Blinken told Congress, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting” aid, even though the U.S. Agency for International Development and others had determined that Israel had broken the law.
You’re right, and none of that gives me hope that Harris will pivot.
The re-elect Harris campaign will start on January 20th, and the political reality you just described will still exist.
Changing stances on Israel’s genocide will take leadership, which is something we haven’t seen from the Harris campaign. It is not Harris leading a campaign on principle, it is the polls leading the Harris campaign, just as you described it.
Those suburban moderates’ views can be changed, they just have never been exposed to an opposing message. The news says Israel is the good guys and Hamas is the bad guys; only those on the fringes say otherwise. If Harris would show leadership and take a principled stance on the side of humanity, she could bring most of these low information moderate voters with her.
This is a false hope every single time. Once she is in office, the structures she will face - Pentagon, Congress, “deep state” (long-standing war-on-terror era bureaucracy) will constrain her even harder. ASSUMING she isn’t another ideological and moral Israeli loyalist, which is a little hard to believe about someone who celebrated Seder in the White House with her Israeli-American husband by serving wine from a West Bank settlement.
It isn’t “Trumpian”, it predates Trump and is an actual phrase that comes from the social sciences and was then adopted and abused by conspiracy theorists. In the American context, it’s a useful concept because it helps to explain the continuity in unpopular or discredited policies between administration that tout different outlooks, but end up railroaded into these policies. It’s just a different name for what Obama called “the blob.”
Yeah, there is a large bureaucracy that implements policy, no question. That policy was initiated democratically though, and can be similarly reversed. Just not unilaterally by a President, who is not supposed to be a king, especially if Congress decided it.
And the blob term to describe the bureaucracy was used by an Obama aide, not Obama btw. Not that I expect honesty out of Trumpets.
But she also didn’t attend Netanyahu’s speech and actually has been quite critical of the war in Gaza. But yes, don’t expect miracles. I still think she will be more critical of the Israelian government and whether this leads to a ceasefire or not is to be seen.
She met with Netanyahu regardless, and did a photo op with him. Every since her poll numbers drastically improved, she has become less and less pensive about her unconditional support for Netanyahu’s Israel.
It’s really silly to point to the provocations and one-sided policy of the Trump administration at this point. Biden not only kept to them, he doubled down on them, and none of them were as monstrously deterimental to the Palestinian people than what Blinken and Biden have done.
They have jettisoned the entire domestic and international humanitarian framework to allow Israel to punish, slaughter, herd and humiliate millions of civilians. And Harris sees no reason to contradict them or abandon this policy. She has made it unequivocally clear that she is with them on this. They’ve really gona above and beyond in doing so. And at the end of the day, a majority of Democratic senators gave Netanyahu a standing ovation in Congress. Her party, her president, her position.
We’ll see. I’m not so sure that 4 years from now the electorate will look just like how it looks today. I also suspect she can make a bolder move in the first year than she can in the latter half. Biden doesn’t draw nearly the level of heat over the Afghanistan pullout as he did a couple years ago, after all. The electorate has a notoriously short memory.
So, she does have some space to demonstrate that exact sort of leadership, and it could very much benefit her in the long run. It’ll have to outweigh all the AIPAC money on the other side, though, that’s another consideration balanced against how successful she has been with small dollar donations. So, remains to be seen how the calculus all falls out.
You’re right, and none of that gives me hope that Harris will pivot.
The re-elect Harris campaign will start on January 20th, and the political reality you just described will still exist.
Changing stances on Israel’s genocide will take leadership, which is something we haven’t seen from the Harris campaign. It is not Harris leading a campaign on principle, it is the polls leading the Harris campaign, just as you described it.
Those suburban moderates’ views can be changed, they just have never been exposed to an opposing message. The news says Israel is the good guys and Hamas is the bad guys; only those on the fringes say otherwise. If Harris would show leadership and take a principled stance on the side of humanity, she could bring most of these low information moderate voters with her.
This is a false hope every single time. Once she is in office, the structures she will face - Pentagon, Congress, “deep state” (long-standing war-on-terror era bureaucracy) will constrain her even harder. ASSUMING she isn’t another ideological and moral Israeli loyalist, which is a little hard to believe about someone who celebrated Seder in the White House with her Israeli-American husband by serving wine from a West Bank settlement.
I swear this Trumpian deep state crap somehow seeps into everything.
It isn’t “Trumpian”, it predates Trump and is an actual phrase that comes from the social sciences and was then adopted and abused by conspiracy theorists. In the American context, it’s a useful concept because it helps to explain the continuity in unpopular or discredited policies between administration that tout different outlooks, but end up railroaded into these policies. It’s just a different name for what Obama called “the blob.”
Uh, no it’s not a technical term.
Yeah, there is a large bureaucracy that implements policy, no question. That policy was initiated democratically though, and can be similarly reversed. Just not unilaterally by a President, who is not supposed to be a king, especially if Congress decided it.
And the blob term to describe the bureaucracy was used by an Obama aide, not Obama btw. Not that I expect honesty out of Trumpets.
edit for clarity
But she also didn’t attend Netanyahu’s speech and actually has been quite critical of the war in Gaza. But yes, don’t expect miracles. I still think she will be more critical of the Israelian government and whether this leads to a ceasefire or not is to be seen.
But in any case she will be harder on them than Trump, who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem during his presidency and offered the “peace deal of the century”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_peace_plan#:~:text=The stated purpose of the,both parties to the conflict.
She met with Netanyahu regardless, and did a photo op with him. Every since her poll numbers drastically improved, she has become less and less pensive about her unconditional support for Netanyahu’s Israel.
It’s really silly to point to the provocations and one-sided policy of the Trump administration at this point. Biden not only kept to them, he doubled down on them, and none of them were as monstrously deterimental to the Palestinian people than what Blinken and Biden have done.
They have jettisoned the entire domestic and international humanitarian framework to allow Israel to punish, slaughter, herd and humiliate millions of civilians. And Harris sees no reason to contradict them or abandon this policy. She has made it unequivocally clear that she is with them on this. They’ve really gona above and beyond in doing so. And at the end of the day, a majority of Democratic senators gave Netanyahu a standing ovation in Congress. Her party, her president, her position.
We’ll see. I’m not so sure that 4 years from now the electorate will look just like how it looks today. I also suspect she can make a bolder move in the first year than she can in the latter half. Biden doesn’t draw nearly the level of heat over the Afghanistan pullout as he did a couple years ago, after all. The electorate has a notoriously short memory.
So, she does have some space to demonstrate that exact sort of leadership, and it could very much benefit her in the long run. It’ll have to outweigh all the AIPAC money on the other side, though, that’s another consideration balanced against how successful she has been with small dollar donations. So, remains to be seen how the calculus all falls out.