by Brian Garvey
On Sunday July 21st President Biden announced that he would not seek reelection in the 2024 campaign and, shortly thereafter, endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him as the Democratic nominee. Since then potential rivals for the nomination like California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have publicly supported Harris’s candidacy. Former and current Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries, are on board along with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. In Massachusetts the entire Congressional delegation has joined President Biden in endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee. Governor Maura Healey has joined them.
With so much support coalescing around the Vice President, it seems almost certain that she will be the candidate. What does this monumental development mean for the peace movement? First let’s look at President Biden’s foreign policy record on the genocide in Gaza.
Biden is still overseeing Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza, providing billions of dollars in weapons that have been used to devastate the enclave for over 9 months. In that time the Israeli military has killed at least 38,000 human beings, the majority of them noncombatants, many of them women and children. Recent estimates and projections have been far worse. According the the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
Biden’s support for this crime against humanity led to a campaign, in which MAPA participated, to vote “uncommitted” or “no preference” in primaries across the country. That campaign gained over 700,000 votes across the country including 13% of voters in Michigan, 19% in Minnesota, and almost 10% in Massachusetts. It was by far the best performing alternative to President Biden on the ballot and, along with his poor health, helped contribute to his dropping out of the race.
But when it comes to peace, is Kamala Harris any better?
Vice President Harris made a speech calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza in early March of this year, but a Politico piece that same month described the contrast, or lack of contrast, between Harris and Biden as, “the prevailing stance inside the administration is that Biden and Harris are reading from the same script even if it’s with different emphasis.” The primary role of any Vice President is to be a loyal messenger for the administration, so it’s no surprise that VP Harris hasn’t strayed too far from her boss, especially on an issue as controversial as Israel’s war on Gaza. Harris’s rhetoric on the plight of Palestinians is certainly better than her boss’s, but she needs to chart a substantive plan to stop the slaughter in the Middle East.
On another important foreign policy issue, Latin America and immigration, Vice President Harris is vulnerable to criticism from both the Left and the Right. Early on, President Biden tasked his veep with one of the most difficult jobs available: immigration policy and the southern border. Famously, on a trip to Guatemala in June of 2021, Kamala Harris told migrants, “Do not come.” The statement implied a complete lack of understanding as to why migrants make the perilous trek from their homelands to the US. People seeking asylum aren’t leaving home because they want to, they’re fleeing. Too often, they are fleeing violent conditions that US foreign policy has helped to create.
Gallup polling has consistently shown that immigration is the “Most Important Problem” listed by Americans for every month of 2024. It has been the signature issue of former President Donald Trump. From the opening speech of his 2016 presidential campaign where he called immigrants murderers and rapists, to his convention speech last week where he claimed immigrants are “coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.” To beat Trump, VP Harris will have to defend her record, and Biden’s, on immigration. Pointing to a bipartisan border bill that Trump helped to kill for political reasons could be one way out.
But the most important question about any Democratic nominee is clearly, “can they beat Trump?” Polls initially showed that Harris was running behind Former President Trump, nationally and in several important swing states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona, at a comparable margin of President Biden. Being one of the few potential nominees from within the Biden-Harris Administration, she has the closest ties to the presidency. But this is changing by the day as it becomes clearer that Harris is the candidate. The most recent national polling from Reuters shows Harris leading Trump.
If Trump becomes president again, Democrats claim he will be an existential threat to Democracy in the United States. His attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election reinforce that fear. So does the pro-Trump Project 2025. Its leader said it represents a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” Trump’s bellicose threats against Iran and Venezuela as well as his criticisms that President Biden hasn’t done enough to support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza reveal that Trump is no peace candidate. His threats to shoot demonstrators during the George Floyd protests show that his violent tendencies are not limited by borders. If Democrats want to prevent his return to the White House in 2025, they would do well to lay out a different path and plan for peace – in the Middle East, with our neighbors in Latin America, and here at home.
