The vibes have not been this good for a long time.
Only two weeks after President Joe Biden’s decision to end his campaign turned the 2024 election on its head, Vice President Kamala Harris has shocked the political establishment by choosing as her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the most progressive of the handful of names in contention. Walz has a record as governor that anyone on the Left has plenty to be pleased with, from putting in place free, universal school meals and paid family and medical leave to establishing a form of tuition-free public college and beefing up worker protections.
But that’s not what makes this pick significant.
Harris’s decision to go with Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the other name that her list had been whittled down to, is another major sign, on top of Biden’s 2020 campaign and the first year of his presidency, of a major shift in the United States’s political center of gravity since 2016, and a reversal in what passes for conventional political wisdom among the Democratic establishment.
Ever since Bill Clinton won the presidency by going out of his way to antagonize the left wing of his own party, Democrats have been guided by a simplistic philosophy: you win elections by tacking to the center on anything and everything, and ideally, you’ll do it by making sure everyone saw you giving progressives a loud and painful slap in the face.
This is not what happened here. By almost every parameter of conventional Democratic thinking, Shapiro was the logical, “strong” pick for Harris: he’s a business-friendly centrist who wants to cut corporate taxes; he bucked unions on school vouchers, a favorite policy of the Right and neoliberal Democrats attempting to dismantle public schools; and he was vehemently pro-Israel, to the point of using state power to attack dissenters on US-Israel policy and comparing left-wing, antiwar protesters to the Ku Klux Klan. He was backed by…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
