On the menu today: The big news overseas is that no matter how badly your week is going, you’re having a better one than Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated this morning under mysterious circumstances. In fact, it’s possible that yesterday was a twofer for fans of the world’s lone Jewish state and foes of radical Islamist terrorism, as Israel announced it had killed Hezbollah’s most senior military official, Fuad Shukr, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. That Bibi Netanyahu speech to Congress last week was just a small timing issue away from reenacting the closing scene of The Godfather.
But today’s newsletter focuses front and center on Kamala Harris’s running-mate search, with one new sign pointing strongly in the direction of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. As far as two other possibilities are concerned, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper quietly and somewhat mysteriously withdrew from consideration, and over in that other place I write for, I discuss a supremely cringe-inducing chapter of Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s past.
Whom Will Harris Announce as Her Running Mate in Philadelphia on Tuesday?
By this time next week, we will know the pick for Kamala Harris’s running mate.
Vice President Kamala Harris is set to launch a battleground tour next week with her yet-to-be-named running mate, with stops in seven swing states stretching from Pennsylvania to Nevada, her campaign said Tuesday.
The planned tour is the latest sign of the whirlwind pace at which Harris has gone from President Joe Biden’s supportive running mate to likely Democratic nominee ready to identify her No. 2 and take on Republican Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
Harris said Tuesday she hadn’t made a decision yet on whom she will select. . . .
The campaign said Harris and her running mate will make stops next week in Philadelphia; western Wisconsin; Detroit; Raleigh, North Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Phoenix and Las Vegas.
The fact that Harris’s veep tour starts in Philadelphia on Tuesday tells us one of two things.
Scenario one: Harris is going to pick Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.
Scenario two: Harris is going to pick someone else, and Shapiro will have to attend that rally and clap and smile like an Oscar nominee everyone has been raving about, only to have the Academy select someone else from an indie film that nobody saw. Shapiro is such a glaringly obvious, slam-dunk choice that if Harris doesn’t pick him, people will wonder if something disqualifying came up during the vetting.
Let’s say that the new Bloomberg poll showing Harris up by eleven percentage points (!)* is a wild outlier. The previous one by Fox News had Michigan tied.
If Michigan looks good and Shapiro can secure Pennsylvania, two-thirds of the Blue Wall looks solid.
Vox is suddenly skeptical that picking Shapiro would help Harris win Pennsylvania.
The guy won four state legislative races in the swing suburban county of Montgomery County, then won a race for county commissioner, then won a statewide race for state attorney general, and then in 2020 he won more votes than Joe Biden did at the top of the ticket. You think maybe this guy knows a thing or two about how to win a race in Pennsylvania?
The hard-left progressives are seething about the possibility of Shapiro’s being a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Emily Tamkin of Slate fumes that Shapiro is “hostile to a pillar of the First Amendment” and “could undercut the core of Harris’ very compelling argument, which is that her campaign is standing up for American freedoms” — because of his criticism of antisemitic anti-Israel protests on college campuses and his call for university presidents to restore order and ensure that Jewish students don’t feel threatened by protesters.
Writing in the New Republic, David Klion calls Shapiro “egregiously bad on Palestine” and complains, “As governor, Shapiro’s particular animus against pro-Palestine activism has only grown more apparent and troubling. Last December, he played an active role in the GOP-orchestrated sacking of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill.”
Look, I already think Shapiro is the best option, you don’t have to sell me on it!
Back in May, Shapiro told the New York Times that campus administrators were treating antisemitism differently than other forms of hate speech, and implicitly compared the anti-Zionist (wink, wink) protesters to white supremacists:
In the interview, Mr. Shapiro stressed that he did not believe all encampments or demonstrators were antisemitic — not “by any stretch.” But he suggested that on some campuses, antisemitic speech was treated differently than other kinds of hate speech.
“If you had a group of white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs every day, that would be met with a different response than antisemites camped out, yelling antisemitic tropes,” he said.
This is a fight the Harris campaign should want to have.
Every day from now until Election Day, the Trump campaign is going to argue — with a lot of supporting evidence — that Kamala Harris is way, way, further to the left than the average American.
Harris has already had to somewhat unconvincingly insist that she’s no longer in favor of many of the positions she took during her 2019–20 presidential campaign:
The Harris campaign announced on Friday that the vice president no longer wanted to ban fracking, a significant shift from where she stood four years ago but one that is consistent with the policies of President Biden’s administration. . . .
In addition to changing her position on fracking, campaign officials said she now backed the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement; no longer supported a single-payer health insurance program; and echoed Mr. Biden’s call for banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government.
As the editors observe, in a line I wish I had written, “Kamala Harris wants to be unburdened by what has been.” And as our Jeff Blehar notes, it’s the same basement playbook used when Biden was the nominee — rallies, short videos and issued statements, no press conferences or sit-down, on-camera interviews, at least not yet.
If Harris wants to avoid being perceived as too far to the left, a big, noisy fight with the Israel-hating, American-flag burning, Hamas-cheering snot-nosed leftist punks is exactly what she needs. It’s the biggest, easiest, lowest-cost Sister Souljah moment imaginable. The question is whether she and the team around her recognize that she needs this.
If somebody’s so antisemitic that they won’t vote for a ticket with a Jew on it, you don’t want their vote!
“We needed to have a more advantageous tax environment for our businesses, and it was one component of an overall strategy in order to grow jobs and create more economic opportunity in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro told reporters at an event in Philadelphia with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
“I am competitive as hell” with other states, he said. That is “why I’ve been so aggressively working to cut business taxes.”
We’ve got a pro-Israel, corporate-tax-cutting Democrat whom the voucher opponents don’t trust, even if he flipped their way last year. For a bunch of committed leftists, Shapiro is going to be an extremely bitter pill to swallow. Pass the popcorn.
*Every time I insert a (!) after some surprising fact, picture me turning to the camera, Deadpool-style, and raising an eyebrow.
This Cooper Isn’t So Special and Loses His Agency
Monday night on Twitter/X, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper announced he was withdrawing from consideration to be Kamala Harris’s running mate.
I strongly support Vice President Harris’ campaign for president. I know she’s going to win, and I was honored to be considered for this role. This just wasn’t the right time for North Carolina and for me to potentially be on a national ticket. She has an outstanding list of people from which to choose, and we’ll all work to make sure she wins.
It’s a little odd for Cooper to insist this isn’t the right time, as he’s term-limited and his term expires January 1, 2025.
Is this a sign that . . .
- Despite his confident talk, Cooper doesn’t like Harris’s odds of victory and doesn’t want to be first mate and/or a convenient scapegoat on a Democratic ticket that is likely to fall short?
- The Harris campaign looked at the various swing states and concluded that North Carolina was simply out of reach? Joe Biden hadn’t led a poll in the Tarheel State since March.
- The vetting process found something that wouldn’t play well?
Or some combination of those?
Mark Kelly Touts Supplements That Are Out of This World!
You know why Harris shouldn’t pick Arizona senator Mark Kelly? Because there are hilariously cringe-inducing videos like this one. As I lay out in the Washington Post today:
In 2015, former astronaut Mark Kelly rode a motorcycle onto a stage in China, with an American flag on one handlebar and the flag of the People’s Republic of China on the other. After dismounting, he told the audience before him how terrific Shaklee vitamins were, and how he took Shaklee Vitalizer on the space shuttle Endeavour in 2011, an out-of-this-world event honored on the Shaklee Facebook page.
“I took Shaklee vitamins and the Shaklee rehydration drink while in orbit aboard the space shuttle!” Kelly said, pumping his fists before the audience. “They worked very well for me in a very demanding environment. Now, it is up to you. It is up to all of you to take those tools that Shaklee and Roger” — company CEO Roger Barnett — “has given you, and turn it into something big! Each and every one of you can create your own successful Shaklee business, and it is the rewards from that business that will help you achieve your own dreams!”
. . . If the words “every one of you can create your own successful Shaklee business” made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you get a gold star. Yes, Shaklee is a multilevel marketing company. Those aren’t illegal, but the Federal Trade Commission warns, “most people who join legitimate MLMs make little or no money. Some of them lose money. In some cases, people believe they’ve joined a legitimate MLM, but it turns out to be an illegal pyramid scheme that steals everything they invest and leaves them deeply in debt.”
Nice gig, Senator. It makes your $55,000 speech in 2018 for Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, then the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, look respectable. (Kelly returned the money amid his 2019 Senate candidacy; the United Arab Emirates’ human rights record at that time and since is … bad. Lots of politicians equivocate about U.S. alliances with dubious Middle Eastern allies. But it’s unclear how many have accepted five-figure checks from them.)
As a slogan, “Mark Kelly: He later gave away the money he was paid by foreign leaders” is less than ideal.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it in yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, the Biden administration got taken to the cleaners by a hostile foreign dictator . . . again.