the obvious pick.

But there was one overriding problem with Josh Shapiro in the age of the Squad: Josh Shapiro is a Jew.

And there will be no Jewish vice president for Kamala Harris.

All of which tells you a lot about Kamala Harris, as both a candidate and as a person.

As a candidate, she's a coward. She is in commanding position within her own party -- a party desperate to prevent a loss to the dreaded scourge of Donald Trump. The base is once again enthused about her, despite her dreadful electoral history, mainly because they no longer have to pretend enthusiasm for the moldering corpse of President Joe Biden. Her own approval ratings have ticked up from the mid-30s to the low-50s. Whereas only 58% of Black voters said they would definitely vote in July -- when Biden was the nominee -- now some 74% say they will vote. Instead of trailing Trump by several points, Harris now leads him by a slim margin nationally, and is within the margin of error in all of the swing states.

Yet Harris is terrified of the pro-Hamas contingent within her own party: the people who are chanting in solidarity with Hezbollah on campus, who declaim their enthusiasm for the cause of a Palestinian population that by polling data, supports terrorism and murder by an 8-2 margin. Harris is frightened of a messy Democratic National Convention, in which Hamas flags fly while American flags are burned. She wanted to paper over her party's dyspepsia on Israel -- and she couldn't have a Jew on the ticket. Because the rift in the Democratic Party isn't truly about Israel: Tim Walz, her actual VP pick, has positions on Israel nearly identical to those of Shapiro. It's about one thing and one thing only: Josh Shapiro is a Jew. And a significant segment of her base doesn't like Jews.

That's true gutlessness.

And then there's Harris as a person.

Harris wants to portray herself as a moderate. She wants to jettison her prior political positions for the sake of winning, hoping that the media will continue to allow her to escape all scrutiny. Yet when it came down to it, she chose the Marxist from Minnesota -- a man who has said that "one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness" -- over the moderate from Pennsylvania. She hasn't been captured by the radicals in her party. She is a radical. She always was. Her entire record says so. She herself has said so. The Walz pick was comfortable for her because she is more comfortable with Walz's extremism than with Shapiro's pseudo-moderation.

So, what should Harris' pick tell us, in the end? That she's a radical, and that she's a coward. That she will always, when given the opportunity, side with the most extreme in her party -- and that she is afraid enough of them that she's willing to engage in the most cynical bigotry in order to curry their favor. That's the kind of person who certainly should not be president of the United States.